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AN 8 26

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

nyt ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/us/trump-investigations-miami-prosecutor.html

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens.

Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

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Trump Ally Expands Inquiry of Former Officials Who Investigated the President

The office of a prosecutor based in Miami has issued new subpoenas in a wide-ranging inquiry aimed at President Trump’s perceived foes.

Jason A. Reding Quiñones

Some of President Trump’s allies have hoped that Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the District of Southern Florida, would develop a “grand conspiracy” inquiry.

By Charlie Savage

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He reported from Washington.

Feb. 26, 2026

A U.S. attorney in Miami appears to be expanding the scope of an investigation into former law enforcement and intelligence officials who were involved in scrutinizing President Trump during his first campaign and term, according to people familiar with the matter.

Subpoenas issued in recent weeks from the office of the prosecutor, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, show that the office is now widening its inquiry to encompass the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. The subpoenas sought documents related to Russia’s election interference from several former officials who played lower-level roles in that inquiry.

In addition, F.B.I. agents recently interviewed at least one retired agent who in 2022 was involved in deliberations with the Justice Department over opening the investigation into Mr. Trump’s plan to create a false slate of electors in swing states in an effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. The agents conducting the interviews, who are based in Washington, said they were asking on behalf of agents based in Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Already, prosecutors in the Miami office had issued subpoenas in November for documents related to a January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russia’s election interference, and last month, they issued a second round to the same recipients seeking similar materials from an expanded date range.

Altogether, the developments suggest that Mr. Reding Quiñones is making good on hopes by some allies of Mr. Trump that he would pursue a criminal investigation into what they have cast as a “grand conspiracy,” targeting numerous former officials who had investigated the president. The idea relies on portraying disparate investigations as a unified “deep state” plot to violate his constitutional rights.

The people familiar with the recent rounds of subpoenas and interviews spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. The Justice Department press office declined to comment.....

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REF 1 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/joseph-e-digenova-sworn-counselor-attorney-general APR 20

U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quinones swears in Joseph E. diGenova as Counselor to the Attorney General

MIAMI – Today, Joseph E. diGenova was sworn in as Counselor to the Attorney General, assuming a senior advisory role within the U.S. Department of Justice.

In this capacity, diGenova will advise the Attorney General on significant legal, policy, and enforcement matters, drawing on decades of experience in federal prosecution, complex investigations, and national legal practice.

“Joe diGenova brings a lifetime of experience, judgment, and proven leadership to this role,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “He understands the mission of the Department of Justice and the responsibility we carry to enforce the law fairly, protect the American people, and uphold the Constitution. I am confident he will serve with distinction.”

Counselor to the Attorney General Joseph E. diGenova with Southern District of Florida Leadership

diGenova has served in some of the most demanding legal roles in government and private practice. From 1983 to 1988, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, where he led one of the largest and most complex prosecutorial offices in the country. During his tenure, he supervised major public corruption, national security, and violent crime prosecutions, earning a reputation for disciplined, results-driven leadership.

Following his government service, diGenova built a distinguished career in private practice, representing clients in high-stakes criminal, civil, and congressional investigations. He has also been a frequent legal commentator and advisor on matters involving federal law enforcement and constitutional issues.

diGenova received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and his law degree from Georgetown University.

As Counselor to the Attorney General, diGenova will support the Department’s mission: to protect Americans, enforce the rule of law, and ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice.

Contact

Public Affairs Unit

U.S. Attorney’s Office

Southern District of Florida

USAFLS.News@usdoj.gov

Updated April 20, 2026

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U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes

A former lawyer for President Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, is said to be planning to split time between Miami and Fort Pierce, where a grand jury overseen by a Trump-favored judge sits.

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Joseph diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida.Credit...Tom Williams

Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer write about the Justice Department.

April 18, 2026

As a sprawling inquiry expands into whether former federal officials committed crimes in investigating President Trump, two unusual factors could ease the way toward securing the indictments he craves.

A former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed from that post this week, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday.

And at least part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury based in Fort Pierce, Fla., overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who issued rulings favorable to Mr. Trump during the classified documents case against him, the official added. Mr. diGenova is expected to split his time between Miami and Fort Pierce.

Together, the moves show how the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control has been willing to embrace politically charged tactics and unorthodox personnel decisions in its efforts to satisfy his demands to prosecute his perceived foes — even as other prosecutors loyal to him have encountered forceful pushback from courts against his wide-ranging retribution campaign.

Mr. diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida, where the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, another Trump loyalist, is supervising the inquiry.

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Medetis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director.

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REF 3 POLITICO

By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

02/23/2026 09:41 AM EST|Updated: 02/23/2026 12:51 PM EST

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report describing President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and allegations that he obstructed government efforts to reclaim them.

Cannon lit into Smith for a “brazen stratagem”: compiling the detailed report even after she ruled in July 2024 his appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and dismissed the case against Trump and two co-defendants. The Justice Department had appealed Cannon’s decision but dropped the case altogether after Trump’s election.

“Special Counsel Smith and his team went ahead for months, undeterred, preparing [the classified documents report] using discovery collected in connection with this proceeding and expending government funds in the process,” Cannon wrote in a 15-page ruling issued Monday. “To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it.”

The Trump-appointed judge said releasing the report now would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never reached a jury. It could also risk revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege and grand jury secrecy, she said.

“While it is true that former special counsels have released final reports at the conclusion of their work,” Cannon wrote, “it appears they have done so either after electing not to bring charges at all or after adjudications of guilt by plea or trial. The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt.”

Aides to Smith, who is now an attorney in private practice, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Judge Cannon’s courage and judicial resolve on these important due process issues should be recognized and taught in law school classrooms across America,” Trump’s lawyer Kendra Wharton said in response to the ruling.

Cannon has drawn scrutiny for rulings that favor Trump and cut against longstanding practice and precedent. She delayed the classified documents case for months when she installed an independent overseer to review materials seized from Mar-a-Lago — until a federal appeals court overturned her decision.

Cannon rejected the speedy schedule that Smith sought for the criminal case and threw it out on the day Trump was formally nominated at the 2024 Republican National Convention, a week after the assassination attempt that nearly took his life.

In her ruling, Cannon emphasized that “all parties” agreed that Smith’s report should not be made public. That is technically true, because after Trump was sworn in to his second term last year, the Justice Department took the position that the report should never be released. Trump’s private lawyers and Trump’s former co-defendants, Carlos de Oliveira and Walt Nauta, also opposed release of the report.

However, two legal groups who favor release of the report — American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute — sought to formally intervene in the dismissed criminal case to argue in support of disclosure. Cannon denied them permission to do so. The groups’ appeal of that decision remains pending at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Judge Cannon’s decision to permanently block the release of this extraordinarily significant report is impossible to square with the First Amendment and the common law,” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight Institute. “There is no legitimate basis for its continued suppression.”

Numerous individuals and organizations, including news outlets, have also sought Smith’s report under the Freedom of Information Act. Unless a higher court overrules Cannon, her order effectively blocks such requests.

