Left: Former CIA Director John Brennan testifies before House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 (PBS NewsHour/YouTube). Right: Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks to the media, Friday, June 27, 2025, in the briefing room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Inset: Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida).
Several days after lawyers wrote to the top judge in the Southern District of Florida (SDFL), fearing the DOJ is doing everything it can to ensure any eventual Russia probe-related case against ex-CIA Director John Brennan is overseen by the judge who threw out President Donald Trump”s classified documents case, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi caused a stir with slams in conservative media of “bad actors” running scared from “their liability.”
The letter from Brennan attorneys Kenneth Wainstein and Natasha Harnwell-Davis, first reported by the New York Times one week ago, spanned 16 pages and listed the reasons George W. Bush-appointed Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga should not allow U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon anywhere near a grand jury matter in which Trump has an axe to grind.
Altonaga once presided over Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC and George Stephanopoulos, a case that ABC eventually agreed to settle for over $15 million. The chief judge is also remembered for reportedly suggesting to Cannon, a Trump appointee, not to oversee the Espionage Act and obstruction prosecution of the then-candidate for president.
The reported unsuccessful persuasion efforts came after the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously smacked down Cannon’s ill-fated decision to appoint a special master, a move that hampered the Biden administration DOJ and FBI’s probe in the months after an August 2022 search for classified documents was set in motion by alleged “surreptitious box movement” at Mar-a-Lago.
Cannon’s torpedoed special master appointment was the first “past decision” that Brennan’s lawyers cited to argue she has “consistently favored” Trump in court, including by catering to his delay tactics. Nowhere was the favoritism clearer, the letter alleged, than when Cannon dismissed Trump’s indictment in July 2024, citing a solo concurrence from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas and finding that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland unlawfully appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.
Still, there’s reason to believe the pattern of preferential treatment has continued over a year later, the letter went on.
Brennan’s attorneys pointed out that Cannon, at the start of 2025, issued an injunction blocking the release of Volume II of Smith’s report — the volume detailing his Mar-a-Lago investigation of Trump — and kept the injunction in place even after the current DOJ ended the cases against his former co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira. In February, nonprofit groups American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute each attempted to intervene for the purpose of bringing Volume II to light in the public interest. Their briefs in favor of disclosure and DOJ’s oppositions followed. So did multiple reminders from the would-be intervenors that the issue was “ripe” for a ruling, yet Cannon’s docket remained silent for months on end.
It took another 11th Circuit criticism in November of Cannon’s “undue delay” for the judge to deny those motions to intervene just last week, meaning it’s been nearly a year now since the injunction issued.
In mentioning each of these details, the letter claimed there’s a real threat that the DOJ which has “pursue[d] political targets” Letitia James and James Comey will try to boost its odds of bringing successful revenge prosecutions against “perceived political adversaries” of President Trump by “judge-shopping” in the Fort Pierce Division of the SDFL, where Cannon is the only sitting jurist and “would likely supervise the grand jury investigation and preside over the litigation of any resulting indictment” — especially now that Brennan has been deemed a “target” of a grand jury investigation and has been subpoenaed.
According to the DOJ’s Justice Manual, a “target” is a “person as to whom the prosecutor or the grand jury has substantial evidence linking him or her to the commission of a crime and who, in the judgment of the prosecutor, is a putative defendant.”
Cannon’s supervision would be a particularly concerning result, the lawyers maintained, considering Trump’s open interest in seeing the arrests of Brennan or other ex-government officials involved in the “Obama administration’s intelligence community assessment […] that detailed” in 2017 “how Russia waged a covert influence campaign to help Trump defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.”
The letter slammed Miami U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones’ alleged “efforts to funnel this investigation to the judge who issued this string of rulings that consistently favored President Trump’s positions in previous litigations.” Such activity “should be seen for what it is,” the letter told Altonaga — “prosecutorial judge-shopping[.]”
“For all these reasons, we urge Your Honor to exercise your supervisory authority as Chief Judge to ensure the United States Attorney does not steer this matter to the Fort Pierce Division and to the courtroom of Judge Aileen Cannon,” the letter concluded.
Against that backdrop, Bondi made the noticeably “weird” choice to comment about Brennan’s letter in the media with a grand jury probe ongoing.
Really weird to see the United States Attorney General commenting on an active grand jury investigation—let alone referring to a potential subject of that investigation as a “bad actor.”https://t.co/QQiit2EmFO pic.twitter.com/RZXTHOH1wz
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) December 29, 2025
In written responses to John Solomon of Just the News as the AG recovers from eye surgery, Bondi reportedly said Sunday that her DOJ is cracking down on “government weaponization nationwide” and stated “a ten-year stain on the country” — a conspiracy — was “committed by high-ranking officials against the American people.”
Then she turned to the letter from Brennan’s lawyers, railing against “bad actors” whom she says “clearly” have “liability” to hide by requesting “judicial intervention.”
“Public reports of a recent letter sent to Cecilia M. Altonaga, the Chief Judge of the Federal District of Florida, by John Brennan’s defense attorneys, seeking judicial intervention in any legitimate grand jury investigation by the executive branch, shows these bad actors are clearly concerned about their liability and want to preserve a two-tiered justice system: one for them and one for everyone else,” Bondi reportedly said. “No more.”
