The Trump administration’s retribution campaign hit a snag this week.
Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor who tried to help overturn the results of the 2020 election and was tapped this spring by the Justice Department to lead a probe into President Donald Trump’s political foes, resigned Thursday, in a move that experts say could be a sign that Trump’s pursuit of political vendettas is shakier than it seems.
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diGenova made his exit amid growing tensions with senior department officials, according to ABC News, which first reported the resignation. diGenova called his time at the department an “honor and a privilege” and though he wished the DOJ “well,” he would not comment further.
But in an interview with NBC News on Friday, diGenova said: “The days leading up to my resignation were shrouded in the secrecy of administrative behavior, and they will remain so.”
“I want to underscore that we were following the principles of federal prosecution all along the way, and we did that. We were moving smartly, and I underscore we were moving smartly, and then things, you know, got where they got,” he said Friday.
A DOJ spokesperson told NBC Friday: “We are grateful to Joe diGenova for his many years of service to the Department. The Attorney General thanks him for his work these past five months alongside the great team of experienced prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida, led by U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones.”
Public details of diGenova’s work have been sparse, though NBC confirmed in April that the 81-year-old was working on a so-called “grand conspiracy investigation” unfolding in the Southern District of Florida.
diGenova told NBC Friday that if the team in Florida is “allowed to do their jobs” then they will “succeed supremely” and he said that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Florida was doing a “phenomenal job under the worst of circumstances.”
The grand conspiracy investigation, overseen by U.S. Attorney Jason Quinones, a Trump appointee, is looking into former federal officials who investigated or prosecuted Trump in the past — specifically, the individuals involved in the origins of the investigation during Trump’s first term for possible collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. The administration argues the intelligence community conspired against Trump during this time.
Sources who spoke to the New York Post said diGenova’s resignation came amid frustration inside the Justice Department and White House that he was “slow-rolling” indictments and falling down too many “rabbit holes.” Another source told the Post he was sharing “unrealistic expectations” with Trump about what the grand jury investigation could actually produce.
But on Friday, diGenova told NBC, “I have no doubt that I was going to be able to take every one of these cases across the finish line because we had put them in perfect posture to proceed.”
When speaking to the New York Post just a day earlier, however, diGenova said, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”
Steven Cash, the executive director of Steady State, a nonprofit advocacy group whose members are former senior national security officials, told HuffPost the resignation may signal just how thin the Justice Department’s investigation really is.
diGenova was a “well-respected prosecutor in the 1980s,” Cash said, long before he became a “Trump sycophant.”
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“Even a guy like that, I like to think, has a conscience and personal ethics and it sounds like a lot of people put in that position don’t have the stomach to do what Trump is asking them to do: indict innocent people.”
The administration has been struggling to stick the landing on convictions for Trump foes. Federal judges dismissed criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James last year after finding that the interim U.S. attorneys tasked with bringing the cases were not lawfully appointed.
Things haven’t been much better for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C, either. Former Fox host and U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro has seen nearly a dozen cases she’s brought accusing people of threatening the president or assaulting ICE officers crumble due to lack of evidence.
Beau Tremitiere, deputy director of Impact Programs and counsel for Protect Democracy, told HuffPost that diGenova’s resignation signals a larger problem brewing for the administration.
“Yet again, Trump’s efforts to translate his personal vendettas into actual criminal punishment are failing. Joe diGenova’s resignation fits the broader pattern of this administration: noisy threats about prosecuting serious lawbreaking, followed by delay, inaction, and quiet retreat once actual evidence is required and the guardrails of the legal system kick in,” Tremitiere said.
Under Trump, the Justice Department has become heavily politicized.
The agency formed a “weaponization working group” last year to investigate what the Trump administration described as “anti-conservative bias.” In reality, the group rooted out investigators and prosecutors who worked on the department’s massive probe of Jan. 6. In the last two years, the DOJ has regularly defied court orders, and Todd Blanche, as America’s chief law enforcement officer, has openly refuted the notion of judicial independence.
Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization monitoring authoritarian creep in the U.S. government, has kept a running list of actions taken by the Trump administration, and its inventory reveals the DOJ’s repeated willingness to single out anyone who criticized Trump or his policies or tried to hold him to account.
Indeed, resignations have been in the thousands at the DOJ since Trump returned to the White House, with many career prosecutors and investigators leaving or being fired as Trump’s handpicked officials have created an increasingly political and hostile work environment.
“I don’t think Donald Trump cares whether there’s enough evidence or if there’s a conviction. He just wants an investigation,” Cash said.
For diGenova to resign instead of being fired could indicate how far off the rails things really are, he added.
“On its face, I have to respect somebody who has the ethical dimension to be willing to say no and walk away,” he said. “But maybe that’s not what happened.”
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