Trump Campaign of Revenge Has Descended into Turmoil
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| President Trump’s demands for revenge have divided the Justice Department, diverted resources from other investigations and mingled politics with federal law enforcement.Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times |
Reporting from Miami and Washington
New York Times
Joseph diGenova, the man assigned by the White House to lead the investigation into those who investigated President Trump, was walking out of Chuck’s Seafood near the beach in Fort Pierce, Fla., and toward his Tesla last month when his cellphone buzzed.
It was his boss, Attorney General Todd Blanche. And he was spluttering mad.
Mr. Blanche had been cautiously supportive of Mr. Trump’s decision to call Mr. diGenova, 81, out of retirement in April to kick-start the so-called grand conspiracy case, the Justice Department’s most expansive effort to pursue people the president considers his enemies.
Now the attorney general, having soured on Mr. diGenova, was livid that he had lashed out at two prosecutors sent from Washington to help move the case along. Mr. Blanche ordered him to his office on Sept. 11 — or else, according to people briefed on the exchange.
Assuming he would be fired, Mr. diGenova quit, dealing the latest blow to a troubled investigation central to the president’s vengeance agenda. More trouble was to come.
Soon after, a top diGenova deputy, Kurt Olsen, also quit. It turned out he had failed a polygraph test about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Olsen said he complied with all requirements regarding foreign contacts and had not resigned over his clearance, but declined to say more.
Still, the dual departures laid bare months of dysfunction. They also offered fresh evidence that Mr. Trump’s demands for revenge have divided the Justice Department, diverted resources from other investigations and continued the erosion of the principle that politics must be kept strictly separate from federal law enforcement.
A New York Times examination of the inquiry, based on more than 20 interviews with current and former officials, found that it was star-crossed from the outset.
The theory of the grand conspiracy case is a bedrock of Trumpist politics: that the various investigations into Mr. Trump, spanning nearly a decade, were all part of a nefarious scheme to take him down. That is, there was an ongoing plot stretching from the investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign to the two prosecutions overseen by the special counsel Jack Smith into his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
To date, Mr. diGenova and others involved in the case have found it difficult, and time-consuming, to meet the standards of evidence and jurisdiction needed to prove anything close to a conspiracy in a court of law
Still, the pressure has not relented. The dozen prosecutors still pursuing the inquiry are fast-tracking narrower cases against some chief targets that could be brought quickly, according to people briefed on their work. Leadership of the effort has defaulted back to Washington, and is now being directly overseen by one of Mr. Blanche’s top deputies, Aakash Singh, those people said.
A Justice Department official said leaders in Washington had “full confidence” in the prosecutors now working on the case and would act to uphold the law should “evidence of misconduct present itself.”
Even if charges are never filed, Mr. Trump has already instilled fear in — and imposed steep financial costs on — potential targets, in his view giving them a taste of what he experienced when he was under investigation.
Two targets have borne a particular brunt: James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director fired by Mr. Trump in the early stages of the Russia inquiry, and John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who played a role in instigating that investigation.
John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, left, and James B. Comey, who was fired as F.B.I. director by Mr. Trump, have both been targeted in investigations by the president.Credit...New York Times photographs by Al Drago and Monica Jorge
Inside the Justice Department, another price is being paid.
The investigation has upended the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, one of the most important in the country, which has been plagued by staff departures and low morale under its Trump-appointed leader, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, according to current and former prosecutors. The problems with the grand conspiracy case have exacerbated what officials in Washington have described as a growing lack of confidence in Mr. Reding Quiñones by his superiors.
The office once had more than 200 lawyers. It is now slightly more than half that size, after a spate of firings and resignations.
Prosecutors have watched the case play out with embarrassment and horror. Many have been so unwilling to join the investigation that Mr. Reding Quiñones, an Army reservist, was forced to bring in military lawyers to backfill the ranks.
The chief of the office’s criminal division has been sidelined. The office’s health care fraud unit has been decimated. Many prosecutors say the office feels leaderless, and are worried that a place once known for big drug and white-collar cases has pivoted to politics.
Even furniture has been repurposed to equip the inquiry’s two work spaces, one on the fifth floor of the main Miami office and the other up the coast in Fort Pierce.
A Winding Path
It is not clear who coined the term “grand conspiracy,” or when it became shorthand for the catchall investigation. July 2025 is as good a place to start as any.
That is when John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, issued a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan to the F.B.I., accusing him of lying to Congress about an intelligence assessment in early 2017 that determined Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.