The first volume of Smith’s final report addressed Trump’s actions to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election and evidence supporting Smith’s election-related criminal case against Trump. That volume of the report was made public by the Justice Department in January 2025, days before President Joe Biden left office.

Before retaking office, Trump asked Cannon to block both volumes of the report, but Cannon concluded at the time she didn’t have the power to intervene in matters stemming from the election investigation.

REF 4? CT DOC TOE 40K CS 200 PP VAUGHN INDEX?

Status Report – #25 in TOENSING v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (D.D.C., 1:24-cv-02444) – CourtListener.com

JEANINE FERRIS PIRRO United States Attorney By: /s/ Thomas W. Duffey THOMAS W. DUFFEY Assistant United States Attorney 601 D Street, NW Washington, DC 20530 (202) 252-2510 Attorneys for the United States of America /s/ Matthew D. Hardin MATTHEW D. HARDIN, D.C. Bar # 1032711 Hardin Law Office 101 Rainbow Drive # 11506 Livingston, TX 77399 (202) 802-1948 MatthewDHardin@protonmail.com

Now comes the Plaintiff, Victoria Toensing, and the Defendant, the United States Department of Justice (“Department”), by and through undersigned counsel, and hereby submit this Joint Status Report pursuant to the Court’s May 27, 2026, Minute Order. This report follows a June 18, 2026 meeting of the parties and their counsel at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. In attendance at the meeting were undersigned counsel, Plaintiff Victoria Toensing and her husband, Joseph diGenova, and Patrice Parker Hale from the Department of Justice.

Defendant’s Statement The Department represents that it has completed its review and has processed in excess of 41,000 pages. There remain outstanding 29 pages that need to be returned from the Office of Information Policy, which are expected to be returned by the middle of next month. The Department anticipates providing a Vaughn index to Plaintiff addressing approximately 1,000 pages withheld in full pursuant to FOIA Exemptions, and certain partially redacted records to which Plaintiff has conveyed its challenges. This Vaughn will be provided to Plaintiff by July 31, 2026, as contemplated by this Court’s May 18, 2026 Minute Order. The Department is not claiming that records at issue in this case are classified.

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Plaintiff’s Statement Plaintiff appreciates the opportunity to confer with the Department and its counsel on June 18, 2026. As previously indicated, Ms. Toensing recently began serving as Deputy Chief for Civil Rights in the Criminal Section, of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, and Ms. Toensing has extensive obligations in that District related to a grand jury proceeding.

The brief postponement of the conferral allowed Ms. Toensing to better serve our country’s pressing interests in effective and efficient criminal justice. The June 18, 2026 meeting in D.C. was productive in terms of allowing the parties to better understand their respective positions and to agree on a path forward for this litigation. As indicated at ECF No. 22, Plaintiff has received less than 200 pages of records, such that Plaintiff has difficulty understanding how 41,000 pages were processed with so few pages produced. The Department has now clarified that it withheld in full approximately 1,000 pages of records. Still, the Department apparently asserts that approximately 40,000 pages of records were non-responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request. Plaintiff reserves the right to challenge the accuracy of Defendant’s assertions as to the volume of responsive records on summary judgment.

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REF 5? Benny Johnson

@bennyjohnson

John Solomon Just Blew My Mind with His Prediction About Deep State Accountability Solomon says President Trump is about to begin declassifying documents at lightning speed in an operation he is calling “Hypersonic Clarity." He believes this massive document dump could pave the way for a grand conspiracy case against the intel agency spooks that have weaponized the government against Trump and millions of Americans for over a decade. "We’re gonna get a level of transparency in a release and declassification of documents unparalleled in American history. The president's setting up something that I think will be unbelievable." "I do think there will be some accountability. It’ll never be enough for what we went through the last 12 years... I think there’ll be a speed of disclosure and a speed of prosecution that we didn’t see in past years." Solomon says prosecutors only need to flip one top deep state actor to make the whole conspiracy case stick — just like taking down a mob boss. This is what we’ve all been waiting for.

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Indictment Of Cuba's Raúl Castro DOJ | Rev

RAUL CASTRO PRESSER SEN MOODY

(09:54)

I'm proud to stand here on this podium with US Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones to my right. Chris Raia, Deputy Director of the FBI.

(10:10)

You're going to get to clap for Jason in 20 seconds. Chris Raia, Deputy Director of the FBI and James Uthmeier, the Attorney General of this great state. And your great US senator is here as well. She's very busy in D.C. but wouldn't miss this for the world. So thank you for being here, Senator Moody.

(10:36)

So I want to thank Jason for his leadership down here in Florida. He's doing a great job beyond today and I'd also ask him to replace me at the podium to say a few words. So thank you, Jason, very much....

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an 5 26

Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies.

“Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” reports Bloomberg. “Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump.”

But “more than a dozen former prosecutors and defense lawyers” — speaking anonymously — say “there is mounting concern that the pursuit of Trump’s agenda has triggered an exodus of experienced prosecutors and hampered Miami’s expertise in building major white collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases.”

According to Bloomberg, many expressed concern that the high-profile drug, corruption, fraud and money laundering prosecutions that the district is known for will “fall by the wayside” while Trump sends his DOJ lieutenants and GOP allies to fucus on the doings of Biden and Obama from years ago.

Several dozen attorneys in the Southern District of Florida have been fired, quit or retiredsince Trump’s second term began in January 2025, which undermined the talent pool for prosecuting complex cases, say anonymous sources familiar with the office. One unit dedicated to prosecuting economic crimes is down to about a dozen attorneys from the more than 30 it traditionally had.

“A top Blanche aide earlier this year relocated to be a prosecutor in the office. Then, last month, an attorney overseeing the investigation was replaced with former US attorney and Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova following a disagreement over how best to proceed, according to people familiar with the situation,” reports Bloomberg. “Multiple grand jury subpoenas have gone out in recent weeks, and FBI officials have been conducting a flurry of interviews, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.”

But as prosecutors neglect investigations against legitimate suspected wrongdoers, Bloomberg reports Trump’s focus on his political hit list is coming up dry with prosecutors struggling with cases against current and former government officials considered to be enemies of the president.

“Charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in Virginia were dismissed last year,” said Bloomberg, and an additional case against Comey last month in North Carolina has kindled criticism that US law enforcement is being directed wielded for retribution for Trump.

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DEM DOCL

A former Trump campaign lawyer who backed President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to a Florida-based U.S. attorney’s office leading a sprawling probe into a slate of former federal officials who investigated Trump.

Joseph diGenova’s appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida comes shortly after journalists reported that he is taking over the “grand conspiracy” investigation into intelligence and law enforcement officials, against whom Trump has long vowed to seek retribution.

In announcing the appointment Monday, Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for southern Florida, said on social media that diGenova would be “stepping into a senior advisory role on key legal, policy, and enforcement matters.”

“With decades of experience—including serving as U.S. Attorney for D.C. under Ronald Reagan—diGenova brings deep expertise in federal prosecution and high-stakes investigations,” Quiñones said.

DiGenova’s appointment to oversee the conspiracy probe marks another significant blow to the DOJ’s longstanding independence from the White House. It comes just over a week after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly claimed that Trump has a “right” to order investigations into his enemies.

