The Justice Department is barreling ahead with its broad conspiracy investigation into Democratic administration officials, summoning former intelligence officials for interviews and making major shake-ups in the Florida-based prosecutorial team.
The wide-ranging investigation is based on an unusual and untested legal theory: that previous administrations conspired for years to violate President Donald Trump’s rights through a series of investigations, beginning with the Obama administration’s examination of ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The conspiracy investigation, among the biggest and most legally complicated that the Justice Department is pursuing as part of Trump’s vow to prosecute his political enemies, appears to be gaining momentum. The probe in part is looking at the decade-old actions of former officials in President Barack Obama’s administration, including former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and former CIA director John Brennan, who played significant roles in investigating the Russia ties.
The Justice Department in recent days tapped Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist, to lead the investigation, which is largely based out of Florida but also has a presence in D.C. DiGenova was an attorney on the president’s campaign and has bolstered the baseless theory that the Russia investigation was an FBI hoax to keep Trump from becoming president.
DiGenova takes over from career national security prosecutor Maria Medetis Long, who recently left the case after expressing discomfort with its direction, according to three people familiar with the personnel move.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche was in South Florida on Monday and met with diGenova and the legal team on the case, according to a Justice Department official familiar with the meeting. In a post on X after diGenova’s role was announced, Blanche posted a photo with the caption, “Welcome to the fight, Joe!”
Trump ally and informal legal adviser Mike Davis was among those who celebrated diGenova’s appointment and Blanche’s seemingly more aggressive approach to the case.
“We’re just going to use what these leftists said during the lawfare against President Trump,” Davis said on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast Monday. “We’re going to throw it right back in their faces.”
The Justice Department is seeking to prosecute the bulk of the case out of the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida and has apparently impaneled a grand jury in the Fort Pierce courthouse — which is part of the Southern District of Florida. Davis, who is not a prosecutor and is not involved in the case, previously posted documents on social media showing that a grand jury had been impaneled this year in Fort Pierce.
By selecting Fort Pierce, the grand jury proceedings probably would be overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — a conservative favorite who made the controversial ruling to dismiss the federal mishandling-of-documents indictment against Trump.
Grand jury proceedings are not made public, and its unclear if prosecutors have interviewed witnesses in that grand jury.
While the Justice Department has not stated the full scope of the investigation, in recent months subpoenas have gone to Brennan and Clapper as well as lower-level intelligence officials from that era, The Washington Post has reported. Other subpoenas have gone to prominent former FBI officials, including the bureau’s former deputy director Andrew McCabe; former bureau attorney Lisa Page; and Peter Strzok, a former counterintelligence agent who helped lead the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The statute of limitations has not lapsed on decade-old actions by Obama administration officials, prosecutors argue, under the theory the same conspiracy against Trump continued when special counsel Jack Smith investigated the president during President Joe Biden’s administration.
Smith secured two criminal indictments of Trump — the first focused on his alleged mishandling of classified documents, the second on his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The classified-documents case was dropped by Cannon, who did not weigh in on the merits of the case but said that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. Smith asked a judge to drop the election results case after Trump was elected to a second term, citing Justice Department regulations that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
So far, the people familiar with the case say, the portion of the current investigation that appears to the furthest along is focused on Brennan. Prosecutors want to indict him for allegedly lying to Congress when he testified about a 2017 intelligence assessment, which found that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election in part to help Trump win. The people familiar spoke on the condition on anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.
Brennan has denied any wrongdoing.
That part of the case would probably need to be indicted in D.C., where Congress is and where Brennan testified in 2017. Prosecutors this week sent subpoenas to people who worked with Brennan, demanding that they testify in front of a D.C. grand jury in the coming days, according to one of the people familiar with the investigation.
But on Monday, prosecutors withdrew those subpoenas and instead asked those subjects to sit for voluntary interviews with investigators, the person familiar said.
The Justice Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday about the tactical change.
Jason Reding Quiñones, the Senate-confirmed prosecutor who runs the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida, has been granted special authority by the attorney general to bring cases outside his jurisdiction, including in D.C., according a Justice Department official familiar with the probe. He has been meeting regularly with Blanche’s deputy attorney general’s office for months about the case, a person familiar with the effort said.
In recent weeks, Blanche dispatched attorney Christopher-James DeLorenz from D.C. to Florida to work on the case. DeLorenz has served as a counselor to the deputy attorney general and previously clerked for Cannon in Fort Pierce.
The latest steps in the investigation come in the weeks after Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, and as the upper ranks of the Justice Department are filled with uncertainty over the president’s long-term leadership plans for the law enforcement agency.
Trump tapped Blanche to serve as the acting attorney general, and The Post has reported that the position is Blanche’s to lose. Blanche is currently in something of an audition period, under pressure to deliver on prosecuting Trump’s foes to secure the permanent position.
In addition to accelerating the probe against Brennan, Blanche last week released the first report from the department’s Weaponization Working Group, detailing what he described as the Biden Justice Department’s improper targeting of antiabortion protesters.
That weaponization group is expected to release other reports in coming weeks, including one examining the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, multiple people familiar with their efforts said.
Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
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