The investigation ended in a furious shouting match.
Joe diGenova, a veteran ally of Donald Trump appointed to lead a sweeping “grand conspiracy” investigation in Florida’s Southern District, accused Attorney General Todd Blanche of interfering with the Justice Department’s own case.
Blanche selected diGenova in April to examine whether US intelligence and law enforcement officials—including former President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan—had participated in a years-long effort to undermine Trump.
A source told Our News Outlet that Blanche had dispatched several people from Washington, DC, weeks earlier in an effort to “rein in” diGenova. The prosecutor, in turn, accused the attorney general of obstructing the investigation.
The dispute escalated during a phone call earlier this month, when Blanche and diGenova exchanged heated words. According to the source, a frustrated diGenova resigned soon afterward.
A report by CNN, citing two people familiar with the matter, described the conversation as tense. The disagreement reportedly focused on diGenova’s decision to block attorneys from the Justice Department headquarters from assisting with the investigation, a move that preceded the prosecutor’s abrupt departure.
Our News Outlet also confirmed that tensions had been building over diGenova’s rejected request for a SCIF in Florida—a secure room used to review classified information. That dispute helped push the investigation to a breaking point.
When asked about diGenova’s unexpected resignation at a recent White House press briefing, Blanche declined to address the matter directly.
“I don’t want to talk about communications I have with prosecutors. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to the process,” he said before quickly moving to another question.
The “grand conspiracy” investigation was launched to determine whether US intelligence and law enforcement officials were involved in a years-long effort against Donald Trump
Attorney General Todd Blanche inherited the investigation from former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired earlier this year
Within Justice Department headquarters, however, the wave of headlines appeared to confirm what career officials had understood for months: The “grand conspiracy” investigation—an issue Trump has pursued publicly and privately for much of the past six years—is effectively dead.
“This case was initiated to make the president and the public think something is happening down there, when in reality, it’s not,” one DOJ official said.
Another DOJ official disputed the claim that the Florida investigation had stalled or lacked backing from Main Justice. The official did not comment on reports of the explosive phone call between Blanche and diGenova.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter and another attorney traveled to Florida after diGenova’s resignation to assess the investigation’s progress, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the matter.
This report is based on conversations with five current and former Justice Department officials, former prosecutors and other people familiar with the investigation.
Sources told Our News Outlet that the investigation in Miami had been running into dead ends for months.
Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor, was reported by CNN to have been removed from the case earlier this year after raising concerns about the strength of the evidence. Since then, several figures viewed as sympathetic to Trump have joined the investigation, including Kurt Olsen, a former White House official and 2020 election denier.
Olsen did not respond to a request for comment from Our News Outlet.
“There have been several prosecutors moved aside because they had the temerity to express that they did not want to move forward with this case,” Kenneth Wainstein, Brennan’s defense attorney, told a federal judge in Washington, DC, last week.
Wainstein also alleged in court that there have been ‘intentional efforts’ by DOJ to hide possible misconduct in a ‘far-reaching’ case, citing the removal of Maria Medetis Long and the appointment of Trump-loyal prosecutors.
‘There’s a lot of really underhanded stuff going on’ in these investigations, Wainstein said.
Failure to advance the probe in Florida’s Southern District was one of the contributing factors behind Pam Bondi’s removal as attorney general earlier this year, as Our News Outlet previously reported.
That, according to people familiar with his thinking, is why Blanche installed a Trump loyalist to head up the investigation in the first place.
The arrangement put a buffer between his office and a politically radioactive case, letting him defer questions about its progress to DiGenova.
The Justice Department’s only intervention in the case until this past week, one person said, ‘has been to keep Kurt Olsen from seeing sensitive [classified] information.’
Blanche, this person added, ‘does not want to touch this case at all.’
Publicly, Blanche insists nothing has changed.
Attorney Joe diGenova, a longtime Trump ally, was tapped to oversee the investigation in the Southern District of Florida
Any investigations DiGenova was leading, he said this week, are ‘not going to slow down just because somebody leaves.’
His office said the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Jason Quinones, a staunch Trump ally, will take over with ‘support’ from the Justice Department.
What that support amounts to is unclear. No grand jury has been summoned yet.
‘They are going to churn, and I don’t even think they’ll have something to present to a grand jury,’ said Harry Litman, who served as deputy assistant attorney general from 1993 to 1998.
‘The “grand conspiracy” is a fiction. You can’t think of another case like this ‘grand conspiracy’ to deny Trump his civil rights because there’s never been any case like it,’ Wainstein added.
Many of the actions at the heart of the probe are roughly a decade old, and involve multiple agencies that investigated Trump, his campaign, or individuals in his orbit.
It is unclear how one might go about establishing alleged criminal conduct, let alone “grand” or “great” conspiracy – which itself is not an existing crime under US code.
Blanche, Our News Outlet understands, had sent individuals to attempt to ‘rein in’ DiGenova
‘There’s no such thing as “great conspiracy,”‘ noted Litman, ‘It’s a wet dream for MAGA folks.
‘And it’s a way to try and express some weird conspiracy and connection as tenuous as, say, Pizzagate, to different actors,’ he said.
He was referring to the debunked conspiracy theory that claimed a pedophilia ring involving high-ranking Democratic Party officials was operating out of the basement of a Washington, DC pizza parlor.
‘It either goes totally nowhere, due to the impossibility of moving beyond the subpoena phase, or it goes to a place where it’s going to, you know, crash and burn right after [an] indictment,’ he added.
Brennan, who has described the campaign as one of ‘harassment,’ has filed a countersuit in Washington seeking to preserve records in the cases against him.
Our News Outlet contacted Brennan’s attorney for comment.
What’s left is a hot-button case that has failed to bear fruit.
‘No one wants to talk about this case right now,’ DiGenova told Our News Outlet by phone. He did not address the circumstances around his swift departure.
It’s a sentiment echoed widely in recent months by sources with knowledge of the probe.
One senior DOJ official summed it up: ‘No one wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole.’
