You’ve likely heard that John Brennan is suing Todd Blanche, which has gotten a lot of press (CNN, quoted below, MS-NOW, WaPo, ABC):
Brennan said in an MS NOW interview Wednesday afternoon, “I told my lawyers I don’t want to sit on our hands because if he gets away with me, he’s going to continue to do this against others … who have given their lives and have sacrificed so much on behalf of this country, believing that a president, an administration is going to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong and corrupt thing.”
“Enough is enough, and that’s why today’s lawsuit, I think, sends a clear signal that I’m willing to fight this on behalf of my reputation and what I did, but also on behalf of so many others who are either currently in those crosshairs or will be soon,” he continued.
What has gotten less attention, though, is the theory behind the lawsuit, which was filed in DC and is, at least in part, an attempt to get some legal review, in DC, of shenanigans going on in Florida.
The complaint airs a broad range of DOJ’s corruption, including the attempts to prosecute Tish James and Jim Comey, the failed attempts to subpoena Tim Walz and Jerome Powell, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche’s discussions of grand jury proceedings in the investigation into him. It describes the two different grand jury investigations into him and the head fakes in the wake of the termination of the real prosecutor who refused to politicize it. It includes the letter Brennan sent to the Chief Judge in SDFL about DOJ’s forum shopping to get a case before Aileen Cannon and a 30-page exhibit of Trump’s attacks on Brennan (last year, Jim Comey’s was 60-pages), going back years, including this tweet, daring Brennan to sue him for something else.
But at its core, the lawsuit is fairly simple. Brennan argues that when Trump indicts him, he will have a viable selective and vindictive prosecution claim, and he’ll need the records showing that Trump unfairly targeted him to be able to prove the case. Then, he shows that Trump and his minions have a habit of deleting things, including records that will harm their politicized prosecutions. So he asks for an injunction (the case has been assigned to Jia Cobb) prohibiting such deletions.
Here’s just part of the argument about Trump’s habit of deleting things (note: There are paragraph numbers and footnote numbers here, which is why the same numbers keep repeating).
58. Beyond that arguably inadvertent failure to preserve, officials of this Administration have shown an advertent disdain for their preservation obligations. President Trump has repeatedly deleted social media posts that should be retained.52 On September 20, 2025, for example, he posted a message on Truth Social directing then-Attorney General Bondi to accelerate prosecutions against James Comey, Adam Schiff and Letitia James. Though clearly a government record to be preserved under the PRA, the President deleted the post after it became clear that it was in the public domain.53 It has also been recently reported that President Trump sent a number of direct messages about official matters during his first administration that were never preserved.54 And he has acted similarly with regard to hard-copy government records, reportedly once flushing some down a toilet55 and ripping others into confetti-size pieces.56
59. Officials across the Executive Branch are exhibiting that same cavalier attitude about their duty to preserve records.57 For example, during the time that Lindsey Halligan purported to serve as the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, she used Signal to communicate with a journalist about a grand jury investigation under her official authority — i.e., the investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James — and set the messages to disappear after eight hours.58 A whistleblower reportedly accused Ed Martin, formerly head of the DOJ Weaponization Group, of concealing and destroying communications relating to his work on the Weaponization Working Group.59 There was also the incident in which National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and others communicated in a Signal chat (which accidentally included a reporter from the Atlantic) about upcoming strikes against Huthi targets in Yemen with messages that indicated on their face that they would disappear at certain intervals — 1 week and 4 weeks.60 And on one recent evening, the Associate Attorney General issued a controversial post indicating that the Department would pursue an alternative to the derailed plan to establish a fund to compensate victims of supposed “weaponization” (see supra note 47), but the post was deleted from his X account the next morning.61 Finally, in a recent challenge to the Administration’s mass terminations of government employees, discovery revealed that high-level officials in the Department of Homeland Security used Signal groups on their personal phones to communicate, and that Justice Department attorneys failed to adequately preserve those materials.62
[snip]
