Lead lawyer and senior counsel quit DOJ's so-called grand-conspiracy probe

Trump frustrated by slow progress; officials say charges could come in weeks

The Wall Street Journal reported that the year-old investigation — which officials informally referred to as the grand-conspiracy probe — was opened to unravel what Justice Department officials described as a grand conspiracy by a cabal of national security officials who sought to undermine President Trump. Trump allies had hoped it would definitively confirm what they have been alleging for years: that officials who investigated the president over the last decade engaged in what was essentially a coordinated effort to violate his civil rights.

Instead, the probe has been beset by departures, infighting and inexperience, according to the Journal. Joe diGenova, the 81-year-old Reagan-era prosecutor coaxed out of retirement to lead the effort, resigned Sept. 10 saying top department officials were pressuring the team to bring criminal cases before they were ready. He had not charged anyone. Officials denied pressuring him. DiGenova was one of several overlapping supervisors of the probe, with different interests and marching orders, according to the Journal.

Kurt Olsen, another senior counsel who had joined the probe from the White House, resigned from the inquiry later in September, people familiar with the matter said. Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer who joined the administration last year to investigate election- and voting-related issues, had moved onto the conspiracy investigation team in June. He had recently lost a security clearance after failing government polygraph tests about his foreign contacts; he said the security clearance issue was not a factor in his departure but declined to elaborate. In an email to Quiñones, Olsen wrote that he was “no longer willing to participate in this matter” given the probe’s direction from Washington.

A third supervisor also drew scrutiny from Washington. Justice Department officials came to believe Miami U.S. attorney Jason Reding Quiñones was not appropriately managing the investigation and his office more broadly. A number of prosecutors on the probe complained to senior officials in Washington that Quiñones had given them no guidance, some of the people said. Lawyers in the deputy attorney general’s office now directly oversee the Florida-based investigation from Washington, officials said. A spokeswoman for Quiñones defended his record on the job and said he was proud to serve in the Trump administration but declined to comment on the conspiracy investigation.

Trump is frustrated by the lack of progress and has complained about it to allies, a person familiar with the conversations said. Justice Department officials said the case is proceeding apace, with roughly a dozen prosecutors continuing to pursue a set of related investigations that could result in charges in coming weeks. They privately acknowledge, however, that the idea of tying all those loose threads together in one big conspiracy case in South Florida, as they had initially attempted, is not a practical approach. One of the officials said leadership is still confident in the people working on the inquiry and recently brought on two former prosecutors. A White House spokeswoman said Trump has full confidence in Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold people accountable.

The putative targets of the probe include a raft of people Trump has long disdained, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and officials involved in the August 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago home. Comey was separately charged in connection with a photo he posted of seashells that Trump alleged was threatening, and a judge dismissed a second case targeting him; Comey has denied the charges and said the cases were an attempt at political retribution.

The investigation sought to tie together a series of past episodes: the 2016 intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in that year’s election to boost Trump; the FBI’s subsequent investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties to that Russian meddling; and special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions in 2023 and 2024 stemming from Trump’s 2020 election loss. The probes went to two other U.S. attorneys before Quiñones raised his hand to oversee it, people familiar with the assignment said.

One of the investigation’s first targets was congressional testimony Brennan gave in 2017 and 2023 about the 2016 assessment. A veteran national-security prosecutor working on that line of inquiry, Maria Medetis Long, soon told senior officials that she had not found a basis to indict Brennan, some of the people said. In April, she was removed from the probe. At Trump’s urging, Blanche installed diGenova, a former Trump campaign lawyer, on the investigation; diGenova, who had not worked as a prosecutor for decades, asked Medetis Long to rejoin the probe, people familiar with the team said. She declined.

The Justice Department struggled to find and retain prosecutors to work on the inquiry and brought on temporary hires, some of whom had never worked as federal prosecutors, some people familiar with the probe said. The office had to give them a crash course on presenting evidence to grand juries. The assembled group has included a senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer; a young lawyer from the Commerce Department who had earlier worked for a conservative legal group that supports Trump’s agenda; a Miami-based prosecutor who joined the Justice Department last year; several military lawyers; and a federal prosecutor in North Dakota who last year sought a position on his state’s Supreme Court.

Washington officials at the time wanted prosecutors to speed up their process, including by subpoenaing witnesses to testify directly before a grand jury without any FBI interview first, they said — a step prosecutors usually avoid so they know what to expect a witness to say. Prosecutors later had to withdraw the subpoenas after realizing that information the witnesses would need to discuss with grand jurors was classified. Some of the team’s allegations also fell outside the five-year statute of limitations and had no clear link to South Florida, people familiar with the probe said.

Prosecutors had been trying to make the case that the FBI’s court-authorized August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, which led to charges that Trump illegally retained classified information, was unlawful. An FBI agent told diGenova that tying the search to a broader conspiracy spanning from Florida to Washington would be challenging; diGenova disagreed and called FBI Director Kash Patel, who moved the agent off the investigation.

DiGenova also objected when officials in Washington refused to set up a room in the Fort Pierce, Fla., office where prosecutors could securely review and store highly classified material, some of the people said. Quiñones agreed to devote $1 million from the office’s budget to build such a room, but senior officials saw it as unnecessary, telling diGenova to work out of an FBI office nearby. DiGenova saw that as a sign that Blanche was not fully invested in the probe.

DiGenova’s wife, Victoria Toensing, another Reagan-era prosecutor-turned-Trump ally, also joined the team. In August, the couple took a preplanned two-week trip to France, frustrating Washington officials who already thought the team was moving too slowly.

In September, two officials — both women — from the deputy attorney general’s office traveled to Florida to learn more about the status of the cases. DiGenova believed they were there to sideline him and take over the investigation. He called a top Blanche deputy to complain, referring derisively to the women, and said he would tell the U.S. Marshals to remove them from the grand jury room if they showed up there. The next call came from Blanche, who demanded diGenova fly to Washington for a meeting. DiGenova instead resigned on Sept. 10.