Though Quiñones said that diGenova would help “advance the Department’s mission to protect Americans, enforce the rule of law, and ensure impartial justice,” the grand conspiracy investigation into Trump enemies features many hallmarks of past politically motivated probes initiated by Trump.

Jason Reding Quiñones (right0, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, shaking hands with former Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova in Florida on April 20, 2026. (Photo: U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of Florida)

DiGenova joined the U.S. attorney’s office after Maria Medetis Long, the previous senior federal prosecutor overseeing the probe, was removed from the case. She had questioned the legal viability of future charges, the New York Times reported.

Specifically, Medetis Long objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John Brennan, the former CIA director.

Her removal echoed personnel changes that placed Trump’s former personal attorney at the helm of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia before it pursued criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both of those criminal cases were dismissed by a federal judge last year.

Comey, whom Trump has branded a “dirty cop” and “leaker” for initiating the FBI’s probe into alleged links between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, has received a subpoena in the grand conspiracy investigation.

The exact parameters of the investigation are unclear, but prominent allies of the president and Quiñones have said it centers on the far-fetched claim that the former officials allegedly conspired to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights starting from his election in 2016 through his federal indictments in 2023.

While the statute of limitations on most federal crimes is five years, Quiñones’ office has been able to scrutinize actions beyond those limits by alleging a conspiracy against Trump.

In total, prosecutors overseeing the sprawling investigation have issued over 130 subpoenas so far.

Part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury seated in Fort Pierce, Florida, overseen by Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who showed the president unusual deference while presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation against the president after his first term in office.

In 2020, DiGenova and his wife, lawyer Victoria Toensing, were part of a legal team that included Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, challenging the results of the 2020 election. He also pushed conspiracy theories alleging election fraud during that vote.

Before that, diGenova and Toensing reportedly collaborated with Giuliani in efforts to extract compromising information on Joe Biden from Ukrainian officials during the last years of Trump’s first term. At the time, Toensing categorically denied their involvement.

That attempt to undermine Biden’s candidacy in the 2020 vote would eventually lead the House of Representatives to impeach Trump.

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NYT 4 20 26

A former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed from that post this week, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday.

And at least part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury based in Fort Pierce, Fla., overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who issued rulings favorable to Mr. Trump during the classified documents case against him, the official added. Mr. diGenova is expected to split his time between Miami and Fort Pierce.

The law enforcement official familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal issue.

Because Judge Cannon is the only federal jurist in the Fort Pierce courthouse, she could be in a position to make critical decisions if Mr. diGenova uses the grand jury there to subpoena documents or witness testimony and the recipients balk, asking her to quash the demands.

Judge Cannon was criticized by an appeals court in 2022 after she effectively stalled the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by appointing a so-called special master to sort through reams of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. Later, Mr. Trump praised her lavishly, calling her “strong” and “brilliant,” after she tossed out the indictment altogether, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the charges, had been improperly appointed.

In another unusual move, Christopher-James DeLorenz, who worked as a law clerk for Judge Cannon during the documents case and later served as an aide to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to Mr. Quiñones’s office earlier this year and is working on the portion of the inquiry that is focused on Mr. Brennan, the official said.

Mr. diGenova will work on the Brennan matter, too, but also the broader inquiry.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s allies began pushing for what they referred to as a “grand conspiracy” case that would portray all of the criminal inquiries of Mr. Trump as a unified plot to violate his constitutional rights. The conspiracy, by their telling, began with the investigation into Russia and its potential ties to the 2016 Trump campaign, then extended to the classified documents and 2020 election indictments.

That far-fetched theory would allow the Justice Department to scrutinize in a single case matters that would normally be barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It would also give Mr. diGenova and Mr. Reding Quiñones the authority to scrutinize events that took place in Washington from their jurisdiction in Florida.

The Justice Department has also given Mr. Reding Quiñones special authority under a statute known as Section 515, the official said. That would enable him to bring indictments in jurisdictions where he is not the U.S. attorney.

While many details remain unknown, Mr. diGenova is inheriting an inquiry whose most developed portion appears to be focused on trying to find a basis to charge Mr. Brennan with lying to Congress over a January 2017 intelligence community assessment. It concluded, among other things, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in part because Moscow hoped to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

As the top federal prosecutor in Washington in the 1980s, Mr. diGenova secured an espionage conviction against Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who passed sensitive information to Israel. He later became a political commentator who gravitated toward Mr. Trump during his first term in the White House.

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

A special counsel appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr in Mr. Trump’s first term, John H. Durham, already scrutinized the actions of senior law enforcement and intelligence officials involved in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

Image

John O. Brennan testifying during a 2017 Senate hearing on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

When that inquiry began in 2019, Mr. diGenova was among the Trump supporters who celebrated, telling Fox News that he believed people like Mr. Brennan, James R. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, would go to prison.

“James Comey, Brennan and Clapper have said to themselves, ‘Which one of us is going to pay the Barr bill?’” Mr. diGenova said, adding, “This conspiracy began with John Brennan and ends with John Brennan.”

But Mr. Durham, who completed his investigation in 2023, did not find a basis to prosecute any of them, and Mr. Barr later said the Durham investigation found that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane.”

Grand jury subpoenas already issued under Mr. Reding Quiñones have sought records related to the 2017 intelligence community assessment. The effort appears focused on trying to build a perjury case against Mr. Brennan over a 2023 deposition to Congress. At the time, he discussed the relationship between the assessment and the Steele dossier, a compendium of later-discredited political opposition research making various claims about Mr. Trump and Russia.

The F.B.I. had wanted to include information from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked. Mr. Brennan, in his testimony, told lawmakers that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.” Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of the dossier was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan had long said.

Documents the Trump administration declassified last year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the main body of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix, although they also showed the appendix had a header stating that its claims did not contribute to the judgment. Released files also showed that C.I.A. analysts had objected to the appendix, too, but portrayed Mr. Brennan as having pushed back in support of the compromise arrangement with the F.B.I.

Last October, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein, has said it did not.

Last December, Mr. Wainstein wrote to the chief federal judge in South Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga, urging her to block the Justice Department from steering the case to Judge Cannon. The Justice Department, he wrote, appeared to be planning to “manipulate grand jury and case-assignment procedures” to put the investigation under her.

It has not been clear whether Judge Altonaga took any action. But the broader investigation has since expanded, including with subpoenas issued earlier this year for documents about the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

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AN 12 25

Former CIA Director John Brennan is fearing that a judge who has frequently ruled in President Donald Trump's favor could be handling a case concerning him and several others. Now, he's asking the court to directly intervene.

The New York Times reported Monday that Brennan – who served in former President Barack Obama's administration – is officially petitioning the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida to prevent U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (who Trump appointed in 2020) from handling a case in which he has been subpoenaed. Brennan's subpoena is part of a Department of Justice investigation into the role former Obama administration officials played in launching the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, who is representing Brennan, acknowledged that his client's request may be unusual, but argued it was not unwarranted. He maintained that the administration sought to "manipulate grand jury and case assignment procedures" to make sure the investigation that ensnared Brennan ended up in Cannon's hands.

