A string of departures at Justice
U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones of the Southern District of Florida has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday in a post on X. According to NBC News, the move is one of several high-profile exits from the Justice Department this week, coming after Republicans suffered heavy losses in the midterm elections.
Blanche praised Reding Quiñones for his work against violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking and transnational crime. He also cited the indictment of Raúl Castro. Blanche said Reding Quiñones had served the department several times over a "distinguished career."
In his own social media post, Reding Quiñones said he was leaving "with immense pride in what we accomplished together." He did not, according to the NBC News account, address the conspiracy investigation in the statement quoted.
What the "grand conspiracy" inquiry sought to do
The office Reding Quiñones ran was handling an investigation of federal law enforcement officials who had taken part in earlier probes of President Donald Trump. NBC News reported that the effort aimed to charge people over conduct more than a decade old. It rested on the idea that those separate investigations were linked parts of a wider plot against Trump's rights.
Investigators tried to connect events from the 2016 campaign to the later work of special counsel Jack Smith. That work produced charges against Trump over efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, along with a case over classified materials tied to the 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago. Those charges have since been dismissed, and Trump denied wrongdoing.
No one has been charged directly as part of the "grand conspiracy" effort, NBC News reported.
Reaction and earlier turmoil
Stacey Young, who leads the group Justice Connection and previously worked as a Justice Department attorney, offered a sharply critical assessment. She said Reding Quiñones would be remembered as the president's "Don Quixote" for chasing the conspiracy theory, and she described his exit as following others who pursued an "impossible dream." She urged his successor to follow a famous principle from former Attorney General Robert Jackson that prosecutors should choose cases where the offense is flagrant, the harm to the public is great and the proof is certain.
Joe diGenova, who had worked under Reding Quiñones in the Florida office, resigned in September. He blamed officials at Justice Department headquarters for moving in to take over the probe. "Everybody was in their lane, and then some lanes got crossed, and then I decided to leave," diGenova told NBC News.
Other resignations and pending cases
Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division, resigned Thursday. Her division had tried to bring a case against Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House official who was a key witness for the House committee that examined Jan. 6. NBC News said the administration recently failed to secure an indictment in that matter. On Friday, Blanche announced that John Eisenberg, who headed the National Security Division, had also resigned. That division had led the department's push on non-citizen voting, an issue Trump often raised before the election, though NBC News noted such voting is rare.
The department has filed charges against several other Trump adversaries but has had little success. A judge threw out a case against two former FBI officials accused by House Republicans of lying to Congress.
Prosecutors are also working toward a case against former FBI Director James Comey over events alleged to have happened in October 2016, when the government says he authorized subordinates to speak with a New York Times reporter about national defense information. A separate Comey case, over an Instagram photo of seashells that the administration says was a threat against Trump, remains pending in the Eastern District of North Carolina.
