South Florida U.S. attorney Quiñones resigns, hitting Trump’s “grand conspiracy” probe

Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, has resigned from the Justice Department, CBS News reported on Friday. His office had been running the so-called “grand conspiracy” investigation based in Fort Pierce, a probe already strained by internal disputes and doubts about whether it can succeed.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the departure and praised Quiñones for his work against violent crime, trafficking and transnational criminal organizations, according to CBS. The statement did not say why he was leaving. Quiñones wrote on X that serving alongside his colleagues had been “the privilege of a lifetime” and thanked President Trump for the opportunity.

An inquiry under strain

The investigation asks whether former intelligence officials in two Democratic administrations conspired to keep Trump out of office by means of a series of criminal and intelligence inquiries. A separate strand examines whether former CIA Director John Brennan misled Congress about the agency’s part in an intelligence assessment that found Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

CBS described a run of earlier exits. Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, quit in September after disagreeing with the Deputy Attorney General’s Office over how the case was run. According to CBS’s sources, the dispute sharpened when senior officials dispatched two lawyers from Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter’s office to Florida to help manage it, a move both diGenova and Quiñones resisted.

Kurt Olsen, a former White House lawyer known for efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, has since left the case as well, CBS said, while several prosecutors on temporary assignment went back to their home offices. Earlier this year, the senior career prosecutor in Quiñones’ office who was handling the matter was sidelined after raising concerns about the strength of the evidence, the network previously reported.

Official line and results so far

In late October, Blanche told reporters that Quiñones had always been in charge and played down the departures, saying people come and go all the time. He added that there was “no frustration” with the pace of the work. CBS noted that the inquiry has generated extensive grand jury activity but has not yet produced charges establishing the alleged overarching conspiracy.

The resignation came a day after the Justice Department announced that Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was leaving.

Other work in Miami

Quiñones, the son of Cuban refugees, built a profile in South Florida by pursuing Cuban government officials accused of crimes affecting the United States. Earlier this year he set up a Cuba-focused task force drawing agents from several agencies, and his office oversaw the prosecution of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and five others over the Cuban military’s downing of two planes 30 years ago.

CBS also reported that his office was developing a corruption-focused criminal investigation into former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who is held in New York awaiting trial on drug and torture charges. Alex Saab, a close business associate of Maduro, has pleaded guilty in a money-laundering case, and observers have asked whether he might cooperate against Maduro.

Neither Blanche’s statement nor CBS’s account explained the reason for the resignation or said who will now oversee the Fort Pierce investigation and the Maduro matter.