"[W]ere we in a normal time, we might hesitate to question the propriety of the government's actions in the grand jury process. However, we are no longer in a normal time," he wrote. "We are now in a time when the Justice Department has surrendered much of its independence and the President is directly commanding his Attorney General and her leadership team to use their prosecutorial authorities against his perceived political adversaries."

Wainstein's letter further questioned the influence that MAGA political operative Mike Davis was having on U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who helms the DOJ's operations in the Southern District of Florida and signed off on Brennan's subpoena. Wainstein noted that Davis has previously referred to Quiñones as his "buddy" and "good friend." Quiñones has empaneled an extra grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Judge Cannon is based.

As Wainstein documented, Davis has played an outsized role in publicizing the investigation that has singled out Brennan, along with former Obama administration officials James Clapper (the former director of national intelligence) and former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page among others. In November, Davis posted a selfie to social media of him and Quiñones with the caption: "Justice is coming."

Brennan's attorney urged chief judge Cecilia M. Altonaga "to defend and reinforce the rule of law in our criminal justice system at this fragile moment in our Nation's history."

"We urge Your Honor to exercise your supervisory authority as chief judge to ensure the United States Attorney does not steer this matter to the Fort Pierce Division and to the courtroom of Judge Aileen Cannon," he wrote.

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an 12 25

Nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 2, Jason Reding Quiñones is a federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) District of Southern Florida. Now, according to The Guardian's Peter Stone, Quiñones is "expanding an investigation" of former FBI and intel officials who, in 2016, probed Russian interference in that year's U.S. presidential race. But many legal experts, Stone reports, view Quiñones' efforts as a "fishing expedition."

"The investigation's apparent focus is to identify ways to criminally charge ex-FBI and intelligence officials who have already been investigated and effectively exonerated by two special counsels and a Republican-led Senate panel, which mounted exhaustive inquiries into Russia's efforts to boost Trump in 2016," Stone explains in an article published on December 17.

"Led by Jason Reding Quiñones…. who is close to (U.S.) Attorney General Pam Bondi and other key MAGA allies, the inquiry accelerated with a flurry of subpoenas in November and new prosecutors to expedite what has been dubbed a 'grand conspiracy' investigation. Among others, subpoenas have reportedly gone to ex-CIA director John Brennan, who led the 2016 Russia inquiry; James Clapper, the ex-director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former FBI counter-intelligence agent who helped lead the Russia inquiry; and Lisa Page, an ex-FBI lawyer."

Two prosecutors assigned to Quiñones' probe, according to Stone, resigned. And former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich views the probe as politically motivated.

Bromwich told The Guardian, "There is simply no factual basis for this investigation. It violates both DOJ and FBI standards that require a factual predicate. It is a fishing expedition where it has been clearly established — by two prior independent counsel investigations and a congressional investigation led by the current secretary of state —there are no fish. The government has refused to provide the basis for venue in Florida; nor has it been willing to describe the statutory violatiosns it is pursuing. That is unprecedented in my 40-plus years of federal criminal practice.”

Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former DOJ prosecutor who is often featured as a legal analyst on MS NOW, is equally critical of Quiñones' efforts.

Noting that previous investigations of the 2016 probe "ended with a whimper," McQuade told The Guardian, "The idea that Trump loyalists are now going to investigate again should make us all suspicious of their motive. If evidence sufficient to support criminal charges existed, we would have seen it by now."

*Read Peter Stone's full article for The Guardian at this link.

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an tc 11 25

In recent weeks, Donald Trump’s supporters have begun to align around the idea that a Democrat-led “grand conspiracy” – potentially involving former president Barack Obama – has been plotting against the US president since 2016. The narrative is that the 2016 Russia investigation, which resulted in the Mueller inquiry was part of this deep-state opposition to Trump, as was the investigation into the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

The focus of the fightback by Trump’s supporters is in Miami, where a Trump-appointed US attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, has begun to issue subpoenas to a wide range of former officials.

This has included former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, all of whom were involved in the federal investigation into alleged links between Russian intelligence and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The way the so-called conspiracy is unfolding will feel familiar to anyone who has watched US politics closely in the past decade. There’s been a constant stream of allegations and counter-allegations. But the narrative from the Trump camp is that the powerful “deep state” forces have been arrayed against the president. The “two-tier” justice system that has persecuted Trump can only be rebalanced by pursuing those who investigated him in 2017 and 2021.

The Grand Conspiracy contains similarities with other prominent conspiracy theories and how they spread. The QAnon movement, whose most famous claim is of a global paedophile ring run out of a Washington pizza parlour involving senior Democrats, is one where disparate claims are sporadically and partially evidenced. The political potency of these claims does not sit in the individual pieces of evidence but in the overarching story.

The story is that hidden government and proxy networks manipulate the truth and judicial outcomes and that only through pressure from “truthers” (what many people in the US who believe conspiracy theories call themselves) will wrongdoers be brought to account. Once these ideas are popularised, they take on a momentum and a direction that is difficult to control.

Campaign of ‘lawfare’

Soon after his inauguration, Trump set up a “weaponization working group” within the Department of Justice. Its director, Ed Martin, said in May that he would expose and discredit people he believes to be guilty, even if the evidence wasn’t sufficient to charge them: “If they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”

In the US the norm has been to “charge crimes, not people”, so this modification fundamentally changes the focus of prosecutors.

Former FBI director James Comey responds to his indictment by grand jury in September.

The recent subpoenas in Florida show this principle at work, effectively making legal process into the punishment. Even without full court hearings on specific charges, being forced to provide testimony or documents creates suspicion around those who are targeted. Criticism from legal officials that this is a “indict first, investigate second” method suggests that this is a break from historical norms.

Lawfare, defined as “legal action undertaken as part of a hostile campaign”, doesn’t require a successful prosecution. It merely requires enough investigative activity to solidify a narrative of suspected guilt and enough costs and pressure to seriously inconvenience those affected by it. In the new era of digital media, it’s enough to degrade the standing of a political opponent.

In that way, political retaliation has become a prosecuting objective. This is clear from what the US president has indicated in his frequent posts on his social media platforms for his enemies, such as former FBI director James Comey, who investigated his alleged links to Russia, or Adam Schiff, the senator who led his impeachment in 2019.

Hardball politics or authoritarianism?

Political scientists argue that authoritarianism is something that happens little by little. Some of these steps involve using state power to target political opponents, degrading checks and balances and making loyalty a legal requirement.

There are reasons to believe that the US seems to be tracking this trajectory currently, certainly when it comes to using the Justice Department to harass the president’s political enemies and pushing back against court judgments while attacking the judges that have issued them.

Further slides towards authoritarianism are possible because of the political potency of contemporary conspiracy movements. The right-wing QAnon movement, for example, has been exceptionally agile. It has offered its followers identity, community spaces and a logic that encourages active participation, exhorting believers to “do your own research”, for example.

