Smith Team Met Brennan at CIA
by: Dana Reyes

Smith’s Team Met Brennan at CIA.

Two sheets of lined paper, released Monday, record an FBI meeting with a former CIA director. One agent wrote “11/3/23,” “CIAHQ” and “John Brennan” at the top of a legal pad. The other wrote “John Brennan,” “3 Nov 2023” and “Former D/CIA.” Under each heading is a blacked-out line, and under that, nothing. Every other ruled line on both pages is empty.

Those pages are attached to a one-page FBI memo saying that agents and members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team met Brennan at CIA headquarters on Nov. 3, 2023, while preparing the classified-documents case against Donald Trump. A White House task force released both documents six days after Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I’ve never met John Brennan.”

We read the memo itself. It lists three of Smith’s prosecutors, not the two reported elsewhere, plus a CIA lawyer, and it was filed to a “coordination subfile” with no interview report attached.

One page, filed five days later

The memo is an FBI Electronic Communication, form FD-1057, titled “Meeting with John BRENNAN.” The Washington Field Office dated it Nov. 8, 2023, five days after the meeting. The synopsis says its purpose is “to document meeting with John BRENNAN on 3 Nov 2023.” The case number is partly redacted. The visible part ends in “COORD,” and the line beside it reads “Coordination subfile.”

The attendance paragraph is the part worth slowing down on. It lists two FBI special agents, then “Assistant Special Counsel” three separate times, each followed by a redacted name, and finally a CIA Office of General Counsel attorney. Fox News reported on Oct. 7 that two assistant special counsels attended. The memo shows three. All of the names are blacked out. No one on the list is identified as the special counsel himself.

The CIA lawyer has barely been mentioned anywhere, and the memo says nothing more about that person’s role.

Then comes the purpose, in one sentence. “The purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming trial in captioned investigation.” The memo adds, “No documents were shown in this meeting,” and says the agents’ original notes would be kept in an attachment. That attachment is the pair of blank pages.

What “expert testimony” does and doesn’t tell us

At the time, the trial was real and scheduled. In July 2023, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had set it to begin May 20, 2024. The charges centered on willful retention of national defense information, the phrase the memo uses.

The memo’s wording points to Brennan as a possible expert on that subject. It does not say he agreed to testify, that prosecutors ever listed him as a witness, or what anyone said in the room. Fox noted that Brennan was not CIA director during the period the case covered, and nothing in the release suggests he had firsthand knowledge of the documents at Mar-a-Lago. The trial never happened. Cannon dismissed the case on July 15, 2024, ruling that Smith had been unlawfully appointed.

The blank notes are a separate question from whether a meeting happened. Just the News, which first published the files, argued that they break with Justice Department practice, and the manual it cited does say something close to that. Its discovery guidance says that “generally speaking, witness interviews should be memorialized by the agent,” and that prosecutors and agents should agree on note-taking before an interview begins.

The same passage opens with “Although not required by law,” and a footnote defines “interview” as a formal question-and-answer session with a potential witness. Whether a meeting about possible expert testimony fits that definition is the argument now underway. The released record contains no FD-302, the form agents use to write up witness interviews. It doesn’t say whether one exists.

“I have no recollection”

The Senate exchange came on Sept. 29. Chairman Chuck Grassley asked whether Smith had ever received “any consultation or counsel” from Brennan, “whether during your time as special counsel or otherwise,” and if so, when and why. Smith answered, “I’ve never met John Brennan.”

About 11 minutes later, Grassley came back to it. “You said you never met John Brennan, but have you ever had any conversation with John Brennan?” Smith said, “I have no recollection of having a conversation with John Brennan.”

Both answers can be literally true if Smith was not in the room on Nov. 3, and the memo’s attendance list does not place him there. Grassley’s question was broader, though, and that is where he has taken it. He told Fox News the meeting “constitutes ‘consultation or counsel’ from John Brennan to Smith and his team,” and called Smith’s answer “highly evasive and misleading, at minimum.” Fox said Smith’s attorneys and the Justice Department did not respond to its request for comment.

One more date sits on the documents themselves. Each page carries a red stamp reading “Approved for public release by Counsel to the President Scharf on 29 September 2026.” That is the same day Smith testified.

Primary source: FBI Electronic Communication, “Meeting with John BRENNAN” (Nov. 8, 2023) and the two pages of agent notes. Full context: transcript of Smith’s Sept. 29 Senate Judiciary testimony. For the earlier files from the same release, see our report, Declassified FBI Logs Show Plasmic Echo Tracked Wiles’s Phone Contacts.

Smith’s Team Met Brennan at CIA. The FBI Notes Are Blank.

Sources

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