WASHINGTON – Before taking charge of the sprawling Justice Department investigation targeting President Donald Trump’s political adversaries, Joe diGenova had criticized the department for failing to make progress toward indictments.
Five months later, diGenova has departed without bringing a single case, raising fresh doubts about the future of an investigation that has energized right-wing commentators determined to substantiate an expansive theory of a “deep state” plot against the Republican president.
Justice Department officials are continuing the work despite diGenova’s exit. A wave of subpoenas issued to former law enforcement and intelligence officials is expected to produce grand jury testimony in the coming weeks in Fort Pierce, Florida, the home court of a federal judge favored by Trump.
Whether the investigation will ultimately result in charges — and what those charges might be — remains unclear. Prosecutors are confronting legal obstacles and internal upheaval while facing an increasingly impatient White House after more than a year of starts and stops.
Known informally as the “grand conspiracy” case, the probe is perhaps the clearest example of the Trump administration’s attempt to use law enforcement to punish the president’s perceived opponents. Its turmoil highlights the longstanding divide between White House demands for swift action and the Justice Department’s struggle to turn Trump’s many grievances into a criminal case that can stand up in court.
DiGenova’s departure injects fresh uncertainty into the investigation
The investigation was difficult from the outset, seeking to combine separate FBI inquiries involving Trump — including the probe into Russian election interference and the investigation of classified documents retained at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida — into a single account of government wrongdoing. Earlier efforts to investigate those investigations have not uncovered the type of criminal misconduct that the conspiracy case seeks to establish.
“The idea of connecting all those different investigations into one single conspiracy, there’s no basis for that,” said retired federal prosecutor Randall Eliason. “Then, maybe more importantly, there’s no basis for an allegation that any one of them was actually a criminal act against Trump. They’ve all been verified and upheld in one way or another.”
The unusual assignment was matched by an unusual choice to lead it.
DiGenova, 81, served as a top prosecutor during President Ronald Reagan’s administration but had been outside government for decades. He drew attention in 2020 after saying a cybersecurity official who vouched for the legitimacy of the election Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden should be “drawn and quartered.” DiGenova later apologized after being sued.
A prominent advocate of the claim that Trump was targeted by a “deep state” conspiracy, diGenova was appointed in April, shortly after Trump removed Pam Bondi as attorney general following her struggles to prosecute his political opponents.
Trump allies welcomed the appointment as a long-awaited reckoning for former officials they believe had wronged the president. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who took over the department after Bondi’s dismissal, also celebrated diGenova’s arrival, posting on social media: “Welcome to the fight, Joe!”
By Sept. 10, diGenova was gone, amid administration frustration over the investigation’s pace and management. His remarks at the time suggested he did not believe indictments were imminent.
“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.
DiGenova later told The Associated Press that the remarks had been taken out of context. “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution,” he said. “It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”
DiGenova was sworn in just days after Maria Medetis Long, a career national security prosecutor, was removed from the team following concerns she raised about an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan.
Brennan’s lawyer has pointed to the upheaval as evidence that prosecutors who reviewed the case were unconvinced by the evidence and were pushed aside by a Justice Department determined to secure indictments at any cost.
“I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this,” attorney Ken Wainstein told a judge, describing a department that was “blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”
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He made the comments last week while notifying the judge that he planned to challenge any indictment of Brennan on grounds of vindictive prosecution.
The Justice Department has not named a replacement for diGenova. A team of prosecutors and agents remains involved, including Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who unsuccessfully urged the department in 2020 to endorse Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Trump has long cast himself as the victim of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy
As the Justice Department reeled last year from the bungled handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, officials eager to change the topic announced a new investigation and a directive from Bondi, then the attorney general, to present evidence before a grand jury.
The topic was hardly a surprise to anyone tracking Trump’s grievances.
The president has long been infuriated by a U.S. intelligence community assessment that found that Russia interfered on his behalf in the 2016 election, including by stealing politically damaging Democratic emails and orchestrating their release through WikiLeaks, and spent much of his first term shadowed by an investigation into whether his campaign had colluded with Moscow.
A 2019 Justice Department special counsel report described wide-ranging Russian interference but found insufficient evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Subsequent investigations by an inspector general and Justice Department prosecutors identified errors by FBI agents but found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by senior law enforcement officials nor proof of an anti-Trump conspiracy.
Frustrated by those outcomes, Trump has amplified his demands for retribution, calls the Justice Department heeded by directing that prosecutors use a grand jury. A team in Florida was assigned to hunt for a conspiracy.
Potential targets of the conspiracy investigation are unclear, though lawyers for Brennan have said they’ve been informed he’s one, with prosecutors examining whether he misled Congress during testimony about the intelligence community assessment. Brennan and his attorneys deny that allegation.
Investigators have drilled into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, with witnesses asked about the preparation of the intelligence community assessment and what’s called the “Steele dossier,” a collection of research files about Trump and Russia compiled by a former British spy that included salacious rumors and unproven assertions.
Subpoenas for records or testimony have been issued during the course of the investigation to a broad array of former FBI and intelligence officials involved in the Russia case, including ex-national intelligence director James Clapper and Brennan, who was recently summoned to appear before the grand jury on Oct. 15.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has sought interviews with law enforcement officials involved in the 2022 FBI search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The search underpinned an indictment of Trump that was ultimately dismissed by Aileen Cannon, a Trump-appointed jurist whose Fort Pierce court is where the Justice Department anchored its investigation — a move Wainstein has called “judge-shopping.”
Despite the investigation’s turmoil, there’s no reason to expect the Justice Department to back down given the political pressures, said John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney in Virginia.
“President Trump wants action in certain cases, and this seems to be one of them,” he said.
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