Law enforcement veterans are expressing deep concerns that the Trump Justice Department’s criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan is being systematically stacked with politically motivated personnel who are intent on a partisan indictment.
Brennan is the subject of two criminal probes being led by the Miami-area U.S. Attorney’s Office. One is weighing allegations that he lied to Congress in 2023 about the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The second is a sprawling “grand conspiracy” probe examining whether Obama- and Biden-era officials were part of a long-running conspiracy to keep President Trump out of political office.
Last month, the Justice Department abruptly removed the senior career prosecutor who was overseeing the Brennan case after she expressed concerns about the strength of the evidence and replaced her with Joseph DiGenova, a staunch Trump ally, to run both investigations.
On Tuesday, DiGenova’s wife, Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor, conservative commentator and staunch Trump ally, was sworn in as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida. DiGenova declined to say whether she is working on the Brennan and grand conspiracy cases, but a source with direct knowledge confirmed she is.
Now, multiple sources are raising concerns that some of the line prosecutors and FBI agents assigned to the case may harbor underlying political motivations that could cast doubt on their ability to conduct an impartial investigation.
One of the FBI agents, for example, once sought to investigate whether Italian military satellites hacked American voting machines in the 2020 election. A second agent was involved in the recently botched criminal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, sources told CBS News, and also lobbied senators to confirm Kash Patel to be FBI director.
Those two agents — Rose Marketos and Jack Eckenrode — both served on the Director’s Advisory Team at the FBI, which was set up by Patel and staffed by agents from around the country who support his policy goals, according to sources familiar with the matter.
A number of the agents who have participated in that group have also been assigned to work on high-profile cases involving targets identified by Mr. Trump as political adversaries.
Marketos and Eckenrode did not respond to requests for comment.
“The FBI does not comment on the contents or existence of investigations in the media, particularly those pertaining to classified information,” an FBI spokesperson said. “Moreover, any accusation of political bias is false and eerily similar to the actual conduct of former officials under the previous administration who actively participated in weaponized government for years.”
Meanwhile, one of the line prosecutors who recently joined the case, Chris DeLorenz, previously clerked for U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon as she was presiding over — and ultimately dismissed — the criminal charges against Mr. Trump related to his retention of classified records.
DeLorenz was detailed as a prosecutor to the probe despite his limited prosecutorial experience, after recently working in the deputy attorney general’s office.
CBS has reached out to DeLorenz for comment.
A federal grand jury in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where Judge Cannon is based, is now investigating the “grand conspiracy” allegations. Because she is the only U.S. District judge in Ft. Pierce, she would most likely handle any potential criminal case brought there.
“Career attorneys and agents take very seriously the power they have to charge someone with a crime. Until this administration, they were expected to drop a case when an investigation revealed no crime occurred,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department lawyer. Young founded and leads the nonprofit Justice Connection, which provides support for former and current career Justice Department civil servants.
“Now, if they dare to say they can’t justify bringing charges against a perceived enemy of this president, they’re pushed aside and replaced with loyalists who will contort the facts and the law to manufacture a case,” she said.
Critics of the investigation have said that it has been tainted by politics since its inception. Mr. Trump has railed against Brennan for years, calling him “crooked as hell” and suggesting he should “pay a price.” Mike Davis, a legal surrogate for Mr. Trump and one of his most pugnacious defenders, pushed relentlessly for a sweeping conspiracy case against former Obama and Biden administration officials with Brennan at its center.
The case was met with skepticism from career Justice Department lawyers from the outset. It was transferred to the Southern District of Florida after federal prosecutors in Philadelphia who were initially assigned to review the case determined there was not enough evidence to proceed, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Seasoned current and former agents and prosecutors say their concerns over the already-fraught criminal cases involving Brennan have only grown as more personnel with seemingly pro-Trump perspectives have been added to the investigative teams.
“Italygate”
One agent who is now involved in the Brennan and grand conspiracy cases is Marketos, who previously worked on a public corruption squad in the Washington Field Office that had investigated Mr. Trump and was disbanded last year.
During recent witness interviews with former intelligence officials, Marketos asked questions about the “Clinton plan intelligence” — an apparent reference to a 2016 election conspiracy theory, claiming Hillary Clinton used allegations about Russia to distract from her own scandals, sources told CBS News. (The theory was later discredited by a Republican-appointed special counsel).
Criminal defense lawyers who have interacted with Marketos told CBS News she’s taken a secondary role in witness interviews and has largely conducted herself professionally.
