Fear that Trump wants Obama arrested has DOJ prosecutors on 'pins and needles': report

A surprise meeting held Monday afternoon by U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones in Florida exposed a continuing rift between Donald Trump-appointed DOJ officials and career prosecutors who want nothing to do with the president’s desire to have his detractors prosecuted, a report stated Tuesday.

According to MSNBC, the impromptu meeting was called after two prosecutors tendered their resignations after being ordered “to take part in a vast ‘conspiracy’ investigation into former intelligence and law enforcement officials.”

MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard and Laura Barrón-López wrote that the Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s office is rife with tension over fears about who will be targeted next as the Department of Justice under Attorney General Pam Bondi ramps up prosecuting the president’s enemies.

Speaking with MSNBC, one official within the major crimes division that was subjected to the “unusual’ meeting said, "Everyone is on pins and needles."

The report noted they fear being ordered to “work on a case that President Donald Trump has said should lead to the arrests of an expansive list of individuals, including former President Barack Obama and former CIA Director John Brennan.”

MSNBC is reporting that the resignations and the meeting followed more than 30 subpoenas issued on Friday by the DOJ which, reportedly, “bypassed what multiple legal experts told MSNBC is standard protocol for its issuance of subpoenas, turning to a member of leadership to sign off on some of them, instead of a line prosecutor assigned to investigate the case.”

One SDFL insider claimed one of the lawyers resigned because the actions being taken “felt like there was something they could not take part in because it would violate their ethical responsibilities.”

Noting the subpoenas were issued seeking “any kind of documents, including emails and texts, related to the intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election,” the report added, “Those kinds of documents, the source familiar said, were so highly classified that they ‘would be in the possession of the government.’”