62. Importantly, the concern about the preservation of records of value to Director Brennan is only heightened by the evidence that this Administration has shown itself willing to withhold records that cut against its interests. For example, in the prosecution of Congresswoman LaMonica McIver for interfering with federal officers during a fracas while conducting an oversight visit to an ICE facility, the prosecutors initially refused to provide any discovery.65 When compelled to do so by the court, it was revealed that significant important discovery material had been lost, including relevant messages on the phones of federal agents at the scene that had not been collected and information on a senior official’s phone that had been wiped, despite the existence of a litigation hold.66 In the criminal prosecution of protesters in United States v. Rabbitt (known as the Broadview 6 case), federal prosecutors balked at the court’s request to review the grand jury transcripts.67 At first, they provided only redacted versions, and when the judge insisted on the full transcripts, they even reduced the felony charges to misdemeanors in an attempt to moot out the grand jury proceeding that had produced the felony
52 Bernd Debusmann Jr., Trump Deletes Post Depicting Him as Jesus-like Figure After Backlash, BBC News (Apr. 13, 2026), https://perma.cc/6EBF-N3EJ Alex Nguyen, A Non-Exhaustive List of Trump’s Deleted Posts, Mother Jones (Apr. 13, 2026), https://perma.cc/M8M7-WARP
53 Kristen Welker & Rebecca Shabad, supra note 22; Josh Dawsey, Sadie Gurman & Aruna Viswanatha, Inside the Justice Department Where the President Calls the Shots, Wall Street Journal (Oct. 8, 2025), https://perma.cc/DD4C-35MH
54 Nate Jones, Trump Library Says no Twitter DMs Can be Found, Despite Evidence he Sent Them, Washington Post (June 3, 2026), https://perma.cc/95LK-AWUR
55 Edward Helmore, Photos Suggest Trump Blocked Toilets with Ripped-up White House Documents, Guardian (Aug. 8, 2022), https://perma.cc/A7VV-GP25 Mike Allen, Exclusive Photos: Trump’s Telltale Toilet, Axios (Aug. 8, 2022), https://perma.cc/98QG-ULBK
56 Annie Karni, Meet the Guys who Tape Trump’s Papers Back Together, Politico (June 10, 2018), https://perma.cc/3A7S-6HZY
57 See generally A Disappearing Data Chronology, Nat’l Sec. Archive, https://perma.cc/55SN66EV (last visited June 5, 2026) (collecting instances of the Trump Administration changing or removing information). See also DON’T SHRED ON ME! USAID Documents Destruction Breaks the Law, According to National Security Archive, National Security Archive (USAID’s Acting Executive Secretary inviting employees to shred or burn classified records and personnel files in March 2025); Kayla Epstein, USAID Staff Told to Shred and Burn Classified Documents, BBC News (Mar. 11, 2025), https://perma.cc/5M2F-JQMZ
58 Anna Bower, “Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.”, Lawfare (Oct. 20, 2025), https://perma.cc/DP74-U7XN This was contrary to Section 9-5.004 of the federal Justice Manual, which states that “[a]ll prosecution team members should be aware of the government’s obligations regarding the preservation and disclosure of electronic communications, or ‘e-communications,’ which include emails, text messages, SMS (short message service), instant messages, voice mail, pin-to-pin communications, and similar means of electronic communication. . . . Prosecution team members should preserve for later review and possible disclosure all substantive e-communications created or received by team members during the course of an investigation and prosecution . . . regardless of content”). U.S. Dep’t of Just., Just. Manual § 9-5.004 (2019).
59 Rebecca Beitsch, Whistleblower Accuses Ed Martin of ‘Concealing and Destroying’ Records Related to DOJ’s Weaponization Group, Hill (Nov. 17, 2025), https://perma.cc/BG4A-UB6V Letter from Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member, H. Comm. on the Judiciary, to Edward P. Martin, Jr., Pardon Att’y and Dir., Weaponization Working Grp., U.S. Dep’t of Just. (Nov. 17, 2025), https://perma.cc/AZ83-JPKH
60 Josh Gerstein & Kyle Cheney, Judge Orders Trump Administration to Preserve Signal Chats, Politico (Mar. 27, 2025), https://perma.cc/AL4Q-NJJ5 According to reports, the National Security Advisor’s team had set up at least 20 Signal group chats to discuss crises in Ukraine, China, Gaza, the broader Middle East, Africa and Europe. Dasha Burns, Waltz’s Team Set Up at Least 20 Signal Group Chats for Crises Across the World, Politico (Apr. 2, 2025), https://perma.cc/6WKP-3K5W Importantly, the messages about the Yemen strikes were ultimately deleted from the phone of CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Julian E. Barnes, C.I.A. Director’s Messages in Leaked Chat Were Deleted, Agency Says, N.Y. Times (Apr. 15, 2025), https://perma.cc/BF54-6CS2
61 Alexander Mallin, Top DOJ Official Deletes Post on Alternate ‘Anti-weaponization’ Compensation Plan, ABC News (June 3, 2026), https://perma.cc/QNU3-RX5L
62 Reply at 3, 11-14, Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps., AFL-CIO v. Trump, No. 25-cv-3698 (N.D. Cal. June 17, 2026), Dkt. No. 421, at 3, 11-14 (“Either DOJ attorneys were willfully blind to their clients’ extensive use of disappearing Signal messages in disregard of their obligation to investigate, or they knowingly participated in the concealment.”).