In the wake of the near daily addition of material from the investigations into the allegations that the late financier, Jeffrey Epstein, ran a sex trafficking ring, involving some influential US citizens, many American citizens have concluded as a general truth that their elites do hide things. This makes it far simpler for broader conspiracies to gain traction and more difficult for politicians and journalists to work out what is conspiracy and what is evidence. This is creating a problematic feedback loop – hints of wrongdoing fuel public suspicion, and public suspicion fuels the idea of a further need for investigation.

But to suggest that anyone has control over this would be wrong. These movements can just as easily consume those seen as supporters as they do those seen as enemies. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s determination to release the full and unredacted Epstein files could well produce negative outcomes for some Maga supporters, including prominent ones.

So, the transformation of legal process into public spectacle in America is suggestive of a drift towards authoritarianism. America’s famous “constitutional guardrails” of separation of powers, independent courts, juries and counsels will be pivotal in preventing this. They will need to stand firm.

The grand conspiracy theory might be more about seeking to isolate, and financially and emotionally exhaust opponents, while at the same time destroying America’s system of checks and balances. It might work.

Robert Dover, Professor of Intelligence and National Security & Dean of Faculty, *University of Hull

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Nov 12, 2025 The Intersection with Michael Popok

MANUELO BOSOLO? SP NOT LINE PROSECUTOR?

CANNON UP FOR ag?

Trump has a new plot in the works, to use the new US Attorney for Miami to investigate and indict Democrats in a "grand conspiracy" including President Obama, and then use his favorite Judge and former pick to be his Attorney General Aileen Cannon to help him out with the grand jury and search warrants and the cases. Michael Popok reports from Miami on what is a new and breaking story and reports on how MAGA influencers like Mike Davis are calling the shots with the US Attorney.

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an 11 25

Far-right influencers are looking to Miami as a venue to pursue "long-promised charges of a 'grand conspiracy'" against President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries, according to a New York Times report.

The influencers have even found a federal prosecutor there— Jason A. Reding Quiñones, Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who was sworn into office in August 2025 and is currently a central figure in a high-profile investigation into a 2017 intelligence community assessment regarding Russian election interference.

As for their alleged 'grand conspiracy,' the Times explains that its theory is "still unsupported by the evidence."

"A cabal of Democrats and 'deep-state' operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office," the Times explains.

Last week, however, Reding Quiñones issued over two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter, the Times writes.

Among the recipients include familiar Trump foils: James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.

The Florida investigation currently focuses on a "January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election, particularly the role played by John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, in drafting the document," the Times says.

The Brennan investigation started "after criminal referrals to the Justice Department by top Trump intelligence officials," the Times writes, and was assigned to David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, "who was given special authority to scrutinize and possibly prosecute Mr. Brennan, according to four people with knowledge of his actions who requested anonymity to discuss an open matter."

Metcalf held senior Justice Department positions during the first Trump administration.

The Brennan case, however, was transfered from Metcalf to Reding Quiñones, "as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities, according to two people with knowledge of the situation," the Times explains.

The Florida subpoenas, the Times explains, "seek documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, according to people familiar with them. It commands the recipients to provide them to prosecutors in Miami by Nov. 20."

Despite the dubious nature of these investigations, the Times says, they do have one thing on its side.

"Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions," notes the Times.

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bloom

The South Florida US attorney’s office is recruiting prosecutors and restructuring its chain of command in preparation for a grand jury investigation expected to target former Justice Department officials and others involved in cases against President Donald Trump.

Under the leadership of a Trump-loyalist US attorney, Jason Reding Quiñones, the Miami-based office has been inviting current staff and outside lawyers to join the new investigative team to be housed within its national security unit, said four people familiar with the situation....

BLOOMB

DOJ Miami Office Readies Conspiracy Probe Into Trump Enemies (2)

Nov. 7, 2025

Jason A. Reding Quiñones, US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, speaks during a press conference on August 25, 2025 in New York City.

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Under the leadership of a Trump-loyalist US attorney, Jason Reding Quiñones, the Miami-based office has been inviting current staff and outside lawyers to join the new investigative team to be housed within its national security unit, said four people familiar with the situation.

The exact scope of the grand jury effort—which one of the individuals described as “special counsel oversight”—remains unclear.

A federal judge recently empaneled a new grand jury to convene Jan. 12 in Fort Pierce, Fla. That prompted close Trump allies to strongly indicate this will be the venue to review what they allege is a broad Democratic conspiracy to thwart Trump, including Russian collusion claims and indictments over Mar-a-Lago documents and election interference.

Scott Strauss, a law school classmate of Reding Quiñones who worked with him as a South Florida federal prosecutor, is playing a potentially significant role in the plans, said the people, who spoke anonymously to avoid reprisal.

Less than two years into the job, Strauss was pushed out of the US attorney’s office for trying to launch baseless 2020 voting fraud conspiracy investigations, the individuals added. He proceeded to help lead Florida Gov. Ron Desantis’ election crimes office in 2022.

People close to the office are waiting to learn if Strauss will return to head up the grand jury project, or if a respected career prosecutor currently running the national security section will remain in charge of it. Strauss recently asked at least one attorney from outside the office to join the South Florida grand jury team, three people familiar with the matter said.

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.

An email to Strauss’ currently listed work account bounced back, suggesting he’s switched jobs. Strauss declined to comment via text message, including on whether he’s in the process of returning to DOJ.

Two of the office’s recently-hired line prosecutors abruptly resigned under duress after being asked this week to join the grand jury investigation, said three individuals.

They exited following a tense meeting in which superiors accused them of leaking information about their new assignment to the media or discussing it with colleagues.

MAGA Pressure

The national security unit has long been organized as a section within the office’s criminal division, but Reding Quiñones this week informed staff that he stripped the criminal chief’s authority by ordering the national security group to start reporting directly to the US attorney’s executive office, according to a Nov. 3 email obtained by Bloomberg Law.

That announcement came 14 hours after prominent MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec denounced the criminal chief, Peter Forand, on X for donating $2,300 to the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign and other Democratic causes.

Forand will “be in charge of” of the newly empaneled grand juries “to investigate Crossfire Hurricane and the Mar-a-Lago raid conspiracy,” Posobiec posted. “Can Forand be trusted to fairly investigate the Biden regime and Jack Smith if he’s friends with them and donates thousands of dollars to them?”

About two hours after Reding Quiñones emailed out the new leadership structure, Posobiec referenced his earlier Forand criticism in a new post to his 3.2 million followers: “UPDATE: Hearing good things on this.”

Forand, who former colleagues say has operated as a nonpartisan prosecutor willing to implement any administration’s objectives, had previously been removed from an office directly outside of Reding Quiñones’ executive suite to a different part of the building, three people said.

That office space is now occupied by a newly hired chief of staff to the US attorney—an unusual position under any top prosecutor. That chief of staff, Jim Poland, is an FBI agent on detail, who’s overseeing the office’s “non-litigation and administrative functions,” Reding Quiñones wrote to staff Nov. 3.

As his team lays the groundwork for the January grand jury, Reding Quiñones has been taking extra precautions in warning staff about keeping office business confidential.

