WASHINGTON – The Justice Department is preparing grand jury subpoenas demanding documents from top Obama administration officials whom President Donald Trump believes unfairly tried to implicate him in a probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, sources told USA TODAY.

Trump has been publicly demanding such a probe for months, including specifying the names of some of the former top law enforcement and intelligence officials he wants to see prosecuted.

Now the Justice Department appears to be doing just that, with the probe being led by Jason Reding Quiñones, a friend of Attorney General Pam Bondi who is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, sources familiar with the probe said.

The first grand jury subpoenas in the probe were being prepared for President Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence, James Clapper and, reportedly, also for his CIA director, John Brennan. They seek documents pertaining to the long-running Russia investigation that began in 2016, during Obama’s tenure, one source said.

The White House confirmed the existence of the grand jury investigation in August after Fox News reported that Bondi ordered it, based on a criminal referral by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

At the time, Gabbard alleged that Brennan and others, possibly up to then-President Obama, "manufactured and politicized intelligence" as a way of going after Trump.

The probe could to go well beyond those who investigated Russia’s efforts to boost Trump’s 2016 campaign and whether any of his campaign and White House staff colluded with the Kremlin.

Other likely targets identified by Trump include national security officials in the Biden administration who investigated Trump for his allegedly illegal mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021 – and for trying to overturn the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. Both resulted in criminal prosecutions of Trump but they were dismissed once he won re-election in November 2024.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted by the Justice Department Sept. 25 on unrelated charges following Trump's demands, also has defense lawyers tasked with anticipating being included in the Miami-based investigation, which is in its early stages, according to a source familiar with the probe.

None of those former officials commented for this story through USA TODAY requests made to their lawyers. The lawyers also had no comment, citing the sensitivity and fluidity of the matter. In past statements, Clapper, Brennan and Comey have strenuously denied wrongdoing.

The Justice Department did not return requests seeking comment.

Revenge for what Trump says was a 'witch hunt' against him?

The sources described the investigation as Trump’s most ambitious attempt to date to weaponize his FBI and Justice Department against those he believes were out to get him dating back to after he was first elected to office in November 2016.

That was when Obama ordered up what’s called an Intelligence Community Assessment into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election through on-the-ground operatives, manipulation of social media and other so-called “active measures.”

Trump has frequently attacked Brennan, Clapper and Comey for that assessment, claiming they – and Obama – mounted a witch hunt against him in what he calls “the Russia Hoax.”

More recently, he’s widened his retribution target list.

In a Sept. 20 Truth Social post. Trump said he wanted revenge against Comey, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and others who “impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

On Oct. 29, Trump used Truth Social to called for the immediate investigation of others, including special counsel Jack Smith, who led the two Justice Department prosecutions of him for mishandling documents and his actions leading to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

In that post, Trump also singled out Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Chris Wray, saying they “should be investigated, immediately” for the “corrupt J-6 Witch Hunt," referring to the massive FBI and DOJ investigation into the causes of the Jan. 6 riot and Trump's efforts to overturn the election results.

Baseless and politically motivated?

Democrats – all the way up to Obama – say Trump’s current calls for prosecutions are baseless and politically motivated.

They cite numerous investigations, including an exhaustive one by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. It concluded beginning in 2019 that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. But investigators stopped short of saying Trump and his associates actively colluded in that effort with Moscow.

On Nov. 6, MSNBC reported that DOJ is preparing to issue “a series of grand jury subpoenas” as part of an "investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and the probes by the CIA and FBI into Russian interference in the 2016 election." It also said Reding Quiñones is working in consultation with Justice Department senior staff in Washington.

A former Florida state judge with previous DOJ experience, Reding Quiñones was the first confirmed U.S. Attorney of Trump’s second administration, and he leads the third-largest U.S. Attorney’s Office in the nation after New York and Washington.

The Trump-friendly Just the News website said a South Florida federal grand jury is in the process of issuing more than 30 subpoenas “tied to the false claims of Trump-Russia collusion that were propagated by the U.S. intelligence community and federal law enforcement in 2016 and beyond,” citing a source directly familiar with the matter.