The case was sent to David Metcalf, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, but it quickly stalled as prosecutors struggled to make headway. Career prosecutors threatened to revolt if the office went forward.
By fall, Mr. Blanche, then the department’s second-in-command, plucked the case from Mr. Metcalf and gave it to Mr. Reding Quiñones, who was close to the right-wing influencers clamoring for a wide-ranging prosecution of the president’s opponents.
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| Todd Blanche, wearing a blue suit and orange tie, shakes hands with a bearded man who is wearing a dark suit. |
The investigation has upended the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, which is led by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, left. Credit...Marco Bello/Reuters
Loudest among them: Mike Davis, a media-savvy lawyer who has relentlessly promoted the case as the best way to prove that Mr. Trump has been undermined by the establishment from the moment he took office.
Mr. Davis, a former Senate aide adept at hurling social media thunderbolts that catch Mr. Trump’s eye, aimed high. He pushed the idea that the inquiry should expand to include targets like former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Davis was among those arguing to steer the case to Mr. Reding Quiñones in the president’s home state. The move made tactical sense. Prosecutors could avail themselves of a grand jury in the Fort Pierce courthouse where the only sitting judge is Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who issued several rulings favorable to the president, especially in the classified documents case against him.
Mr. Trump, impatient to see splashy results, cheered and coached from the sidelines, even posting a fake video showing Mr. Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.
A man wearing a dark suit and red tie sits in a white chair.
Mike Davis, a media-savvy lawyer who has relentlessly promoted the “grand conspiracy” case, said the inquiry should be expanded to include targets like former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
But the move to Florida did not translate into immediate success.
One big problem, in the view of Mr. Blanche’s aides, was Mr. Reding Quiñones, whom they viewed as a feckless and inexperienced manager not capable of running the day-to-day operations of his office, let alone the grand conspiracy case.
Moreover, they felt that Mr. Reding Quiñones spent too much time in Washington and too little in Florida. To address that concern, Mr. Singh recently removed him from the attorney general’s advisory committee, which meets at department headquarters, to refocus his energies on Miami, according to two people with knowledge of the move.
But he was hardly the only problem.
By early 2026, the case had landed on the desk of Maria Medetis Long, a respected national security prosecutor in Miami, who approached the inquiry with an open mind. She eventually determined that the evidence did not support indicting Mr. Brennan, according to people familiar with her account. In April, she put her findings in writing. She was suddenly removed from the case.
Since then, the investigation has expanded beyond Mr. Brennan. The flurry of grand jury subpoenas issued since last year, hailed as bombshells by Trump-friendly news outlets, hints at its breadth.
Prosecutors have demanded documents from other officials connected to the Russia investigation, including James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy director of the F.B.I.; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.
They have also issued subpoenas demanding testimony from Daniel C. Richman, who is a longtime confidant of Mr. Comey’s, and several F.B.I. agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach club and residence, a key investigative step in the classified documents case.
The prosecutors also want testimony from Mr. Brennan. But amid the recent turmoil, they pushed back his appearance from its initial date on Oct. 15 to at least early December.
Fumbling for Evidence
Enter Mr. diGenova, who as U.S. attorney in Washington four decades ago led investigations of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and Marion Barry, the city’s mayor.
He was a familiar presence in the capital, known as one of the more dulcet crooners to perform in musical skits at the annual Gridiron Club dinner.
But in recent years, Mr. diGenova has established himself as a stalwart and aggressive Trump defender who embraced unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election championed by his close friend Rudolph W. Giuliani.
In early 2025, with the help of Mr. Davis, he secured an assignment in Miami as the head of that office’s civil rights division, where he intended to investigate Mr. Trump’s adversaries.
But Pam Bondi, the attorney general at the time, vetoed his hiring, according to two former department officials. Department officials thought he was too old for such a demanding job when his name came up a year later. Ms. Bondi, on the verge of being fired, argued that he had not been in a courtroom for many years.
Mr. Trump, then 79, thought otherwise.
He instructed Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, and Mr. Blanche to sign him on.
Mr. diGenova showed up for his first day at work with a 190-page memo on how to proceed, listing more than 50 “overt acts” in the conspiracy he wanted to investigate. They started with what he saw as the original deep-state sin — a December 2016 meeting in the White House that he believed to be the linchpin of the conspiracy against Mr. Trump.
At that meeting, Mr. Obama and his aides authorized the intelligence assessment that eventually showed Russia had interfered in the election Mr. Trump had just won. The participants have denied that anything illegal took place.