Late last month, Reding Quiñones messaged all employees—flagged with a red high-priority notice—to remind them about DOJ rules forbidding unauthorized communications with the press, according to a copy of the note obtained by Bloomberg Law.

The two resigning assistant US attorneys—one a registered Republican and the other a military veteran—were both considered promising prosecutors inside the office, said three people.

Trump Adviser

The Miami office’s preparations come as Mike Davis, an influential Trump legal adviser, has called for his friend, Reding Quiñones, to investigate what he’s termed “lawfare Democrats” under a Reconstruction-era “conspiracy against rights” statute designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan.

“For the last three-and-a-half years since the Mar-a-Lago raid I have very publicly called for a grand jury in Fort Pierce,” Davis told Bloomberg Law on Thursday. He added, “I hope my very good friend Jason Reding Quiñones” will hold them accountable for the “Russian collusion hoax” and the “Mar-a-Lago raid.”

Reding Quiñones was sworn into office in August, after serving as a state trial court judge in Miami-Dade County.

He’s pushed the South Florida district—one of the largest and most historically significant US attorney’s offices in the country—closer to the president’s agenda. His mission statement includes the phrase “restore impartial justice.”

In an Oct. 29 Truth Social post, Trump singled out former officials such as Special Counsel Jack Smith and several members of his team, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Chris Wray as people who are “a disgrace to our Nation” and “should be investigated, immediately.”

MSNBC reported Thursday that Reding Quiñones’ office is also readying grand jury subpoenas for an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan related to the 2017 intelligence assessment about Russian election interference.

Fort Pierce, which is more than a two hour drive north of Miami, offers a majority conservative jury pool and a small courthouse with only one district court judge. That jurist, Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, issued several ruling favorable to the then-former president while presiding over his classified documents case.

(Updated with reporting on two prosecutor resignations.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Penn in Washington at bpenn@bloomberglaw.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Seth Stern at sstern@bloomberglaw.com; Rob Tricchinelli at rtricchinelli@bloombergindustry.com

---

ABC

A key Trump ally says a federal grand jury has been empaneled in Florida that will begin meeting in January to investigate what he calls a decade-long conspiracy against President Donald Trump.

In a series of interviews with conservative podcasters over the last week, conservative attorney Mike Davis -- a close friend and informal adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top Trump administration officials -- has claimed that the grand jury will consider whether to bring criminal charges against top Democratic figures that Davis claims have colluded over the last decade to impede Trump, beginning with the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election through the criminal cases against the president.

The Federalist Society's Mike Davis speaks with Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt at the CPAC DC conference at the Gaylord National Resort in Oxon Hill, MD on Thursday, 20, 2025. (

"I've been publicly calling for this for three years. I'm going to make damn sure that these lawfare Democrats go to prison during the four years of President Trump's second term," _{{Davis told}_}_{ }_conservative commentator Benny Johnson on Friday.

### Attorneys for former special counsel Jack Smith dispute 'inaccurate' claims he tapped senators' phones

While Davis does not hold a government position, _{{court documents}_}_{ }_confirm that a federal judge last month ordered a grand jury to be empaneled in Fort Pierce, Florida, beginning in January at the request of the Trump administration.

A representative of the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the purpose of the grand jury.

A conservative lawyer who helped shepherd Trump's nominees through the Supreme Court confirmation process, Davis now runs the Article III Project, an organization that describes itself as devoted to helping "fight leftist lawfare to defend the rule of law."

Trump has recently called for the prosecution of some of the same officials accused by Davis of using lawfare to target him.

"They cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election," Trump wrote on social media Saturday. "These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!"

Trump has not yet commented on Davis' remarks on the conservative podcasts.

In an interview on "The Charlie Kirk Show," Davis said his "buddy" Jason Quiñones -- the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida -- moved to empanel the grand jury after Davis "pushed very hard" to investigate what he says is a conspiracy against Trump.

Davis has suggested that top officials, including former Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, FBI Director Chris Wray and Special Counsel Jack Smith should be compelled to testify before the grand jury to answer questions about what Davis says is the politicized use of the legal system.

Quiñones and representatives from the Southern District of Florida did not immediately respond to ABC News' requests for comment.

Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason A. Reding Quinones speaks during a press conference at the U.S. Attorney's Office on August 25, 2025 in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City.

Davis has argued that the former Biden administration officials and others violated a section of federal law, known as 18 U.S.C. § 241, by conspiring to interfere with federally protected rights.

### House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan calls on Jack Smith to testify over Trump investigations

Created in response to a surge in violence during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the law has historically been used to protect the civil rights of Black Americans, though prosecutors have expanded it to apply to broader election-related and police-misconduct offenses.

Notably, Trump was accused of violating the statute after he allegedly sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, though the case was dismissed after he won the 2024 election.

Davis claims that a wide array of actions -- including the FBI's investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection -- were coordinated efforts by Democrats to impede and ultimately imprison Trump.

Davis also argues the criminal and civil cases against Trump, purported issues with Trump's Secret Service protection ahead of two assassination attempts last year and the efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in 2024 could also be violations of federal law.

"They took the country to the break. They tried to bankrupt Trump for non-fraud. They tried to throw him in prison four times for non-crimes. They tried to take him off the ballot in Colorado and made it elsewhere unconstitutionally. They tried to take off his head when Joe Biden underfunded Trump's Secret Service protection, said he was the biggest threat to democracy and to put a bull's eye on Trump," Davis said on Friday on the Johnson podcast.

With some Republican senators now raising concerns over the scope of the federal investigation of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election -- including the subpoenaing of phone records of multiple senators -- Davis has argued he has enough support to carry out a sweeping investigation.

:{[:{The Alto Lee Adams Sr. United States Courthouse where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon scheduled former President Donald Trump's trial to begin Aug. 14 in her courtroom on June 20, 2023 in Fort Pierce, Florida.}:

"There's now a special grand jury that Jason [Quiñones] just motioned the court and the Southern District of Florida to open in Fort Pierce. That's going to be empaneled in January. I think that sounds like a great place to open up this grand jury on Crossfire Hurricane and against these lawfare Democrats," Davis said Friday.

The setting for the grand jury in Fort Pierce's federal courthouse is a familiar one for Trump and his allies -- it's the same courthouse where he attended multiple hearings in his criminal case for allegedly retaining classified documents and obstructing justice. Davis claims the classified documents case,which was dismissed by a federal judge before the 2024 election, is part of the conspiracy against Trump as well.

"As I promised and as I will deliver, justice is definitely coming," Davis said Friday on Johnson's podcast.

---

:REPORT: Three Russiagate Grand Jury Subpoenas Sent Today, Brennan, Page and Strzok – Up to 30 Subpoenas Pending](https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/11/07/report-three-russiagate-grand-jury-subpoenas-sent-today-brennan-page-and-strzok-up-to-30-subpoenas-pending/)}:

November 7, 2025 | Sundance | 184 Comments

Fox News is reporting that three grand jury subpoenas were issued today for John Brennan, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Brennan was the former CIA Director during Russiagate, who created the fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment. Strzok was the lead FBI counterintelligence agent in charge of Crossfire Hurricane, and Page was the former DOJ lawyer assigned to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Strzok and Page worked both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation.

