A Justice Department attorney hand-picked by President Donald Trump to investigate his political enemies quit dramatically after a tense phone call with Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Joe diGenova was brought on less than five months ago to oversee the DOJ’s “grand conspiracy” investigation, which attempts to link the president’s various political grievances into one giant case out of Florida.
The investigation has generated dozens of subpoenas over the past year but has not led to any criminal prosecutions.
DiGenova told the New York Post last week he resigned over “ethical” disagreements with the DOJ’s leadership, saying, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”
It turns out the former federal prosecutor had recently clashed with Blanche, who was Trump’s criminal defense attorney before being tapped to lead the DOJ, after butting heads with officials over the pace of the investigation, sources told CNN.
DiGenova, 81, and Blanche, 52, had a tense call on Wednesday in part because diGenova was trying to block lawyers dispatched from DOJ headquarters to help with the probe, sources told the outlet.
A day later, diGenova, who was part of the legal team that tried to overturn the president’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, resigned.
He had been leading the investigation out of the Southern District of Florida alongside U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones.
“It was an honor and a privilege to serve the president and the department,” he told ABC News. “I’m not going to say anything further. I wish them well.”
Reached by CNN, he declined to comment on reports that he butted heads with Blanche, saying only, “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old-fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the DOJ for comment.
The president has long claimed he’s the victim of a “grand conspiracy” by Democrats and “deep-state” operatives who have been working to destroy him since his first term in office.
As part of its wide-ranging probe, the DOJ has issued dozens of subpoenas to intelligence officials who concluded in January 2017 that Russia was trying to tip the election in Trump’s favor.
Officials have also opened a criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, scrutinized the DOJ’s 2022 deliberations about whether to investigate Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, and tried to connect everything to the FBI’s 2022 search of Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club.
The president’s allies have argued that a single grand conspiracy case allows them to file charges in Florida for events that took place in Washington, D.C., including things that happened more than 10 years ago and would normally fall outside the statute of limitations.
Career prosecutors running the investigation originally balked at bringing the case, citing a lack of evidence, but were pushed aside in favor of diGenova, who vowed to bring charges.
Two previous investigations into high-level officials who led the Russia inquiry failed to turn up evidence of any crimes.
