The Justice Department has issued a new wave of subpoenas in a Florida-based investigation that is tied, according to people familiar with the matter, to perceived adversaries of President Donald Trump and to the U.S. government’s response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The subpoenas seek documents covering the years since the Obama administration published an intelligence community assessment in January 2017, the people said, speaking anonymously because the demands are not public. Those latest requests broadened the scope beyond an earlier, November wave of subpoenas that asked recipients for documents from the months surrounding preparation of the assessment.
The Justice Department declined to comment on Tuesday, when the AP report was published. The subpoenas also reflect continued investigative activity in one of several criminal inquiries the department has pursued, the people said, and it is part of a wider set of efforts that has revisited old decisions and findings from the Russia investigation.
Several former intelligence and law enforcement officials have received subpoenas, AP reported, and lawyers for former CIA Director John Brennan said they were told he is a target. Brennan’s lawyers said they had not been told what they described as the “legally justifiable basis” for undertaking the investigation.
The Obama-era intelligence community assessment at the center of the broader controversy, published in the final days of the administration, found that Russia had developed a “clear preference” for Trump and that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign intended to undermine confidence in American democracy and harm Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning. That assessment and a related investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia have been among Trump’s chief grievances, and Trump has vowed retribution against officials tied to the inquiries.
Multiple government reports, including bipartisan congressional reviews and a criminal investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller, have found that Russia interfered in Trump’s favor through a hack-and-leak operation involving Democratic emails and a covert social media campaign aimed at sowing discord and influencing American public opinion. Mueller’s report also found that the Trump campaign actively welcomed Russian help, while it did not establish that Russian operatives and Trump or his associates conspired to tip the election in his favor.
Trump’s administration has also scrutinized the intelligence community assessment, in part because a classified version included in an annex a summary of the “Steele dossier,” which compiled opposition research funded by Democrats and prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele for submission to the FBI. Trump has repeatedly cited weaknesses in the dossier to cast doubt on the entire Russia investigation.
In July, a declassified CIA tradecraft review released by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe did not refute the conclusion that Russia interfered in the election, but it found “multiple procedural anomalies” in the intelligence community assessment and criticized Brennan for the classified version’s references to the Steele dossier. Brennan testified to Congress and wrote in a memoir that he opposed including information from the dossier in the intelligence assessment because neither its substance nor sources had been validated, according to the AP report, and he has said the dossier did not inform the assessment’s judgments.
That same CIA review asserted that Brennan’s approach favored narrative consistency over analytical soundness. It also quoted Brennan, without context, as having written that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”
It is unclear, AP reported, whether the Florida investigation will lead to any criminal charges. In a letter last December addressed to the chief judge of the Southern District of Florida, Brennan’s lawyers challenged the investigation’s underpinnings, questioning what basis prosecutors had for opening the inquiry in the state and saying they had received no clarity from prosecutors about what potential crimes were being investigated. In that letter, the lawyers described it as “mystifying how the prosecutors could possibly believe there is any legally justifiable basis for undertaking this investigation,” and they said the investigation was “manufactured.”