Reports: Comey subpoenaed in DOJ’s ‘grand conspiracy’ probe against slate of Trump’s enemies

By Jacob Knutson

Former FBI Director James Comey testifying before the U.S. Senate hearing in Washington, D.C. in June 2017.
Former FBI Director James Comey testifying before the U.S. Senate hearing in Washington, D.C. in June 2017. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently subpoenaed former FBI Director James Comey as part of a “grand conspiracy” probe into an expansive list of President Donald Trump’s political enemies, multiple media outlets reported.

The investigation, which is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, appears to be targeting former intelligence and law enforcement officials who allegedly conspired to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights starting from his election in 2016 through his federal indictments in 2023.

In reality, the probe is being directed by a DOJ led by Trump’s former personal attorneys and stems from the president’s campaign of retribution against anyone who has stood in his way.

The subpoena against Comey, which he received last week, related to his alleged role in drafting a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and benefiting Trump’s.

The investigation has so far produced over 130 subpoenas in total, Axios first reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the situation.

The grand jury issuing the subpoenas is being overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, in the Trump-friendly Southern District of Florida.

Cannon, who is the sole federal judge at the U.S. courthouse in Fort Pierce, showed the president unusual deference while overseeing special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation against Trump after his first term in office.

Former CIA Director John Brennan received a similar subpoena last year related to his role overseeing the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment. 

John Ratcliff, Trump’s current CIA director, referred Comey and Brennan to the DOJ for prosecution. He claimed they committed misconduct by including in the assessment a summary of the Steele dossier, a now-debunked opposition research report that alleged collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.

However, the summary of the dossier was placed in an annex to the assessment and was not used to support the report’s core analytical judgments. 

In 2020, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee reached the same conclusion as the assessment — that Russia interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf. The committee also determined that the dossier was not directly used in the assessment and did not “support any of its analytic judgments.”

In a letter last year, Brennan asked the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida to block Cannon from overseeing the DOJ’s conspiracy investigation because of her behavior during the classified documents case.

Prominent MAGA figures previewed the investigation in comments last year, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, one of Trump’s former personal attorneys, all but confirmed its existence in statements to a far-right media outlet in December. 

The DOJ previously indicted Comey in the Eastern District of Virginia, accusing him of making false statements in 2020 during a congressional hearing on the FBI’s Russia investigation. That prosecution failed after judges determined that the prosecutor leading the case, former Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed.