Jack Smith’s team interviewed John Brennan in 2023. The FBI agents’ notes are blank

FBI memos released Monday show that special counsel Jack Smith’s team met former CIA Director John Brennan at CIA headquarters on Nov. 3, 2023, to discuss expert testimony in the classified-documents case against President Trump. The agents who attended left their notes blank.

A typed summary, written five days later, states: “On 3 November 2023, FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) and Special Counsel personnel met with former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John BRENNAN at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia.” The purpose, the memo says, “was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming captioned investigation.” It adds that no documents were shown. The White House Government Transparency Task Force released the records.

Two sets of agent notes are attached. They list the date, the location, Brennan’s name, and the government attendees. They contain no account of what was said. The Justice Manual says that, although not required by law, witness interviews generally should be memorialized, and that prosecutors should confirm with agents that substantive interviews are written up. Standard practice is handwritten notes converted to an FD-302. That did not happen here.

The meeting was logged under the FBI investigation code-named Plasmic Echo, the file that became Smith’s Florida case accusing Trump of retaining classified records at Mar-a-Lago. A federal judge later dismissed those charges, ruling Smith had not been lawfully appointed because he was not Senate-confirmed.

Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that he had never met Brennan and had no recollection of a conversation with him. The November 2023 memo describes a meeting by his personnel, not by Smith himself.

Brennan had testified to the House Judiciary Committee earlier in 2023 about the Russia investigation. Chairman Jim Jordan referred him to the Justice Department in October 2025, alleging false testimony about the Steele dossier and the intelligence assessment. CIA Director John Ratcliffe sent a separate criminal referral after a lessons-learned review. Brennan’s lawyer has confirmed in a court filing that a Fort Pierce, Florida, grand jury subpoenaed him. Prosecutor Kurt Olsen told counsel Brennan was a “target” of a narrower false-statements inquiry and a “subject” of a wider conspiracy investigation into whether Trump’s civil rights were violated. Olsen has since left the case.

After leaving the CIA, Brennan wrote in the New York Times that Trump’s “no collusion” claim was “hogwash.” He remains a paid analyst for MS NOW. Special Counsel John Durham later reported that the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane without verified evidence of collusion, and that Brennan had briefed President Obama in 2016 on intelligence that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia.