Last year, Justice Department officials said a sweeping investigation would unravel a grand conspiracy by a cabal of national security officials who sought to undermine President Trump.
Trump allies hoped it would definitively confirm what they have been alleging for years: Officials who investigated the president over the last decade engaged in what was essentially a coordinated effort to violate his civil rights.
Instead, the probe has been beset by departures, infighting and inexperience.
The 81-year-old Reagan-era prosecutor coaxed out of retirement to lead the effort, Joe diGenova, abruptly quit last month saying top department officials were pressuring the team to bring criminal cases before they were ready. He hadn't charged anyone. Officials denied pressuring him.
DiGenova was one of several overlapping supervisors of the probe, with different interests and marching orders, adding to the chaotic nature of the effort.
Last month, another senior counsel, Kurt Olsen, who had joined the probe from the White House, resigned from the inquiry, people familiar with the matter said. He had recently lost a security clearance after failing government polygraph tests about his foreign contacts. Olsen said the security clearance issue wasn't a factor in his departure but declined to elaborate.
Trump is frustrated by the lack of progress and has complained about it to allies, a person familiar with the conversations said.
Justice Department officials said the case is proceeding apace, with roughly a dozen prosecutors continuing to pursue a set of related investigations that could result in charges in coming weeks. But they privately acknowledge the idea of tying all those loose threads together in one big conspiracy case in South Florida, as they had initially attempted, isn't a practical approach.
One of the officials said leadership is still confident in the people who continue to work on the inquiry, and recently brought on two former prosecutors. A White House spokeswoman said Trump has full confidence in Attorney General Todd Blanche to hold people accountable.
In addition to the departures of Olsen and diGenova, Justice Department officials came to believe a third supervisor of the case, Miami U.S. attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, wasn't appropriately managing the investigation and his office more broadly. A number of the prosecutors on the probe complained to senior officials in Washington that Quiñones had given them no guidance, some of the people said. Lawyers in the deputy attorney general's office are now directly overseeing the Florida-based investigation from Washington, officials said.
A spokeswoman for Quiñones defended his record on the job and said he was proud to serve in the Trump administration but declined to comment on the conspiracy investigation.
The putative targets of the probe include a raft of people Trump has long disdained, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and officials involved in the August 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago home. (Comey was separately charged in connection with a photo he posted of seashells that Trump alleged was threatening, and a judge dismissed a second case targeting him. He has denied the charges and said the cases were an attempt at political retribution.)
The investigation, which officials informally referred to as the grand-conspiracy probe, sought to tie together a series of past episodes, including the 2016 intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in that year's election to boost Trump; the FBI's subsequent investigation into alleged Trump campaign ties to that Russian meddling; and the more recent criminal prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith in 2023 and 2024 that stemmed from Trump's 2020 election loss.
The probes went to two other U.S. attorneys before Quiñones raised his hand to oversee it, people familiar with the assignment said.
One of the investigation's first targets: Congressional testimony Brennan had given in 2017 and 2023 about the 2016 assessment. A veteran national-security prosecutor working on that line of inquiry, Maria Medetis Long, soon told senior officials that she hadn't found a basis to indict Brennan, some of the people said. In April, she was removed from the probe.
The Justice Department had struggled to find and retain other prosecutors to work on it and brought on temporary hires; some of them had never worked as federal prosecutors. The office had to give them a crash course on presenting evidence to grand juries, some people familiar with the probe said.
The assembled group, according to people familiar with it, have included a senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer; a young lawyer from the Commerce Department who had earlier worked for a conservative legal group that supports Trump's agenda; a Miami-based prosecutor who joined the Justice Department last year; several military lawyers; and a federal prosecutor in North Dakota who last year sought a position on his state's Supreme Court.
At Trump's urging, Blanche installed diGenova, a former Trump campaign lawyer, on the investigation. DiGenova, who hadn't worked as a prosecutor for decades, asked Medetis Long to rejoin the probe, people familiar with the team said. She declined.
Justice Department officials in Washington at the time wanted prosecutors to speed up their process, including by subpoenaing witnesses to testify directly before a grand jury, without any FBI interview first, they said.
Prosecutors usually avoid doing that to make sure they know what to expect a witness to say and avoid surprises before the grand jury. Prosecutors had to later withdraw the subpoenas after realizing information the witnesses would need to discuss with grand jurors was classified.
In June, Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer who joined the administration last year to investigate election and voting related issues, moved on to the conspiracy investigation team.
DiGenova's wife, Victoria Toensing, another Reagan-era prosecutor-turned-Trump ally, also joined the team. In August, the couple took a preplanned two-week trip to France, frustrating Washington officials who already thought the team was moving too slowly.
The team encountered other problems, including that some of their allegations fell outside the five-year statute of limitations and had no clear link to South Florida, people familiar with it said.
Prosecutors had been trying to make the case that the FBI's court-authorized August 2022 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home, which led to charges that he illegally retained classified information, was unlawful. But an FBI agent told diGenova that tying the search to a broader conspiracy spanning from Florida to Washington would be challenging; diGenova disagreed and called FBI Director Kash Patel, who moved the agent off the investigation.
DiGenova again fumed when officials in Washington refused to set up a room in the Fort Pierce, Fla., office where prosecutors could securely review and store highly classified material, some of the people said.
Quiñones agreed to devote $1 million from the office's budget to build such a room, but senior officials saw it as unnecessary, telling diGenova to work out of an FBI office nearby. DiGenova saw that as a sign that Blanche wasn't fully invested in the probe.
In September, two officials -- both women -- from the deputy attorney general's office traveled to Florida to learn more about the status of the cases. The visit angered diGenova, who believed they were there to sideline him and take over the investigation. He called a top Blanche deputy to complain, referring derisively to the women. DiGenova also said he would tell the U.S. Marshals to remove the women from the grand jury room if they showed up there.
The next call came from Blanche, who demanded diGenova fly to Washington for a meeting. DiGenova instead resigned on Sept. 10.
Later that month, Olsen stepped down, writing in an email to Quiñones that he was "no longer willing to participate in this matter" given the probe's direction from Washington.