Peter Pinedo writes for FoxNews.com about an interesting legal action against the Trump administration.
Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan is suing the Trump administration and demanding a court order to require officials to preserve records of the criminal investigations against him.
Brennan served as CIA director under former President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017. In a court filing reviewed by Fox News Digital, Brennan asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to issue preliminary injunctive relief to “protect his constitutional rights as the current target of two federal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Attorneys for Brennan assert that the DOJ has launched its investigations “at the direct urging of President Trump” and that the investigations amount to searching for “phantom criminal conduct.”
The filing states that “regrettably, some in the current DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation leadership have acceded to that direction, and are converting the Justice Department into a tool of retribution against Director Brennan and the President’s other perceived adversaries.”
Fox News Digital reported this May that the FBI had begun questioning current and former CIA officials as part of a Justice Department probe into Brennan and his role in the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Brennan has previously denied wrongdoing related to the Russia investigation and has defended the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
According to sources familiar with the matter, as of May, agents had interviewed roughly a dozen officials involved in drafting the assessment, with investigators focusing on how its conclusions were reached and whether Brennan may have misled Congress during his 2023 testimony.
At the center of the probe is whether the intelligence assessment, which concluded Russia sought to boost Trump’s candidacy, was influenced by the controversial Steele dossier, a collection of largely unsubstantiated allegations about Trump’s supposed ties to Russia that was funded by political opponents.
