Procedure Over Spectacle:

The Comey Sequel, the Brennan Probe, and the ODNI–CIA Records Dispute

Thompson Technologies Defense Intelligence Desk

Three federal storylines have crowded the Department of Justice docket over the past month: a second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, a leadership shake-up inside the criminal probe of former CIA Director John Brennan, and a now-public dispute over who controls custody of sensitive Cold War-era records held jointly by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Cable and X coverage has framed all three as personality fights — Trump versus Comey, Trump versus Brennan, Gabbard versus Ratcliffe. That framing is a distraction. The story across all three threads is procedural: appointment authority, evidentiary chain, and statutory custody. Whatever one’s view of the underlying merits, the procedural questions are the ones that will determine whether any of this survives contact with an Article III courtroom.

This is a process update. Public record only.

The Comey Sequel

On April 28, 2026, a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina returned a two-count indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. The charges are making and transmitting a threat against the president, both stemming from a May 2025 Instagram post depicting a seashell arrangement reading “86 47.” Each count carries a statutory maximum of ten years.

The procedural backdrop is what matters. This is the second indictment against Comey in eight months. The first, returned in EDVA on September 25, 2025, charged him with making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding in connection with September 2020 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That case was dismissed without prejudice on November 24, 2025, after Judge Cameron McGowan Currie found that the acting U.S. attorney who secured it, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. DOJ filed an appeal to the Fourth Circuit on February 9, 2026. A separate ruling by D.C. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on December 6 temporarily blocked DOJ from using evidence collected from Comey’s friend and former lawyer Dan Richman’s personal computer, on grounds the search had likely been unconstitutional.

The new EDNC indictment sidesteps both problems. It rests on a fresh grand jury, a different venue, and an evidentiary record (a public Instagram post) that has no Richman dependency. That is procedurally clean in a way the EDVA case was not — but it raises a different problem. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Counterman v. Colorado requires the government to show that the speaker subjectively understood the threatening character of the communication, not merely that a reasonable recipient could so interpret it. Prosecutors will face a high legal bar to prove that the post constituted a “true threat” under the standard set in 2023. The four corners of this indictment — seashells, an ambiguous numeric pairing, an immediately deleted post — sit close to the line where First Amendment protection still holds.

There is also a question worth flagging that the major outlets have generally not raised: venue selection. The post was made on a beach in North Carolina. The grand jury sat in EDNC. But the alleged victim (the president) and the alleged interstate transmission both have a Washington nexus. Defense counsel will likely raise venue early. Patrick Fitzgerald, Comey’s attorney, has already signaled the defense will be a First Amendment one.

This is not a case that survives or falls on Trump’s political grievance. It survives or falls on Counterman, on venue, and on the four corners of the indictment.

The Brennan Probe and the Appointment Problem

The Brennan track is procedurally less mature and procedurally more troubled. The investigation traces to an October 2025 referral from the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan, alleging that Brennan falsely denied the CIA’s reliance on the Steele dossier in crafting the 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference. A federal grand jury has been seated in the Southern District of Florida since late 2025.

The procedural disturbance came in mid-April. On April 18, 2026, the career national-security prosecutor leading the matter, Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the case. A source told CBS that Medetis Long had expressed concerns about the strength of the evidence. Two days later, on April 20, Joseph diGenova — a former U.S. Attorney for D.C., former Trump personal attorney during the Mueller investigation, and a longtime public accuser of Brennan — was sworn in as Counselor to the Acting Attorney General with the brief of overseeing the probe.

Three procedural concerns deserve to be named.

First, the removal of a career prosecutor for evidentiary skepticism is the kind of pattern that gets surfaced at trial and on appeal. It also tracks the EDVA Comey precedent, where another career prosecutor’s resistance led to Halligan’s installation and ultimately to Judge Currie’s dismissal order. Whatever one thinks of Brennan, this is the same procedural fact pattern that has already failed once in Comey I.

Second, the subpoena sequence. DOJ issued subpoenas to witnesses, including former Obama-administration officials, then withdrew them within days. The publicly stated reason was that the prosecutorial team needed more time to prepare and might prefer voluntary interviews. Subpoenas issued and rescinded in the span of a weekend are not the signature of a mature criminal case. They are the signature of a case being pushed faster than the evidentiary record supports.