During her time on the public corruption squad for the Washington field office, she told colleagues she believed Trump won the 2020 election, several sources said.
Without the knowledge of her immediate supervisor, she sought permission to travel to Rome to speak with a confidential human source who claimed that Italian military satellites had hacked into Dominion’s voting machines to flip votes against Mr. Trump, according to sources familiar with the matter and congressional testimony from that supervisor.
In the transcript of the testimony, the former supervisor said he later discovered that Justice Department officials laughed when they saw her request. He also said several of the sources providing the tip about the satellites had “partisan political ties.”
“There was a lack of investigative rigor,” the former FBI supervisor told lawmakers.
Her supervisor denied her request after discovering the former acting deputy attorney general had previously referred to the allegation as “pure insanity,” according to a transcript of the interview. He added that he shut down the investigation in around July 2021.
An internal Justice Department directory lists Marketos as being assigned to the Office of Congressional Affairs, though she hasn’t spent much — if any — time there, sources said.
CBS News could not determine how Marketos came to be assigned to the Brennan case. Typically agents are assigned cases to investigate in the regional offices where they are based. The two investigations targeting Brennan are being conducted in Florida. Marketos is based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Marketos’ involvement in the Brennan case has also attracted attention because of her recent temporary assignment with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the agency whose core mission is integrating foreign, domestic and military U.S. intelligence in defense of American interests at home and abroad.
Since last year, the ODNI has been tasked by its director, Tulsi Gabbard, with identifying what has been called political “weaponization” or political bias in the intelligence community. The office last year referred the “grand conspiracy” case for investigation.
Marketos has primarily spent her time since last year on temporary assignment to Gabbard’s office, and she has even reached out to defense lawyers on the Brennan case from her post there, sources told CBS News.
“It is a staggering indictment of the current institutional standards that an individual who lacks the basic discernment to distinguish between a fringe conspiracy theory and a federal crime is now tasked with investigating a former CIA director,” former FBI agent James Davidson told CBS News.
Davidson is now the president of the FBI Integrity Project, a group founded by former agents who say they aim to protect the bureau’s integrity from partisan influences and other abuses.
An official from ODNI declined to answer questions about Marketos’ role, stating that she is not an employee of the office and referring CBS News to the FBI.
“As [Director] Gabbard has said publicly, we’ve sent multiple criminal referrals and stated that ODNI shares information as appropriate with the DOJ and FBI to support their investigations,” a Gabbard spokesperson said.
From retirement to the Comey case
Eckenrode, meanwhile, was a retired longtime agent who returned to the bureau after Patel became director. He previously served on the investigative team for former special counsel John Durham, sources said.
His involvement in the latest probes related to Russia and the 2016 election was previously reported by the New York Times.
Eckenrode publicly endorsed Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI in a letter to lawmakers, according to the Washington Examiner. In that letter, he criticized the bureau’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, writing, “Regrettably, the FBI’s conduct during Crossfire Hurricane has caused the Bureau’s reputation to plummet, and for a variety of reasons, it has not rebounded.”
Eckenrode was one of two FBI agents assigned last year to investigate whether former FBI Director James Comey lied to Congress, sources told CBS News.
Before the case was dismissed on a different issue, a magistrate judge blasted the two agents and the former interim U.S. attorney, saying they had potentially committed misconduct by failing to filter evidence that was likely covered by Comey’s attorney-client privilege rights and by using stale search warrants from a prior FBI investigation that started in 2017. The Justice Department has denied any wrongdoing.
Eckenrode has been present for some witness interviews and meetings to discuss the Brennan case, several sources said, though CBS News has not determined his precise role in the probes.
He is listed in the Justice Department’s internal directory under Patel’s office, which is also a part of the bureau not typically assigned to criminal probes.
Joe DiGenova, the 2020 Trump campaign attorney who’s leading the Brennan investigations
DiGenova returns to the Justice Department more than two decades after he served as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., from 1983 to 1988.
More recently, DiGenova represented Mr. Trump’s campaign in its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, and he has long railed against Brennan’s role in assessing that Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 election, referring to him in one interview as the “primogenitor of the entire counterintelligence investigation.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, when asked by CBS News last month whether DiGenova’s involvement in the case could raise questions about bias, replied, “He has to make sure that he is doing everything ethically. I’m sure that he would.”
On Tuesday, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, posted a photograph of DiGenova, Toensing and others standing outside the federal courthouse in Ft. Pierce.
DiGenova “led a productive meeting with half the team in person at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce and the other half joining by video,” Quiñones wrote. “Good things are building in SDFL.”