And Bloomberg Law reported Nov. 7 that the Miami-based U.S. Attorney’s office is recruiting prosecutors and restructuring its chain of command in preparation for a grand jury investigation expected to target former DOJ officials and others involved in cases against Trump.

To that end, the office has been inviting current staff and outside lawyers to join the new investigative team to be housed within its national security unit, Bloomberg Law said, citing four people familiar with the situation.

Trump loyalists, including lawyers following the case, say the investigation ultimately should examine what they believe is a far broader and longstanding Democratic conspiracy to undermine Trump by launching numerous investigations and prosecutions.

"I think it goes all the way up to the top, to President Obama, to Vice President Biden, to Hillary Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, so many players within the Obama and Biden administration,” Mike Davis of the Article III Project, a pro-Trump conservative legal organization told Fox News Oct. 12. “And I think it also includes the Lawfare Democrats, these prosecutors who coordinated with the Biden White House to bring these indictments against President Trump.”

Davis and others point to a federal judge who recently impaneled a new grand jury to convene Jan. 12 in Fort Pierce, Fla.

“That would be a good place to do this grand jury investigation for what they did to President Trump,” Davis said. “The Mar-a-Lago raid is the hook."

Davis said his "buddy" Reding Quiñones moved to impanel the grand jury after Davis "pushed very hard" to get him to investigate what he says is a conspiracy against Trump, Davis said in an October interview on "The Charlie Kirk Show."

In August 2022, the FBI obtained a court order to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida to look for classified documents he was refusing to return. Trump said he had personally declassified them.

Davis and other Trump MAGA supporters say that gives the Justice Department the ability to use Republican-heavy South Florida to conduct the investigation away from what they believe would be a Democratic-leaning grand jury and trial jury in Washington DC or its suburbs.

What are the allegations against Brennan and Clapper?

Gabbard, Trump’s director of National Intelligence, and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, allege that Brennan used loyal CIA aides to ensure that a 2017 intelligence community assessment concluded that Russia wanted Trump to become president. Gabbard contends Brennan overruled dissent from some career officials who said the evidence wasn’t there.

The House Republicans also allege that Brennan personally pushed to include material from the now-largely discredited Steele dossier, the shorthand name for intelligence collected from former British spy Christopher Steele. And they claim that Brennan falsely testified when he told the committee on May 11, 2023, that the CIA pushed back on FBI requests to include the Steele dossier in the intelligence assessment.

On Oct. 21, Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio referred the matter to the Justice Department, asking for Brennan to face criminal charges.

Steele's dossier initially was shared with the FBI near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. Ultimately, a summary of the dossier was included in the report only as an appendix, including qualifiers about its methodology.

Claims already refuted by numerous investigations

Brennan and Clapper heatedly deny the allegations.

“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals and engaged in a broad ‘treasonous conspiracy’ to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump,” the two wrote in a July 30 opinion piece in the New York Times. “That is patently false.”

“Every serious review has substantiated the intelligence community’s fundamental conclusion that the Russians conducted an influence campaign intended to help Mr. Trump win the 2016 election,” they wrote, citing reports backing that conclusion.

One of those reports followed an investigation by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Trump’s then-Attorney General Bill Barr in May 2019. It found no criminal wrongdoing by Brennan, Clapper or others who played lead roles in the probe into Russian election interference.

The FBI-led component of that probe, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. His team found significant contacts between Kremlin operatives and Trump campaign officials who were eager to accept help from Moscow.

In his final report, however, Mueller did not allege any intentional coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report said the Trump campaign – especially former campaign chair Paul Manafort – posed “a grave counterintelligence threat” by sharing internal polling data and other information with people closely affiliated with Russian intelligence services.

In a March 2022 letter to Durham, a lawyer for both Brennan and Clapper said the intelligence community's work on the 2016 election interference threat "became the target of factual distortions and baseless accusations from many pundits, political operatives, and even government leaders who sought to demonize the Intelligence Community and discredit its analytical assessments about the Russian interference."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: DOJ prepares subpoenas in sweeping criminal probe of Obama-era Trump-Russia investigation

Reporting by Josh Meyer, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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