Fox News also reports that up to 30 grand jury subpoenas are anticipated to be served on former government officials involved in “Spygate” and/or “Russiagate.” [SEE FOX REPORT HERE]

There has been a tremendous amount of external pressure being applied, and thankfully this year a significant amount of key internal pressure has joined that effort. For the issues surrounding former CIA Director John Brennan, Fox News is citing a declassified “Annex A” of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which highlights John Brennan including the Steele Dossier in the ICA at the request of former FBI Director James Comey.

Apparently, according to Fox News, the most significant citation against Brennan is an issue we outlined at CTH five years ago [SEE HERE] when we wrote about Annex-A and the implications therein. President Trump was still in office in 2020 when Annex-A was released. The good news is that Annex-A found its way into evidence that a prosecutor can present to a grand jury.

The outcome of a grand jury subpoena means the primary Russiagate officials will have to lawyer up, spend money and go plead the 5th amendment, the most likely outcome.

From my frame of reference, the evidence against the targets clearly exists and does not need them to make any admissions or denials. However, putting them on record in court individually, possibly compelled to testify or invoke the 5th, would perhaps narrow down their options if they were eventually indicted and face a criminal trial.

EXCLUSIVE:A federal grand jury has subpoenaed former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, among others as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Fox News Digital has learned.

Sources told Fox News Digital Brennan; Strzok, the FBI’s former deputy assistant director of counterintelligence; and Page, a former FBI lawyer, were served with federal subpoenas on Friday.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News Digital that up to 30 subpoenas will be issued in the coming days relating to the investigation.

The grand jury is out of the Southern District of Florida. U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones is supervising the probe. Fox News Digital first reported this summer that Brennan was under criminal investigation.

[…] As for the criminal investigation into Brennan, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred evidence of wrongdoing by Brennan to FBI Director Kash Patel for potential prosecution, DOJ sources told Fox News Digital.

[…] But back in June 2020, Ratcliffe, while serving as director of national intelligence, declassified a footnote of the 2017 ICA, which revealed that the reporting of Trump dossier author Christopher Steele had only “limited corroboration” regarding whether then-President-elect Trump “knowingly worked with Russian officials to bolster his chances of beating” Hillary Clinton and other claims.

[…] The footnote, also known as “Annex A” of the 2017 ICA, exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital in June 2020, spanned less than two pages and detailed reporting by Steele, the former British spy who authored the unverified anti-Trump dossier — a document that helped serve as the basis for controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants obtained against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. (read more)

I also find it interesting they begin with “Russiagate”, and I wonder if they will find the “Spygate” that preceded it {GO DEEP}.

Then again, I am thankful for the change and recognize Spygate might just be a little too uncomfy for those who seek to retain continuity of government.

Posted in Big Government, Big Stupid Government, CIA, Conspiracy ?, Decepticons, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Election 2020, FBI, Lawfare, media bias, President Trump, propaganda, Russia, Spygate, Spying, THE BIG UGLY, Uncategorized, White House Coverup

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New York Times,*Trump Loyalists Push ‘Grand Conspiracy’ as New Subpoenas Land* ,Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, Nov. 9, 2025. *The Justice Department moved an inquiry that appeared initially focused on the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan to South Florida and is beginning to recruit line prosecutors.

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries.

Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.

But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation.

Last week, Mr. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, issued more than two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Among them, they said, were James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.

The investigation in Florida appears to focus, for now, on a January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election, particularly the role played by John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, in drafting the document.

It is not clear whether Mr. Brennan has received a similar request to turn over records to investigators. But over the past two months, the investigation into his actions has widened to encompass other actions in a broader time frame, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Reding Quiñones did not return a request for comment. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer had no comment.

The investigation started earlier this year after criminal referrals to the Justice Department by top Trump intelligence officials. It was assigned to David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, who was given special authority to scrutinize and possibly prosecute Mr. Brennan, according to four people with knowledge of his actions who requested anonymity to discuss an open matter.

Mr. Metcalf, a veteran prosecutor who held senior Justice Department positions during the first Trump administration, was given a relatively narrow mandate in his authorization, limited to examining Mr. Brennan’s work on the intelligence assessment in 2017. He struggled to advance a case that was regarded as weak by current and former department officials.

It is not clear if Mr. Metcalf believed a prosecution of Mr. Brennan was viable. But he never got the chance to complete his work.

This fall, senior Justice Department officials transferred the investigation from Mr. Metcalf to Mr. Reding Quiñones, as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

That kind of internal maneuvering, once highly unusual, has become commonplace under Mr. Trump, who has personally and publicly directed top department officials to go after people he reviles, often over the objections of experienced investigators who have found insufficient evidence to proceed.

In September, Mr. Trump installed an inexperienced White House lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, in Alexandria, Va., for lying to and obstructing Congress, after her Trump-appointed predecessor had refused to do so. Last week, the federal magistrate judge handling the case accused prosecutors of trying “to indict first, investigate second.”

The Florida subpoenas seek documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, according to people familiar with them. It commands the recipients to provide them to prosecutors in Miami by Nov. 20.

Some of the people who have reviewed the subpoenas said they did not mention specific crimes being investigated. Most federal crimes have a five-year statute of limitations, and offenses must be charged in a venue where the conduct occurred. It is not clear how the preparations of the intelligence assessment, which took place in and around Washington, would be connected to Florida, apart from Mr. Trump’s residence there.

Whether the subpoenas will lead to charges, much less to convictions, is impossible to know. But merely creating an aura of criminality around Trump foes by celebrating incremental prosecutorial moves is a trophy in itself to die-hard Trump supporters, who have said that naming and shaming targets is a legitimate aim of law enforcement.

“Justice is coming,” Mike Davis, an influential former Republican Senate staff aide who has prodded the Justice Department to use Florida as an arena for anti-Trump conspiracy cases, wrote on social media on Friday. His message was accompanied by a photo of himself with a smiling Mr. Reding Quiñones.

Mr. Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions.

Right-wing activists believe he has broad jurisdiction to bring a wide array of charges involving investigations into Mr. Trump, because Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., is in his district.

Asked for comment, Chad Gilmartin, a Justice Department spokesman, praised the work of Mr. Reding Quiñones and Mr. Metcalf.

“While we do not confirm or comment on the existence of specific investigations, the American people should know that this department will continue to follow the facts and pursue justice in every case,” he said in a statement.

People familiar with the nascent inquiry say there have been signs in recent days that it is ramping up.

The Justice Department, for example, has begun to recruit line prosecutors in Florida to work on the case, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Mr. Reding Quiñones has also moved his office’s national security unit out of its traditional home inside the criminal division, the person said. Prosecutors in the office read that move as an effort to create a stand-alone section that could potentially house the prosecutors assigned to the new investigation.

The 2017 intelligence assessment said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a multifaceted information operation targeting the U.S. presidential election. That included hacking Democratic emails and releasing them, as well as seeding social media with messages promoting Mr. Trump and denigrating his rival, Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Trump and his allies have long chafed at a judgment in the assessment, which stated that Mr. Putin aspired to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning — not just sow chaos and undermine Mrs. Clinton.

