April 18, 2026 / 4:02 PM EDT / CBS News
Joseph DiGenova, a conservative attorney who represented former President Trump in challenges to the 2020 election results, has been appointed by the Justice Department to help lead a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, a DOJ official said Saturday.
DiGenova will oversee aspects of the probe from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida and will serve as counselor to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. His addition comes days after lead prosecutor Maria Medetis Long was removed from the case; a source told CBS News she was taken off after raising doubts about the strength of the evidence. A Justice Department spokesperson said personnel changes on cases are “healthy and normal” but did not provide further explanation.
The move — replacing a career federal prosecutor with a politically aligned lawyer who backed efforts to overturn the 2020 election — is likely to fuel concerns about political influence. Observers noted parallels to a prior situation in which the White House removed a top federal prosecutor in Virginia’s Eastern District after he questioned the sufficiency of evidence in prosecutions tied to former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Charges against James were later dismissed; a Trump administration official recently made new criminal referrals to federal prosecutors in Miami and Chicago in two homeowner insurance-related matters.
DiGenova, 81, is a staunch Trump ally who has promoted theories that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021 he apologized to Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, after Krebs said the 2020 election was free of major fraud. Krebs later sued DiGenova, alleging that DiGenova’s on-air calls for Krebs to be “drawn and quartered” and “shot” led to death threats against him.
DiGenova previously served as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., under President Ronald Reagan.
The Brennan investigation began after a referral from the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee in October. Committee Chairman Jim Jordan alleged that Brennan lied to Congress about the CIA’s role in preparing the intelligence assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Jordan claimed Brennan falsely denied that the CIA relied on a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele when drafting the assessment and had falsely told the committee the CIA opposed including the Steele dossier. The Steele dossier contained unverified, salacious allegations about then-candidate Trump.
The probe has recently intensified, with team members conducting interviews with key witnesses. Chris DeLorenz, who formerly clerked for U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation and later left a deputy attorney general’s office position to join the Southern District of Florida, is also working on the case.