Third, venue logic. The grand jury sits in Miami. The witnesses sit, by and large, in Washington. The Reuters reporting from May 12 confirms that FBI agents out of the Miami field office are interviewing current and former CIA personnel at agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Cross-district investigative architecture is not unusual, but it generates appellate questions about venue, witness availability, and grand jury authority that an experienced defense team will exploit. The choice of SDFL — the courthouse where Judge Aileen Cannon sits — has not gone unnoticed.

The probe may yet produce an indictment. But the procedural surface area for a defense motion to dismiss is unusually wide for a case at this stage.

The ODNI–CIA Records Custody Dispute

The third storyline is the most institutionally consequential and the least understood publicly. It is not a single event but a sequence.

The trigger was President Trump’s January 2025 executive order directing rapid declassification of records relating to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The order placed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in a coordinating role over CIA, FBI, and National Archives equities. The order’s 45-day review deadline for the RFK and MLK files expired in late March 2026.

In early April, a team acting on behalf of DNI Tulsi Gabbard arrived unannounced at a classified CIA archival facility in the Washington area to take custody of still-classified records on the Kennedy and King assassinations. The Reuters account, later confirmed by Newsweek and other outlets, describes the operation as led on-site by Paul Allen McDonald II and as involving Amaryllis Fox Kennedy. The transfer to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, concluded around 2 a.m. Sources described tense moments at the archive’s entrance, including raised voices, with ODNI’s team presenting written authority asserting legal power to remove records without prior CIA approval.

The dispute went public a month later. On May 13, 2026, CIA officer James Erdman III testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He alleged that approximately 40 boxes of JFK-assassination and MKUltra records had been taken from ODNI while undergoing declassification review. The following day, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) characterized the removal on X and on NewsNation as a CIA “raid” on ODNI, then walked the framing back: she clarified that the CIA had taken documents “that ODNI has jurisdiction over” and that the event was not a raid. ODNI Press Secretary Olivia Coleman publicly denied that any raid had occurred. Luna issued a preservation letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Strip the political theater and the underlying legal question is genuinely interesting. Under Title 50 of the U.S. Code and the National Security Act as amended, the DNI has statutory authority over the Intelligence Community, including the CIA, for coordination and integration purposes. The CIA, however, retains operational and custodial authority over its own records under the CIA Act of 1949 and the implementing executive orders. The President’s January 2025 order layered a declassification mandate on top of this architecture. None of the publicly available materials — the EO, the ODNI press releases, the Senate testimony — resolves the custodial question cleanly. Who has lawful possession of a CIA-originated, still-classified document during an ODNI-coordinated declassification review? The answer is unsettled, and it is being litigated in the political and oversight space rather than in court.

That is not a sustainable equilibrium. A formal HPSCI or SSCI custody-protocol review is the natural next step. A judicial test is unlikely unless a private party with standing — a journalist under FOIA, a researcher, or a member of Congress in a subpoena posture — forces one.

The Through-Line

Set aside the partisan valence. The three stories share a single procedural spine.

In Comey, the question is whether DOJ can sustain a second indictment after the first failed on appointment-authority grounds, with the underlying evidentiary base partly compromised by the Richman ruling. In Brennan, the question is whether a probe led by a politically appointed counselor, with a removed career prosecutor and rescinded subpoenas, can survive the defense motions that the procedural record invites. In ODNI–CIA, the question is which agency has lawful custody of records during a presidentially ordered declassification review, and whether that question can be answered without a judicial resolution.

These are not novel questions. They are the same questions that arise in every prosecutorial succession, every interagency records dispute, and every politically charged investigation in modern federal practice. What is unusual is the simultaneity. Three high-visibility federal processes are testing three different parts of the institutional architecture — appointment authority, evidentiary chain, statutory custody — at the same time, and in each case the procedural posture is unsettled in ways that will outlast the current news cycle.

For readers of this Desk who track federal procedure for its own sake, the months ahead will be instructive. The Fourth Circuit’s ruling on the Halligan appointment appeal is the next major data point on the Comey track. The first grand jury action or motion to dismiss in SDFL will be the next data point on Brennan. And the first formal HPSCI or SSCI markup on records custody will be the data point on ODNI–CIA.

Watch the procedure. The headlines will sort themselves out.

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Rob Thompson is the founder and executive director of Thompson Technologies and writes the Defense Intelligence Desk on Substack. This analysis is based entirely on public-record reporting and court filings; nothing in it reflects nonpublic information.