Jason Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney in Miami who spent a year running a criminal investigation of President Donald Trump’s critics, resigned from the Justice Department on Friday. The investigation has not produced a single indictment.
He is the third senior department official to go since Tuesday’s midterms. John Eisenberg, who headed the National Security Division, announced his departure the same day. Harmeet Dhillon, who led the Civil Rights Division, resigned Thursday.
The “grand conspiracy” probe, run through a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, asked whether intelligence officials and other government figures conspired against Trump from his 2016 campaign onward. Its subjects included John Brennan, who directed the CIA under President Barack Obama. Brennan sued to force prosecutors to preserve their records, and a federal judge threw the case out as premature. ABC News, citing sources, reported that department leadership had privately criticized Quiñones for the lack of progress and for frequent trips to Washington.
Attorney General Todd Blanche’s statement did not mention the investigation. “We are grateful for Jason’s leadership in combatting violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime,” he said.
For Black readers, the useful comparison is where the department put its lawyers. A year of subpoenas went to a case against officials who had investigated the president. In the same period, the Civil Rights Division under Dhillon moved to drop the police reform agreements reached after the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Dhillon said she had sought to resign three weeks ago but was asked by White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to stay through the election, Fox News reported.
The priorities were plain. The division meant to protect Black people from discrimination and abusive policing gave up the agreements that were supposed to do it, and the department’s most aggressive prosecutors went after the president’s enemies. The families who lost someone to the police got nothing from either.
Democrats take control of the House in January and will have subpoena power over all of it: the Fort Pierce grand jury, the abandoned agreements and the question of who now runs a Civil Rights Division with its leader gone. Blanche has not said who will replace Quiñones or Dhillon.
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