President Donald Trump's push to prosecute the officials who once investigated him is losing key players, and the reasons are spilling out.
Pressure to deliver indictments fast notably drove Joseph diGenova out as head of the Justice Department's Florida-based "grand conspiracy" investigation, The Washington Post reported Saturday, citing two people familiar with the matter. Trump loyalist Kurt Olsen also left the prosecution team amid disagreements over how long the probe was taking, The Post noted.
The probe aims to show that officials engaged in a years-long scheme to strip Trump of his rights, stretching from the Russia investigation of his first term through the classified documents case tied to his Mar-a-Lago estate. It has generated a pile of subpoenas but not a single indictment, and the legal theory behind it has never been tested.
Because much of the evidence centers on intelligence documents nearly a decade old, prosecutors face a statute of limitations problem that the conspiracy framing is meant to overcome.
The president has made his expectations clear. He has publicly demanded charges against former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, and he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi in April after repeatedly fuming over her failure to prosecute his opponents.
Meanwhile, a White House task force headed by conservative journalist John Solomon has been releasing batches of records from past investigations of Trump. The panel was originally sold as an effort to root out election fraud, but it hasn't produced evidence of any. Some prosecutors on the Florida case are frustrated by how slowly they receive intelligence files and see Solomon as better positioned to get them fast, according to The Post.
Solomon insisted his group is not coordinating with prosecutors and described the two efforts as distinct. "They're worried about the court of law, and what the president has created here is something that can serve the court of public opinion," he told The Post.