The Justice Department's sprawling probe into an alleged "grand conspiracy" against President Donald Trump unraveled from the inside Monday as a second senior Trump loyalist walked out on the administration, and as many as eight prosecutors are now gone from the Florida-based team.
Kurt Olsen, 63, resigned from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida after months working the investigation into claims of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and into the classified documents case that saw Trump indicted.
Sources told CBS News. A Trump ally who pushed the president's false claims about the 2020 election, Olsen had served as the White House's director of election security and integrity before moving to the Justice Department earlier this year.
The Daily Beastreported that sources familiar with the matter said Olsen was frustrated by DOJ leadership in Washington pressuring the team to hurry up and secure indictments before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Former U.S. attorney and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance wrote, "If true, that would violate long-standing DOJ policy about taking overt steps so close to an election."
Olsen's exit follows the abrupt September 10 resignation of Joseph diGenova, the 81-year-old former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under Ronald Reagan who had been tapped to lead the probe. DiGenova told the Washington Post he still believed in the case but that "time was needed to build those cases" and "people differ on how long that should take."
The pressure from Washington triggered an internal blowup earlier this month, sources told the Daily Mail. "They started asking questions, and then they started giving orders to line attorneys about how to conduct the grand jury," one source said. "The attorneys revolted, and then objections were made to the department, and then that's when everything exploded."
Daily Mail sources put the total departures between seven and eight, though others put the number closer to four.
The roughly year-old probe, run out of Fort Pierce under Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, is examining whether Obama- and Biden-era officials illegally conspired against Trump during the Russia investigation and the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
It has yet to produce a single charge.
A DOJ spokesperson told the Daily Beast the department's "work on this investigation continues, and we are grateful to the talented team of attorneys, which continues to grow, doing the work each day."
Sources inside the probe disputed that upbeat framing. "This case was initiated to make the president and the public think something is happening down there, when in reality, it's not," one told the Mail.