One of Mr. diGenova’s first moves reflected an understanding of the daunting challenges of proving his theory. He asked his predecessor, Ms. Medetis Long, to rejoin the investigation. She turned him down, according to the people familiar with her account. He also made it known that he was looking for cooperating witnesses among the targets of the inquiry, even though Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey were unlikely to help him.
By May, he had begun hiring staff, including his wife, Victoria Toensing. He immediately encountered problems securing volunteers from either Miami or Washington.
Few career agents or attorneys wanted anything to do with it. As of now, most of the prosecutors on the team are military lawyers or were dispatched from other offices.
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| Joseph diGenova, wearing a dark pinstriped suit and red tie. |
Joseph diGenova resigned last month from his role leading the investigation.Credit...Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via AP Images
Among those who signed on: An F.B.I. agent who had investigated a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election had been hacked by Italian satellites and who was part of a special team assembled by Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. There were a largely unknown prosecutor from Fargo, N.D., and a Stanford law professor best known for having written memos justifying the use of torture during the global war on terrorism.
There was a young Justice Department official sent to Florida from Washington who had served as a clerk to Judge Cannon. And then there was Mr. Olsen, a longtime election denier who had no experience in working on criminal cases.
The case that Mr. diGenova hoped to build involved a wide array of targets — not only Mr. Brennan, Mr. Comey and others from the Russia inquiry, but also the prosecutors led by Mr. Smith, the special counsel.
He quickly confronted hurdles. The first: Any crimes arising from the Russia investigation, which ended in 2019, already fell outside the five-year statute of limitations, and had no obvious connection to South Florida. Other problems emerged.
Just as Mr. diGenova was settling in, Jack Eckenrode, an F.B.I. veteran best known for having gone after Mr. Brennan and Mr. Comey during the Russia inquiry, questioned a central premise of the investigation — that the court-approved search of Mr. Trump’s residence was a politically motivated intrusion that tainted everything that followed.
Mr. Eckenrode, part of a special squad assembled by F.B.I. leaders, told Mr. diGenova that Judge Cannon had already ruled that the search of Mar-a-Lago was lawful. That finding, he said, made it difficult to use the search as evidence of a conspiracy connecting Washington to Florida, according to people briefed on the exchange.
Mr. diGenova disagreed — he thought that point was legally irrelevant — and he called Mr. Patel, who pulled Mr. Eckenrode off the case, one of those people said.
By this time, Mr. diGenova was also becoming frustrated with the resources given to his inquiry. There were never enough lawyers, he told Washington, and the ones he had were so young that he had to block off time to teach them the basics, like grand jury presentations.
In late summer, Mr. Reding Quiñones agreed to set aside $1 million from the office’s allocated budget to build a secure facility in Fort Pierce to review classified materials.
Mr. Blanche’s staff rejected the idea.
Why waste money? There was already a facility nearby run by the F.B.I., they said, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.
Escalating Pressure to Indict
Under the clash of personalities was a deeper divide on how best to move forward.
Mr. diGenova, who wanted to take aim at big-name targets, told one associate he believed that Mr. Blanche was less interested in proving the conspiracy to destroy the president than in securing rapid box-checking indictments of low-level players to keep Mr. Trump happy.
Mr. Blanche, he told that person, was so anxious to maintain his position that he did not want to tell Mr. Trump the truth: A successful investigation needed time.
The attorney general acknowledged the inquiry’s complexities on a podcast earlier this year. “I’m not suggesting that we don’t have that evidence,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I’m saying when you talk about the challenges, that’s the challenge.”
Mr. Blanche had his own complaints. His team thought Mr. diGenova was too scattered, too combative and too slow, according to three current and former officials. It did not help that around this time Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing left for a long-planned vacation to France.
By early September, Mr. Blanche dispatched two prosecutors from Washington to Florida to move things forward. During a heated meeting, they peppered Mr. diGenova’s staff with questions about its work before the grand jury.
The coda came when members of Mr. diGenova’s team offered him a readout of their closed-door meeting with the two prosecutors: Washington would now be running things.
Mr. diGenova, infuriated, said he would instruct U.S. marshals to remove the prosecutors from the grand jury room if they showed up there to interfere, the officials said.
Mr. Blanche responded with a profanity-laced phone call and summoned Mr. diGenova to Washington. The attorney general wanted to recount his grievances in person, but never actually planned to fire Mr. diGenova, according to a person close to Mr. Blanche.
He never got that chance.
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