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When President Trump returned to office last year, the administration had revenge on the agenda. First, the FBI purged agents who’d been involved in investigations into Trump while he was out of office. Second, the Department of Justice launched a major probe to prove a “grand conspiracy” to politically persecute Trump, which would rely in part on the former agents’ cooperation and testimony about improper or illegal actions.
Perhaps you have spotted a potential flaw in the plan. The administration apparently did not.
The team conducting the probe sought to compel testimony from agents involved in an August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, in which the FBI recovered documents that Trump had removed from the White House. Last week, lawyers representing agents involved in the search filed a motion saying that if they were forced to testify to a grand jury, they would relay “their firsthand memories of investigating a properly predicated allegation” that Trump had “unlawfully retained hundreds of highly classified documents,” as well as “factually supported opinions on why and how such retention put the country’s national security at risk.”
No one should be surprised that the agents, who appear to have already been fired for simply doing their job, were not eager to testify in court that they’d been involved in anything untoward. Although such testimony would pose serious problems for the DOJ probe, the motion’s intent was not to sabotage it, The New York Times notes, but rather to seek assurances that if the agents testified, they would not be violating a federal judge’s order that bars publication of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about it. (Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today—more on that in a moment.)
More to the point, the agents were never likely to have the sort of damning information about a conspiracy that prosecutors want. The facts of the Mar-a-Lago case are not complicated: Trump absconded with documents, many of them highly sensitive; did not turn them over when asked to do so by the National Archives and later via a subpoena; and was found in possession of them at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, didn’t really dispute any of these facts. He argued that he had declassified the materials—a claim for which he provided no evidence—and that he rightfully possessed them. (Prosecutors further alleged that he’d suggested to his lawyers that they hide some documents, and that he’d tried to hide others from them.)
The grand-conspiracy probe, which attempts to tie together the documents case, investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and other investigations into Trump allies, has been a mess. In April, a career prosecutor leading the team was removed, reportedly after she concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama who has repeatedly tangled with Trump, with any crimes. (Brennan is reportedly facing two separate DOJ criminal investigations, which a law professor told The Washington Sun is an indication of either prosecutorial incompetence or malice; those might not be mutually exclusive.)
She was replaced by Joseph diGenova, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1980s but has more recently been known for propagating conspiracy theories. He and his wife were appointed to Trump’s defense team during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in 2018 but quickly withdrew; they were later involved in Trump’s attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. DiGenova abruptly resigned earlier this month and implied that he had been under pressure to bring unjustified charges. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.
Yesterday, another member of the team, Kurt Olsen, departed. The Times reports that Olsen faced difficulties with his security clearance; The Washington Post says that he was also frustrated by pressure from DOJ officials to move faster. If even Olsen thinks DOJ is being hasty, that would be stunning: He pushed DOJ to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election and more recently was the driving force behind more conspiracy theories, including about voting in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2020.
People like diGenova and Olsen are die-hard loyalists, not just deep-staters or fair-weather Trump fans. The problem with the grand-conspiracy probe is the fundamental premise, not staffing. Trump’s view of the world is zero-sum, such as in trade or diplomacy. The motive for the probe is that because Trump suffered during his criminal probes, his antagonists must have done something just as bad and must suffer the same.
Perhaps you can see the flaw here too: Trump and his allies are starting with a conclusion of guilt and attempting to work backwards to find the charges and evidence to justify it. The risks of this were vividly displayed during Smith’s testimony today, in one of the most excruciating exchanges I’ve ever seen in politics. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri seemed convinced that he had caught Smith perjuring himself—when, in fact, Schmitt had failed to recognize the difference between the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, eviscerating not only Schmitt’s dignity but also his theory that Smith had been covertly meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to conspire against Trump.
A robust debate continues about whether it was politically prudent to prosecute Trump for his various offenses in order to uphold the rule of law, or whether doing so simply inflamed his supporters and fostered an atmosphere of partisan retribution. Legally, the matter is simpler. On one side of the ledger, Trump did take the documents, Trump did try to overturn an election that he lost, and Trump’s 2016 campaign did have a series of inappropriate contacts with foreign governments. (The weakest case against Trump involved falsified business records, but that one produced a felony conviction.) On the other side, federal law-enforcement agencies did their job and investigated those actions, for which many were fired. Given the facts, is the DOJ probe investigating a grand conspiracy, or is it evidence of one?
Related:
- A Department of Justice for an age of conspiracy theories
- Trump is turning DOJ into his personal law firm. (From 2025)
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Can the polls possibly be right?
- Inside the biggest feud in artificial intelligence
- Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies.
Today’s News
- ICE plans to hire 5,000 additional employees by the end of the year to support the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which would expand its workforce by about 17 percent. Most of the new hires are expected to be deportation officers, and the agency says that it plans to use stricter vetting procedures after hundreds of recruits from last year’s hiring surge were removed.
- The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to temporarily resume rapidly deporting immigrants to third countries; the justices will hear arguments in December over whether immigrants must be given an opportunity to contest removal to a third country where they could face persecution.
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The Trump administration launched America.gov today, an AI-powered chatbot designed to help people find information about federal services. The tool will initially search government websites, and the administration plans to have it eventually help users complete tasks such as enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.
Evening Read
ICE Deportees Are Vanishing Into Salvadoran Prisons
By Kevin Sieff
Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.
But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.
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- The art of dealing with Trump
- Why did Wallace Shawn liken Israelis to Nazis?
- Gaza’s open horizon
- The THAAD delusion
- Radio Atlantic: Republican candidates are running from Trump. Will it work?
Culture Break
Debate. Taylor Swift’s music once put a clever twist on ideas about aging and adulthood. Now she seems to just be going backwards, Spencer Kornhaber argues.
Explore. Faith Hill writes about Gillian Anderson’s case for sexual fantasies.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post The DOJ’s Collapsing Probe Into a Supposed Anti-Trump Conspiracy appeared first on The Atlantic.
