The Justice Department has requested House Intelligence Committee records related to former CIA Director John Brennan, a frequent target of President Donald Trump, two people familiar with the request said.
The Intelligence Committee voted Tuesday night to send several confidential hearing records related to Brennan to the Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the committee’s work. The vote was taken at the request of the Justice Department, two sources said.
A Republican spokesperson for the committee said in a statement that the committee “resolved to report confidential hearing records at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice for ongoing investigations related to the 2017 report by Republican members of the committee that was declassified and made public last year, as well as other topics related to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.”
The spokesperson said the committee hopes this action “could advance the process of accountability that many Americans are eager to see unfold.”
A lawyer for Mr. Brennan, a paid contributor to NBC News, did not respond to a request for comment.
Punchbowl News first reported the Justice Department’s request.
The committee’s move signals that the Trump administration’s Justice Department is moving forward with possible criminal charges against Brennan after launching an investigation in July.
His lawyers said in a December letter that prosecutors from the office of Jason Redding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who is investigating Brennan, had advised him that he was the subject of a grand jury investigation in connection with a 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Brennan served as CIA director from 2013 to 2017.
“We wonder why prosecutors believe they have a legally sound basis for conducting this investigation, but they have done nothing to explain that mystery,” Brennan’s lawyers wrote in a letter to Chief U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a staunch ally of Mr. Trump and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, previously referred Mr. Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, alleging that Mr. Brennan gave false testimony in 2023 in connection with the decade-long investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Brennan’s lawyer denied Mr. Jordan’s claims.
The testimony Jordan cited took place in Washington, D.C., where a federal grand jury was skeptical of a lawsuit the Trump administration was trying to bring against the second-term president’s political goals. In February, a federal grand jury unanimously rejected the administration’s attempt to indict six sitting members of Congress over a video posted on social media telling military personnel to disobey illegal orders.
