And the consequences of pursuing bad cases.
In my earlier post about President Trump’s offer of the position of White House press secretary to Dana White, I said I’d separately address the ongoing shake-up at the Trump Justice Department.
Earlier in the week, it was announced that Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Right Division chief, was returning to private practice. The decision was apparently made weeks ago but not announced until after the midterms . . . which is probably because Dhillon’s office was steering the Trump DOJ’s two major — and ultimately failed — election-law cases: the attempts (1) to compel segregation of the ballots of 20,000 Californians whom the administration suspected of being aliens ineligible to vote (a challenge based on sloppy evidence-gathering, to which the Supreme Court gave the back of the hand without even asking for a response from the state), and (2) to block Alaska from declaring a winner in the (still undecided) Senate race over the Democrats’ sleazy Dan Sullivan trick (see our editorial). Dhillon was also the architect of the administration’s uniformly unsuccessful attempt to force states to provide their rolls of registered voters to the Trump administration. (In late October, the left-leaning Brennan Center calculated that of the 31 Trump DOJ lawsuits filed over voter rolls, courts had dismissed 27, and the administration did not prevail in any.)
On Friday, two other significant departures were announced.
John Eisenberg, the chief of the DOJ’s National Security Division, resigned. Eisenberg oversaw some of the administration’s top-priority cases, including the prosecution of John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security adviser who became one of his most virulent detractors. (Bolton pled guilty to a charge of illegally retaining classified information and is scheduled to be sentenced next month, by which time he will be 78 years old; the Trump DOJ is seeking a five-year prison sentence and a $2.25 million fine.) Bloomberg is reporting that the administration’s “numerous frustrations” with Eisenberg include failure to successfully follow through on President Trump’s desire that prosecutors use grand jury subpoenas to force journalists to reveal their government sources in reporting that has cast Trump in a bad light.
I have no way of knowing why Eisenberg quit — or was pushed out, as the reporting implies. We have, however, covered the Trump DOJ’s war with the press, in which DOJ regulations that discourage making information demands on journalists have been skirted. The DOJ has tended to back down when press organizations challenged subpoenas in court (although a magistrate judge recently recommended upholding a DOJ subpoena to a Times freelance reporter; as yet, there has been no ruling by the federal district court in Virginia). There is reporting that, before being shown the door, Susie Wiles pushed back against the president’s demands that the DOJ try to force reporters to reveal their government sources, and that Stephen Miller, in stark contrast, is in favor of turning up the heat on the fourth estate.
The other notable resignation was that of Jason Reding Quiñones, Trump’s Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. His tenure has been fraught. Earlier in his career, he had been a line prosecutor in the office and received poor performance reviews from supervisors, some of whom were still in the office and quit when he was named to lead it. The New York Times reports that roughly half the prosecutors in the district ultimately left after his appointment, causing major staffing problems in an office that, nationally speaking, is quite important — responsible for major drug and gang investigations.
Most notably, Quiñones was brought in to handle the so-called grand-conspiracy probe — the DOJ’s project to bring criminal charges over what it portrays as a long term, multipronged scheme by Obama and Biden administration officials and agencies to violate Trump’s civil rights. The former official on whom most press coverage has centered is former CIA Director John Brennan. I’ve outlined his central role in the Obama-era claims about collusion between Trump and Russia, but also what I believe are insurmountable legal hurdles that undermine the perjury case urged by Trump loyalists. Brennan is not alone in the Trump DOJ’s sights; other former officials being scrutinized in the probe include James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Comey (whom the Trump DOJ has tried to charge three times so far), Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page.
The grand-conspiracy investigation has been a prosecutorial revolving door: Several government attorneys, including Trump loyalists, have quit the DOJ after dedicating months to the task. I believe that, while putting handcuffs on Obama and Biden officials is a fervent desire of the president and his MAGA base, the supporting legal theories are untenable.
Did Democratic administrations target Trump? Yes. Sometimes, it was over such nonsense as the claim that Trump and his 2016 campaign were clandestine agents of the Kremlin. And no, it does not follow that Trump’s nauseating appeasement of Russia’s dictator (even if fueled by corrupt desires to cut lucrative business deals with Moscow) means that Trump criminally conspired with Vladimir Putin in connection with the 2016 election — a claim that the Mueller probe tried very hard, but failed, to substantiate. And while they were not federal investigations, the criminal and civil prosecutions of Trump by, respectively, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James were blatantly politicized travesties. It is credibly undeniable, however, that Trump was also targeted over serious misconduct: the 2020 soft coup attempt, the illegal retention of classified documents, and the obstruction of the grand jury probe of the latter.
Still, whatever you may think of these investigations, the problems for grand-conspiracy enthusiasts are: (1) there is no single conspiratorial thread that ties Russiagate (2016–17) to the later Trump probes (2021–24); (2) most of the former officials targeted have immunity for investigative actions (just as President Trump’s immunity undermined Biden special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to prosecute him over official acts); and (3) the main conduct under scrutiny happened circa 2016–17, i.e., nearly a decade ago and well outside the five-year statute of limitations.
Quiñones, like the other prosecutors, were unable to advance the grand-conspiracy investigation. The Times reports that it is now being managed from Washington by subordinates of Attorney General Todd Blanche at Main Justice. Again, I believe that, legally speaking, an attempt to bring formal charges would be a train wreck. Alas, as we’ve seen time and again, that hasn’t stopped this DOJ from filing criminal charges when the president demands it.
This is part of what has so alienated voters from Trump’s Republican Party: They don’t like the president’s brazen lawfare any more than they liked the lawfare that Democrats practiced against him — which helped lead Democrats to defeat in 2024.