The U.S. attorney whose Miami office is leading the troubled conspiracy investigation into several of President Donald Trump’s political foes resigned Friday, making him the latest high-profile official to depart the Justice Department following Tuesday’s midterms rout.
Jason Reding Quiñones, who Trump appointed to lead the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, is leaving his post 15 months after he was confirmed by the Senate, Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media.
His departure comes less than two months after the Trump administration’s picks to spearhead the “grand conspiracy” probe under Reding Quiñones’s supervision abruptly resigned.
At the time, Justice Department officials said the investigation would continue under Reding Quiñones’s leadership. His resignation Friday, with little explanation, threw the future of that high-profile probe into doubt.
Also on Friday, Blanche also said that John Eisenberg, head of the Justice Department’s national security division, had also resigned.
Blanche thanked Reding Quiñones for his “service to this country” and hailed his work to combat violent crime and drug trafficking during his tenure. The attorney general also singled out the indictment Reding Quiñones’s prosecutors secured in May this year charging former Cuban president Raúl Castro for the deaths of three Americans shot down during the mid-1990s.
Reding Quiñones, in a statement posted to social media, thanked Trump for the opportunity to serve.
“It has been the privilege of a lifetime,” he wrote. “I leave with immense pride in what we accomplished together and profound gratitude for the opportunity to serve our great Nation.”
His departure comes a day after Harmeet K. Dhillon resigned as head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Reding Quiñones had been among a crop of U.S. attorneys that stepped into their roles with high hopes from Trump allies. He took the office’s helm after a previous stint working as an assistant U.S. attorney there, during which he received poor evaluations from his supervisors and left in 2024.
His appointment as U.S. attorney won significant endorsements from the likes of Mike Davis, the conservative legal activist who is known as an influential and informal legal adviser to the Trump administration. Still, Reding Quiñones found little buy-in from the rank and file at the U.S. attorney’s office.
The two respected supervisors who gave him poor performance evaluations quickly resigned once he was installed at the helm, fearful that their new boss would push them out, The Washington Post previously reported. An exodus of career staffers followed, much like what occurred in other U.S. attorney offices across the country, leaving the critical Justice Department outpost understaffed.
The “grand conspiracy” probe became the most ambitious and legally complicated case Reding Quiñones’s office was pursuing — and the most politically important to a Justice Department intent on prosecuting Trump’s enemies.
The theory of that investigation, as officials have described it, was that officials from the Obama and Biden administrations engaged in a decades-long “deep state” conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights.
Scores of officials and investigators including former CIA director John Brennan, ex-national intelligence director James R. Clapper Jr. and former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau, had all been subpoenaed.
In recent months, though, a series of departures left its future in doubt. And despite months of investigation, the probe has not produced the type of sweeping indictment sought by Trump and his allies.
This fall, Joseph DiGenova — the Trump loyalist tapped to oversee the investigation — resigned in a dispute with Justice Department officials over the pace of the inquiry. Before that, the career national security prosecutor overseeing the probe had also stepped aside over concerns about its direction and scope.
The probe’s future remains in doubt. Subpoenas that sought testimony from officials like Brennan at grand jury proceedings last month have since been delayed until next year.
DiGenova on Friday lauded Reding Quiñones’s tenure.
“He’s a smart guy,” DiGenova said. “He’s a very dedicated person. Very smart and really ethical.”
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