The dispute ended in a furious shouting match.
Joe diGenova, a longtime ally of Donald Trump who was chosen to lead a sweeping “grand conspiracy” investigation in the Southern District of Florida, accused Attorney General Todd Blanche of blocking his own department’s probe.
Blanche appointed diGenova in April to investigate whether US intelligence and law enforcement officials—including former President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan—had participated in a years-long effort targeting Trump.
A source told the Daily Mail that Blanche had sent several people from Washington to Florida weeks earlier in an effort to “rein in” diGenova. The former prosecutor, in turn, accused Blanche of obstructing the investigation.
The two men later had a heated phone conversation earlier this month. According to the source, diGenova resigned soon afterward, frustrated by the dispute.
A report by CNN, citing two people familiar with the matter, described the call as tense. The report said the disagreement centered on diGenova’s alleged efforts to prevent attorneys from the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters from assisting with the investigation, a conflict that was followed by the prosecutor’s swift departure.
The Daily Mail also confirmed that tensions had escalated over diGenova’s unsuccessful request for a SCIF in Florida—a secure room used to examine classified information.
When asked at a recent White House press briefing about diGenova’s abrupt resignation, Blanche avoided giving a direct answer.
“I don’t want to talk about communications I have with prosecutors. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to the process,” he said before quickly moving on to another question.
The “grand conspiracy” investigation was launched to examine whether US intelligence and law enforcement officials had taken part in a years-long plot against Donald Trump
Attorney General Todd Blanche inherited the investigation from former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired earlier this year
Inside Justice Department headquarters, however, the wave of headlines appeared to confirm what longtime career officials had believed for months: The “grand conspiracy” investigation—an issue Trump has pursued publicly and privately for much of the past six years—was effectively collapsing.
“This case was initiated to make the president and the public think something is happening down there, when in reality, it’s not,” one DOJ official said.
Another DOJ official disputed the claim that the Florida investigation had stalled or lacked backing from the department’s Washington headquarters. The official declined to comment on the reported explosive phone call between Blanche and diGenova.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and another attorney traveled to Florida after diGenova’s departure to assess the investigation’s progress, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the matter.
This report is based on conversations with five current and former Justice Department officials, former prosecutors and other people familiar with the investigation.
Sources told the Daily Mail that the investigation in Miami had run into repeated dead ends for months.
Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor, was reported by CNN to have been removed from the case earlier this year after raising concerns about the strength of the evidence. Since then, several figures viewed as friendly to Trump have joined the investigation, including Kurt Olsen, a former White House official and 2020 election denier.
Olsen did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.
“There have been several prosecutors moved aside because they had the temerity to express that they did not want to move forward with this case,” Kenneth Wainstein, Brennan’s defense attorney, told a federal judge in Washington, DC, last week.
Wainstein also alleged in court that there have been ‘intentional efforts’ by DOJ to hide possible misconduct in a ‘far-reaching’ case, citing the removal of Maria Medetis Long and the appointment of Trump-loyal prosecutors.
‘There’s a lot of really underhanded stuff going on’ in these investigations, Wainstein said.
Failure to advance the probe in Florida’s Southern District was one of the contributing factors behind Pam Bondi’s removal as attorney general earlier this year, as the Daily Mail previously reported.
That, according to people familiar with his thinking, is why Blanche installed a Trump loyalist to head up the investigation in the first place.
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The arrangement put a buffer between his office and a politically radioactive case, letting him defer questions about its progress to DiGenova.
The Justice Department’s only intervention in the case until this past week, one person said, ‘has been to keep Kurt Olsen from seeing sensitive [classified] information.’
Blanche, this person added, ‘does not want to touch this case at all.’
Publicly, Blanche insists nothing has changed.
Attorney Joe diGenova, a longtime Trump ally, was tapped to oversee the investigation in the Southern District of Florida
Any investigations DiGenova was leading, he said this week, are ‘not going to slow down just because somebody leaves.’
His office said the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Quinones, a staunch Trump ally, will take over with ‘support’ from the Justice Department.
What that support amounts to is unclear. No grand jury has been summoned yet.
‘They are going to churn, and I don’t even think they’ll have something to present to a grand jury,’ said Harry Litman, who served as deputy assistant attorney general from 1993 to 1998.
‘The “grand conspiracy” is a fiction. You can’t think of another case like this ‘grand conspiracy’ to deny Trump his civil rights because there’s never been any case like it,’ Wainstein added.
Many of the actions at the heart of the probe are roughly a decade old, and involve multiple agencies that investigated Trump, his campaign, or individuals in his orbit.
It is unclear how one might go about establishing alleged criminal conduct, let alone “grand” or “great” conspiracy – which itself is not an existing crime under US code.
Blanche, the Daily Mail understands, had sent individuals to attempt to ‘rein in’ DiGenova
‘There’s no such thing as “great conspiracy,”‘ noted Litman, ‘It’s a wet dream for MAGA folks.
‘And it’s a way to try and express some weird conspiracy and connection as tenuous as, say, Pizzagate, to different actors,’ he said.
He was referring to the debunked conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring involving high-ranking Democratic Party officials was operating out of the basement of a Washington, DC pizza parlor.
‘It either goes totally nowhere, due to the impossibility of moving beyond the subpoena phase, or it goes to a place where it’s going to, you know, crash and burn right after [an] indictment,’ he added.
Brennan, who has described the campaign as one of ‘harassment,’ has filed a countersuit in Washington seeking to preserve records in the cases against him.
The Daily Mail contacted Brennan’s attorney for comment.
What’s left is a hot-button case that has failed to bear fruit.
‘No one wants to talk about this case right now,’ DiGenova told the Daily Mail by phone. He did not address the circumstances around his swift departure.
It’s a sentiment echoed widely in recent months by sources with knowledge of the probe.
One senior DOJ official summed it up: ‘No one wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole.’