By Erin Banco, Andrew Goudsward and Jonathan Landay
NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters) - The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA employees as part of the Department of Justice’s investigation into ex-CIA director John Brennan over his role in an intelligence finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help Donald Trump, according to five sources familiar with the matter.
Employees were questioned last week by agents out of the Miami field office at CIA headquarters in McLean,
Virginia. Interviews are expected to continue throughout the coming weeks, three of the sources said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida has for months pursued an investigation into Brennan. Prosecutors have been examining whether he made a false statement to Congress in 2023 in discussing a 2017 intelligence assessment that looked at Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The core conclusions of that assessment, which focused on Russia’s cyber-espionage and influence efforts to boost Trump’s candidacy over Hillary Clinton, were later affirmed by the Justice Department, a bipartisan Senate committee and a CIA review.
Still, President Trump, who has described the Russia investigation as a “hoax”, has pushed prosecutors to dig into those he perceives to have been involved in spearheading the probe, including Brennan.
A source familiar with the Brennan investigation said that FBI agents had questioned about a dozen current and former CIA officers who worked on the 2017 assessment.
The current and former CIA officers are being asked about Brennan's role in producing the assessment and the extent to which its conclusions were shaped by a controversial dossier of unverified claims about Trump's ties to Russia.
Known as the Steele dossier after its author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the document was funded by Trump's political opponents and included salacious rumors about alleged links between his 2016 campaign and Moscow, which Trump strenuously denied.
The dossier was referenced briefly in the assessment and a summary of its allegations was attached to a classified version of the report. Brennan has said the CIA opposed including the dossier in the report and the classified summary was only included as part of a compromise with the FBI.
Reuters previously reported that the FBI was expected to interview intelligence officials as part of its investigation into Brennan. The CIA and Justice Department declined to comment. A lawyer for Brennan declined to comment.
Brennan’s lawyer said in a letter to the chief federal judge in Miami that prosecutors had told his client that he is a target of the investigation. He claimed prosecutors were "judge shopping" by trying to steer the investigation to a Trump-appointed judge in Fort Pierce, Florida, who previously dismissed a criminal case against Trump.
Sources familiar with the probe expect that any charges would eventually have to be filed in Washington, D.C. given that's where Brennan's congressional testimony took place.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, referred Brennan to the DOJ in October, alleging he lied during a 2023 congressional testimony, in part by saying the CIA was "not involved at all" with the Steele dossier.
Attorney General Todd Blanche helped oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into Brennan when the office was run by Pam Bondi. Trump fired Bondi in April amid mounting White House frustration with the pace and outcome of her team’s investigations.
The Justice Department last month removed the veteran prosecutor in Miami who had been leading the investigation into Brennan. The department then installed Joe DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor turned conservative legal commentator and critic of Brennan, to oversee the probe and a related effort to examine whether prior investigations into Trump amounted to a conspiracy against the president.
Prosecutors initially issued several subpoenas for witnesses in the Brennan investigation to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington, a move that reflected a more aggressive approach to the investigation. In an unusual move, those subpoenas were withdrawn in mid-April shortly after being issued, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
DiGenova’s appointment has rattled current and former employees of the CIA who worry he will go after anyone inside the intelligence community who Trump perceives to have played a part in politically motivated investigations, two of the sources said.
(Reporting by Erin Banco in New York; Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Jonathan Landay in Washington. Editing by Michael Learmonth and Sanjeev Miglani)
