President Donald Trump’s pick to be the top prosecutor in his home district previously “flunked” out of the very office he now leads, a new report reveals.
Jason Reding Quiñones left the Southern District of Florida in 2024 after years of “poor performance evaluations,” sources tell The Washington Post.
Trump, 79, nominated Reding Quiñones, 43, to not only return to his former office, which is prosecuting top MAGA foes like Obama-era officials James R. Clapper Jr. and John Brennan, but to lead it. The district’s jurisdiction includes Mar-a-Lago.
It is unlikely those in the Miami-based office foresaw Reding Quiñones’ ascension when he was hired as an entry-level prosecutor in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
A graduate of nearby Florida International University’s law school, the Post reports he was put “in a boot camp for new hires, where young prosecutors work on drug and gun cases to gain trial experience before they move to more prestigious divisions.”
Most prosecutors in the program are quickly promoted. Reding Quiñones was not.
“Reding Quiñones flunked, failing to impress his supervisors with his work ethic and legal acumen and earning poor marks on his performance evaluation,” the Post reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.
Reding Quiñones, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, who has served a total of 22 years in the Army and Air Force, became a Miami-Dade County judge after he left the Southern District of Florida last year.
Reding Quiñones filed a complaint claiming that he was discriminated against as a white man and military reservist during his initial stint at the federal office. He went by “Reding” when he was hired, but has changed his last name to include “Quiñones,” reflecting his Cuban heritage.
The Senate confirmed Reding Quiñones to lead the Southern District of Florida in August. A staff exodus, including two “respected” former supervisors who issued him poor evaluations, quickly followed, according to the Post.
Those departures, paired with Reding Quiñones suggesting during his swearing-in ceremony that the office had previously operated with bias, caused morale among the remaining prosecutors to plummet, the Post reports.
The Southern District of Florida did not respond to a request for comment.
Reding Quiñones has made “significant changes” in his three months on the job.
Prosecutors have reportedly resigned over refusals to prosecute MAGA political foes, so the Trump administration has turned to recruiting office outsiders who are willing to do the job.
The office was also restructured after right-wing influencers revealed that the head of the office’s criminal division donated to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign last year—a legally protected action. Still, Reding Quiñones removed the national security division from the criminal division’s purview, giving him more direct oversight over the very division probing the Obama-era officials.
Just last week, Reding Quiñones issued dozens of subpoenas for U.S. officials who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election—a clear response to one of Trump’s longest-running conspiracy theories.
“I have never seen anything like this before,” said a departed assistant U.S. attorney with decades of experience in the office to the Post. “People are now asking, ‘If I touch this or that case, will I be fired?’”
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