As the Justice Department prepares to attempt to criminally indict former CIA director John Brennan in the coming weeks, a source familiar with the investigation told NOTUS the newly appointed lawyer overseeing the prosecution is going to be traveling back and forth between Miami and Fort Pierce, Florida — the location of a small courthouse that’s home to a single jurist: U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

The move, which has been described by several current and former prosecutors as “venue shopping,” would position any grand jury disputes to take place in front of Cannon — who was appointed by Trump in his first term and is seen as a reliable judge who rules in favor of his administration. She consistently ruled against Special Counsel Jack Smith and ultimately dismissed a criminal case against Trump for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Obtaining an indictment in Fort Pierce would raise several legal questions, given that the beachfront city isn’t the location of any of Brennan’s alleged wrongdoing or even the closest federal courthouse to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. However, initiating the case there would nearly ensure that any criminal trial takes place there as well, former federal prosecutors said.

The DOJ will allege Brennan engaged in a “grand conspiracy” of trying to sideline President Donald Trump’s candidacy, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. In another sign that an indictment could come as soon as this week, FBI agents who worked on the case prepared exhibits last week for prosecutors to present to a grand jury, one of those sources said.

The Trump White House has been closely monitoring and actively involved in the development of the DOJ case for months, said a fourth source privy to those conversations. The source, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, described a level of involvement that would make for a government-toppling scandal in past presidential administrations.

South Florida federal prosecutors working on or overseeing the investigation have coordinated with DOJ brass in recent weeks, a fifth source said, naming three men who served alongside interim Attorney General Todd Blanche when he was second-in-command: Trenton McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general; Aakash Singh, an associate deputy attorney general; and Colin McDonald, who was recently appointed to lead the new National Fraud Enforcement Division.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s office has also been looped in, according to the second and fifth sources.

A recent shakeup in the DOJ personnel overseeing this case is yet another sign that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida is preparing to cross the finish line. CNN reported that the DOJ removed Maria Medetis Long, the chief of that office’s national security section, when she resisted “pressure” from above to move the case along.

She was replaced by Joseph diGenova — a hardline MAGA loyalist who was personally employed by Trump in 2018 to defend him from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia ties and again two years later in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

The criminal case against Brennan stems from his handling of the CIA’s involvement in a public “intelligence community assessment” put out in the closing days of the Obama administration that explained Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections. The DOJ says the CIA overstepped when it claimed that President Vladimir “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible.”

It was unclear at the time whether the CIA relied at all on political-opposition fodder obtained by former British MI6 officer Christopher Steele about unproven and salacious accusations against Trump. It later emerged that the CIA had cited the dossier in a classified annex to the public report.

In September 2020, the Democrat-led House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — led at the time by then-Rep. Adam Schiff — authored a classified report that quoted a senior CIA official’s account of Brennan’s involvement. This person described a meeting in which two senior CIA officers had specifically warned Brennan four years earlier against relying on the Steele dossier because it did not meet spycraft standards, to which Brennan allegedly responded, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

The report, kept secret until a recent declassification, explained that “CIA veterans noted that they could not imagine any previous director allowing such information in a formal CIA product, much less one intended for two presidents, and then overriding the objections of experienced senior officers to do so.”

Brennan was subsequently interviewed by House Republicans in 2023 and, while not under oath, claimed that “the CIA was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the

Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment.” In October, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee referred Brennan to the DOJ for criminal prosecution for lying.

A previous independent investigation run by special counsel John Durham — one that started during the first Trump administration and ended during the Joe Biden’s presidency — examined some allegations against Brennan and did not accuse him of any criminal conduct. However, at least one person who worked on that probe, former FBI agent Jack Eckenrode, now appears to be involved in this revived investigation, according to a person familiar with the case. He now lists himself as a “senior special investigator” at the DOJ. Eckenrode was most recently involved in the political prosecution of former FBI director Jim Comey, whose case was dismissed by federal judge in Virginia.