Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami whose office ran the Justice Department's so-called grand conspiracy investigation of President Donald Trump's perceived adversaries, has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Friday.
He is one of several senior department officials to leave after Tuesday's midterm elections, in which Republicans took heavy losses. Blanche said National Security Division chief John Eisenberg also resigned Friday, a day after Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said she was leaving the Civil Rights Division.
People familiar with the matter said Washington officials had grown frustrated with Reding Quiñones, both for showing little progress on the conspiracy cases and for his management of an office handling major drug and gang work. Three people with knowledge of the situation said Aakash Singh, a top Blanche deputy, was already supervising many of the office's most sensitive investigations.
Blanche's announcement left out the conspiracy inquiry entirely. He praised Reding Quiñones instead for work on violent crime, trafficking and transnational crime, including the indictment of Raúl Castro. The former Cuban president was charged in May in connection with the 1996 downing of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles.
In his own social media post, Reding Quiñones thanked Trump for his trust and said he was departing proud of what his office had achieved.
A stalled investigation
The Southern District of Florida became the center of the effort to determine whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against Trump. The theory sought to connect actions from the 2016 campaign to Jack Smith's later investigation, whose charges against Trump were dismissed. No charges have come directly out of the effort.
Leadership of the case has churned repeatedly. A career official in Miami who found the evidence insufficient to charge former CIA Director John Brennan was taken off it. Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, then took over but left in September with no charges filed, blaming headquarters officials for trying to seize control. Another Trump loyalist on the case departed weeks later.
In recent weeks, investigators delayed planned grand jury appearances by several witnesses, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Reding Quiñones is at least the third U.S. attorney to step down after being assigned to the inquiry; two in Virginia were pushed out last year after deciding charges against figures such as former FBI Director James Comey were not justified.
departure follows the well-tread path of others who signed up for this impossible dream.
Stacey Young, head of Justice Connection
His office was also shrinking. It had more than 200 lawyers when he arrived but just over half that by the fall after firings and resignations, leaving him to bring in military lawyers to fill the gaps.
Other senior exits
Eisenberg had led the National Security Division since June 2025, overseeing espionage, terrorism, export control and cyber cases. On his watch, former national security adviser John Bolton entered a guilty plea this year on classified-information allegations; Bolton has not yet been sentenced.
Dhillon's Civil Rights Division, which she sharply reshaped, failed in a recent attempt to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. It also led the department's campaign against noncitizen voting.
The department is still pursuing Comey. In October it filed charges in Washington, without a grand jury indictment or a judge's signature, accusing him of directing a 2016 leak of classified information to a reporter. Comey denies the accusation and is seeking dismissal.
