Declassification moves at the speed of a bureaucracy that would rather not, and that is the point. Redaction review takes months. Interagency clearance takes longer. And every quarter that passes is a quarter in which the people who ran these operations remain employed, pensioned, and counting on American attention spans.
It hasn’t worked. The documents are coming out anyway, and what they describe is an institution that inserted itself into a presidential election and is still in the building.
The latest comes from Catherine Herridge, working outside the legacy outlets that spent four years incurious about any of this. Her analysis of the newest tranche from Plasmic Echo — the FBI’s codename for the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation — shows that communications involving a long list of people in Trump’s orbit were swept up. Among them: Susie Wiles, now the president’s chief of staff, and Kash Patel, now director of the FBI.
Trump Probe: Approval Came From The TOP
– FBI, Biden DOJ Leadership– Then FBI Director Wray Initials memo, Deputy AG Lisa Monaco initials, with note to then Attorney General Garland:
“Merrick, I recommend you approve, Lisa 3/25/22”
While memo is heavily redacted, it reads in part:
“Although members of the 45th Presidential
administration are no longer in office, the DOJ Memo states that the scope of this policy should be broadly construed to ensure that Department leadership is made aware of the opening of matters that could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior
to an election….”Declassified via @WhiteHouse transparency task force
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) October 5, 2026
And then there’s the phrase an unnamed FBI official gave Herridge: this looks like a tickle-the-wire operation.
That term has a specific meaning, and it isn’t flattering. Tickling the wire is when investigators who already have surveillance running take an action designed to provoke their targets into talking — a leak, a knock on a door, a well-timed public development — so that the people being monitored start generating the chatter the case file lacks. It is a technique for manufacturing evidence traffic when the investigation hasn’t produced any on its own.
DECLASSIFIED RECORDS: Brennan/Jack Smith Connection
Meeting CIA HQ: FBI notes are blank
– November 2023 Former CIA Director John Brennan meets with special counsel staff, FBI agents
“..purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming trial…”
Was Brennan being prepped as potential “expert witness” in Trump classified documents case?
Former Senior FBI Agents: “Looks like an intel OP not a law enforcement probe…made the FBI notes disappear”
At Least Three Potential Scenarios:
– FBI agents took no notes, violating long standing Bureau procedures
– FBI agents took notes which were intentionally withheld so ‘Brennan conversation’ was not discoverable for President Trump’s lawyers
– FBI agents’ original notes were “electronically buried” in a restricted fileNOTE: The FBI EC or Electronic Communication documents the 2023 Brennan meeting at CIA HQ
“The original agent notes will be maintained in the attached 1A.”
MISSING LINK: There should be a summary of the meeting/discussion known as an FBI 302
Brennan has consistently defended his actions in court and in front of Congress.
Declassified records via @WhiteHouse transparency task force
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) October 5, 2026
So much for “we don’t target people” — the line Democrats have recited for a decade, and the one Biden and Obama DOJ veterans still recite on cable with a straight face. Nobody believes it. It ranks alongside the security officials who spent years insisting Area 51 wasn’t there. We can see the thing, gentlemen. And everyone knows Joe Biden was along for the ride, waiting on an indictment that never came fast enough, growing visibly irritated with his own attorney general over the delay — as though a charging document was going to rescue him from the collapse that arrived in 2024 regardless.
Then there’s the meeting, which is the part that should not be allowed to disappear into the pile.
John Brennan is the former CIA director who muscled the unverified Steele dossier into the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, handing a piece of opposition research the imprimatur of the United States intelligence community and giving the collusion story the institutional credibility it could never have earned on the facts. That is his legacy. It is the whole reason anyone knows his name.
So what was he doing sitting down with Jack Smith?
Former Senior FBI Agents: “Looks like an intel OP not a law enforcement probe…made the FBI notes disappear”
At Least Three Potential Scenarios:
FBI agents took no notes, violating long standing Bureau procedures
FBI agents took notes which were intentionally withheld so ‘Brennan conversation’ was not discoverable for President Trump’s lawyers
FBI agents’ original notes were “electronically buried” in a restricted file
NOTE: The FBI EC or Electronic Communication documents the 2023 Brennan meeting at CIA HQ“The original agent notes will be maintained in the attached 1A.”
MISSING LINK: There should be a summary of the meeting/discussion known as an FBI 302
Brennan has consistently defended his actions in court and in front of Congress.
The stated answer is expert witness preparation. Fine — then produce the paperwork. Except there isn’t any. No notes were taken, which is not an oversight but a departure from Justice Department practice, and the kind of departure that happens when someone decides in advance that a record would be inconvenient.
Prosecutors document witness meetings for a reason. The notes become discoverable, which means defense counsel gets to see what the government’s witness said before he said it under oath. Skip the notes and you skip that problem.
One final observation: Anytime we see new evidence of federal goverment overreach involving Trump or the creation of some wild conspiracy, John Brennan is right in the thick of it.