*Global News

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{Devoun Cetoute and Jay WeaverMiami Herald (TNS)}:

:{:{Published Aug. 42025}:

President Donald Trump’s first confirmed nominee for U.S. attorney is a Miami-Dade judge whose professional background includes poor job evaluations in the office he will now lead.

On Saturday, Judge Jason A. Reding Quiñones secured a 51-41 cloture vote in the U.S. Senate. He will now head the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida, replacing interim U.S. Attorney Hayden O’Byrne.

Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, “Very proud of our great Republican Senators for fighting, over the Weekend and far beyond, if necessary, in order to get my great Appointments approved, and on their way to helping us MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The Miami Herald could not reach Reding Quiñones for comment.

Who is Jason A. Reding Quiñones?

Reding Quiñones, formerly a federal prosecutor in the Miami office, was appointed as a Miami-Dade County judge a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis and is a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

After graduating from Florida International University’s law school in 2008, he began his career practicing corporate law before transitioning to a military lawyer for the U.S. Air Force and then joining the Justice Department.

Soon after, he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami as a prosecutor in the major crimes section, where he would receive poor evaluations from supervisors relating to incompetence; however, Reding Quiñones filed a discrimination complaint claiming he was being targeted because of his race.

He would later drop that complaint and continue on in the Miami office’s civil division, where he received satisfactory job evaluations.

Despite this history, University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said it likely wouldn’t have a big impact on his confirmation by the Senate.

U.S. Attorney confirmation process not “very rigorous”

The Senate Judiciary Committee process for evaluating U.S. attorney nominees is “not very rigorous,” Tobias said.

That’s because, he said, the panel doesn’t have the resources to conduct hearings and instead relies on staff analysis and recommendations.

“Practically all nominees receive no discussion and voice votes, unless staff detects red flags,” he said.

Tobias believes confirmations have grown increasingly politicized, but in a rare occurrence, Reding Quiñones received a 12-9 committee party line vote before the process continued to the Senate, where he would be confirmed.

Aid to struggling U.S. Attorney’s Office

The confirmation is not only a victory for the president, but also a much-needed move for the Miami office, which has remained one of the busiest in the country despite growing struggles.

Since the resignation of former U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe, the first Black lawyer to hold the position in South Florida, earlier this year, the office has lost half a dozen senior career prosecutors.

“The (South Florida office) does critical law enforcement work and its several hundred attorneys function more smoothly when the office has a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader, who cooperates effectively with the Justice Department and other U.S. Attorneys,” Tobias said.

Other South Florida seats remain open

While the U.S. Attorney position may now be filled, other seats in South Florida and the rest of the state have not made it through Senate confirmation hearings yet.

The Senate failed to confirm one Trump federal judge nominee who would preside in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida and three nominees for the Middle District.

Tobias noted that these are emergency vacancies, as both districts have substantial caseloads that are reaching or already surpassing protracted lengths without resolution.

The Senate is now in recess, which means any appointments will have to wait until September, when it resumes session.

“The diligent, overloaded Southern and Middle District judges and the people of Florida must wait for relief,” Tobias said.

---

GGL 11 25

[### Hon. Jason A. Reding Quiñones

The Federalist Society

https://fedsoc.org › bio › jason-reding-quinones](https://fedsoc.org/bio/jason-reding-quinones)

Mar 12, 2025 — Judge Reding Quiñones is a state court trial judge presiding over Domestic Violence cases in both family civil proceedings and criminal ...

[### Southern District of Florida | Jason A. Reding Quiñones ...

Department of Justice (.gov)

https://www.justice.gov › usao-sdfl › jason-reding-quin...](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/jason-reding-quinones-sworn-united-states-attorney-southern-district-florida)

Aug 13, 2025 — As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, I will work tirelessly to protect the American people, restore impartial ...

Missing: FEDERALIST ‎SOCIETY

[### US Attorney Reding Quiñones | Jason A. ...

Instagram · usao_sdfl

60+ likes · 2 months ago](https://www.instagram.com/p/DNT3LjyRQHu/?hl=en)

Jason A. Reding Quiñones was sworn in as the new US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, marking a significant milestone in the ...

Missing: SOCIETY ‎| Show results with: SOCIETY

[### Trump picks U.S. attorney in Miami. As criminal prosecutor ...

Miami Herald

https://www.miamiherald.com › local › article300526204](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article300526204.html)

Feb 19, 2025 — “As the next U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Judge Reding Quiñones will restore Law and Order, prosecute violent crimes and, ...

[### Judge Jason A. Reding Quiñones, '08, nominated as the ...

FIU College of Law

https://law.fiu.edu › news-events › news › judge-jason-...](https://law.fiu.edu/news-events/news/2025/judge-jason-a-reding-quinones-08-nominated-as-the-next-u.s-attorney-for-the-southern-district-of-florida.html)

Judge Jason A. Reding Quiñones, '08, nominated as the next U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. February 19, 2025.

Missing: FEDERALIST ‎| Show results with: FEDERALIST

[### Panel 4: Modern Lawfare and the American Democracy

The Federalist Society

https://fedsoc.org › commentary › podcasts › panel-4-...](https://fedsoc.org/commentary/podcasts/panel-4-modern-lawfare-and-the-american-democracy)

Mar 12, 2025 — Jason Reding Quiñones, Judge, Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Permalink. https://fedsoc.org/commentary/podcasts/panel-4-modern-lawfare ...

[### Trump ally says grand jury empaneled in Florida ... - ABC News

go.com

https://abcnews.go.com › Politics › story](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-ally-grand-jury-empaneled-florida-investigate-sweeping/story?id=126854433)

"There's now a special grand jury that Jason [Quiñones] just motioned the court and the Southern District of Florida to open in Fort Pierce. That's going to be ...

[### Military reservist sworn in as U.S. Attorney for the Southern ...

WPLG Local 10

https://www.local10.com › ... › News › Politics › World](https://www.local10.com/news/local/2025/08/13/us-army-reservist-sworn-in-as-us-attorney-for-the-southern-district-of-florida/)

Aug 14, 2025 — Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who served in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army and assists the Central Command, is officially the U.S. Attorney ...

Missing: FEDERALIST ‎SOCIETY

[### PN26-40 - Nomination of Jason Reding Quinones for ...

Congress.gov

https://www.congress.gov › nomination](https://www.congress.gov/nomination/119th-congress/26/40)

Jason Reding Quinones, of Florida, to be United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida for the term of four years, vice Markenzy Lapointe.

Missing: SOCIETY ‎| Show results with: SOCIETY

[### U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida

Facebook · U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida

4 reactions · 1 month ago](https://www.facebook.com/SDFLnews/posts/congratulations-to-our-newest-assistant-us-attorneys-yesterday-us-attorney-jason/1114608230872824/)

Congratulations to our newest Assistant U.S. Attorneys. Yesterday, U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones administered the oath of office, ...

Missing: FEDERALIST ‎SOCIETY

---

Reding Quinones

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