[snip]
66 Letter Mot. at 2-11, United States v. McIver, No. 25-cr-388 (D.N.J. Dec. 23, 2025), Dkt. No. 57.
67 Hr’g Tr. at 20-24, United States v. Rabbitt, No. 25-cr-693 (N.D. Ill. May 21, 2026), Dkt. No. 187, https://perma.cc/S55U-H2GJ
Note: Brennan missed one from the Broadview 6 case. DOJ tried to withhold Broadview bodyworn camera footage (and in fact, some of the footage was destroyed); when they did eventually turn it over, that footage showed that most of the defendants had moved away (or behind) the car they were purportedly obstructing.
The theory is a stretch, because even with all the dripping politicization that Trump has engaged in, none of the high profile people have gotten discovery. Kilmar Abrego (who is only famous because of the way DOJ retaliated against him) did, but in other cases, the case collapsed before the politicization got aired; in LaMonica McIver’s case, a judge ruled against such claims.
DOJ could argue that Brennan would never get discovery in any case, so there’s no reason to enjoin them from destroying records. But to argue that, DOJ would effectively be arguing they can hide their tracks with impunity.
The easy thing would be to not fight the injunction and to starve Brennan of the attention this will otherwise generate. But it would add a requirement that they keep these records.
As such, the lawsuit might best be understood as an invitation for DOJ to take the maximal stand they do everywhere else, which might cause problems down the road.
I can’t see Trump & Co doing “the easy thing” you lay out. In Trump’s eyes, not fighting the injunction would be admitting that Brennan’s allegations are true. In Trump’s heart, not fighting the injunction would be rolling over and letting Brennan win. In Trump’s ears, not fighting the injunction would mean listening to hours of the Lamestream media crow at Trump’s expense.
Trump is going to direct his minions to fight this. Hard.
Which brings us to footnote 58, which captures Trump’s problem in a nutshell. Official DOJ policy demands retention of documents and messages. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. But as Brennan lays out, message after message goes missing, which seems less like a mistake or one bad apple, but full government policy. I can see Brennan’s lawyers asking the DOJ to provide evidence of *anyone* being disciplined for their illegal deletions.
Starting the parade of examples in paragraph 59 with “the time that Lindsey Halligan purported to serve as the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia” is the chef’s kiss here. It’s Brennan’s lawyers saying, “these folks have a habit of breaking the rules and obstructing the courts, and document retention failings are but a piece of a larger whole.”
Peterr, I was going to mention Lindsey Halligan’s “purport[ing]” too, but you beat me to the point.
My guess: Trump and DOJ are busily deleting absolutely *everything* related to Brennan. Trump habitually brings on investigations and (if he’s lucky) indictments for the purpose of generating Fox News cycles and harassing his targets. He has little if any intention of following through in court, where this (hypothetical) prosecution would fail on numerous grounds–including the Trump administration’s refusal to hand over discovery.
Trump cares about *now*, not a future prosecution. He wants spectacle and conflict NOW.
The same can be said about the SCOTUS refusing to take-up Trump’s appeal to overturn a jury’s finding that he sexually abused and later defamed writer E. Jean Carroll, leaving intact the jury’s verdict that Trump IS an adjudicated sexual assaulter.
Brannan laid down a date and time, after which any lose of records or failure to collect everything will look like a conspiracy to obstruct justice. What else can DOJ say here? “We can delete whatever we want but we won’t”? “The complete lack of records, including emails, meeting notes, texts, etc. indicates that Trump sent twenty texts in an hour cuz he was high on Diet Coke fumes”?
Finally, it increases the chances that The Young Aileen won’t get the case but Cobb instead. She’s already handling some preliminary work, after all.