Prosecutor leading Trump’s ‘grand conspiracy’ investigation into Democrats resigns

Jason Reding Quiñones, the top prosecutor investigating an alleged “grand conspiracy” by Democrats against President Donald Trump, has resigned. 

As U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Quiñones was tasked with a wide-ranging probe into top Democrats and high-profile Trump foes who the president alleged conspired to sabotage his first term. The investigation also targeted officials who investigated Trump’s 2016 campaign. 

Quiñones’ departure could signal the end of the politically motivated investigation.  

In September, Joe diGenova — a Trump ally who played a key role in the president’s 2020 election subversion scheme and was appointed in April to lead the grand conspiracy probe — abruptly resigned. A few weeks later, Kurt Olsen, another Trump ally working on the investigation, also resigned. 

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Quiñones’ resignation in a social media post Friday morning, highlighting Quiñones’ work “combating violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime, including the indictment of Raúl Castro.”

He made no mention of Quiñones’ effort leading the “grand conspiracy” investigation.

Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has made punishing his political enemies a top priority.

Before Trump took office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi announced plans to prepare a vast grand jury investigation of the president’s foes out of the Southern District of Florida.

Among the top targets of the investigation were former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former White House official Cassidy Hutchinson and a host of other figures from Trump’s first term who probed the president’s Russia ties, investigated his efforts to overturn the 2020 election or participated in his impeachment. 

But the investigation never got off the ground and did not successfully prosecute any of its targets.

The case against Comey — over his alleged role in drafting a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election — has stalled. So too have two other, separate investigations against the former FBI director — one over an “86 47” social media post, and the other into allegations of unlawfully transmitting national defense information to the press.

The New York Times reported that Trump administration officials were frustrated with Quiñones’
“inability to demonstrate progress on the grand conspiracy cases,” which led to his resignation. 

DiGenova resigned under similar circumstances, with journalists reporting that he clashed with Blanche over a lack of evidence to prosecute Comey and Brennan. 

“Jason Reding Quiñones will forever be known as this president’s Don Quixote for tilting at the windmill of the so-called grand conspiracy,” Justice Connection executive director Stacey Young said in a statement. “His departure follows the well-tread path of others who signed up for this impossible dream.”

“Whoever replaces him should heed the great Attorney General Robert Jackson’s wise counsel that prosecutors should select those cases in which ‘the offense is the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain,’” Young added.

Quiñones is the third U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) official to resign since Democrats cruised to historic victories in the midterm elections. 

Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who served as assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned Thursday. And John Eisenberg, the head of the DOJ’s National Security Division, also resigned Friday, according to Blanche.