Second prosecutor quits Justice Department probe of Trump's perceived enemies

A second senior prosecutor has quit the Justice Department team investigating whether former national security officials conspired against President Trump, deepening turmoil inside a politically fraught inquiry that has produced subpoenas of some of the government's most prominent former intelligence chiefs but, more than a year in, no charges against any of them.

Kurt Olsen, a longtime Trump loyalist who spent years pushing the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, resigned Monday from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he had been assigned to what prosecutors and the White House have called the "grand conspiracy" investigation. The probe examines whether officials who investigated Mr. Trump over the past decade — including the 2016 Russia inquiry and the classified-documents case brought after he left office — violated his civil rights by doing so.

What happened

Olsen's departure was first reported Monday and confirmed by multiple news organizations, including CBS News, which said he left without publicly stating a reason. He is the second high-profile member of the investigative team to leave in three weeks. Joseph diGenova, the prosecutor who had been leading the probe day to day, resigned on September 11, the same day his office delivered a grand jury subpoena to former CIA Director John Brennan. People familiar with the matter have said diGenova left amid friction with Justice Department leadership in Washington over the pace of the investigation and pressure to produce indictments.

Olsen's exit narrows an already small circle of prosecutors willing to carry the investigation forward. He had been a visible presence on the team: it was Olsen whom Brennan's own lawyer said he consulted about the scope of the inquiry, according to reporting on the Brennan subpoena.

The numbers

The inquiry has run for more than a year without producing an indictment against any of its most prominent targets. Former FBI Director James Comey has already been charged in a related case; former CIA Director Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have been subpoenaed but not charged. Brennan is due to appear before a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, on October 15, roughly two and a half weeks from now, under a subpoena his lawyers have contested in a federal court docket tied to the grand jury proceeding. Two of the investigation's most senior line prosecutors have now resigned within a month, and other lawyers who had been detailed to the team on a temporary basis have also rotated off in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the office's staffing.

How we got here

The investigation traces back to a directive Pam Bondi issued as attorney general within hours of taking office in February 2025, creating a "Weaponization Working Group" to review what the administration described as politicized prosecutions of Mr. Trump during the Biden years. That review evolved into a formal grand jury investigation based in South Florida, built around a theory that officials involved in the FBI's original Russia counterintelligence inquiry — the subject of a lengthy Justice Department inspector general review of surveillance practices in that case — acted to deprive Mr. Trump of his civil rights.

Bondi did not stay in office to see the case through. Mr. Trump removed her as attorney general on April 2, amid reported dissatisfaction with the pace of prosecutions against his political adversaries and her handling of records related to Jeffrey Epstein. Todd Blanche, previously the deputy attorney general, served as acting head of the department before the Senate confirmed him as the 88th attorney general in a narrow vote on August 8, and he was sworn in two days later. It is Blanche's Justice Department that has now watched two of the investigation's senior prosecutors resign in the space of a month without securing an indictment of either Brennan or Clapper.

Olsen brought his own history to the assignment. He had served in the White House as a Trump-appointed director of election security, where he pushed to challenge the 2020 results, including joining an effort with Texas's attorney general urging the Supreme Court to overturn the outcome in other states. He also helped set in motion an FBI-assisted seizure of ballots and equipment in Fulton County, Georgia. The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol subpoenaed him in 2022 over his contacts with Justice Department officials and with Mr. Trump himself on the day of the riot.

Who is affected

The investigation's targets are a roster of the government's former top intelligence and law enforcement officials. Comey's case has already gone forward. Brennan and Clapper remain under subpoena, and a separate, Washington-based strand of the inquiry is examining whether Brennan misled Congress in testimony given years ago about the intelligence community's 2017 assessment of Russian interference — an accusation Brennan has denied. Paul Abbate, a former FBI deputy director, has also drawn scrutiny over how the bureau handled related records.

The churn among prosecutors leaves the office thinner just as the investigation approaches a milestone: Brennan's scheduled grand jury appearance. It also raises practical questions inside the Southern District of Florida, whose staff must now brief incoming replacements on a legally and politically sensitive case that office veterans describe as unusually compressed by outside pressure to move quickly.

Reaction

Brennan's attorney, Ken Wainstein, has argued in the Brennan matter, reported by Fox News and other outlets, that the government is pursuing a case with no legitimate foundation. "I've never even conceived of a situation like this," Wainstein said of the Justice Department's approach, adding that prosecutors were "blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction."

"Our justice system operates on the principle that the President cannot demand the prosecution of an individual to settle personal scores," Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats wrote to the Justice Department last year.

Ranking member Dick Durbin and eight other Senate Judiciary Democrats pressed then-Attorney General Bondi in writing for documents and testimony about the investigation's origins and staffing, part of a broader inquiry the committee has pursued into what its Democratic members call the politicization of the Justice Department, a line of oversight Democrats say applies equally to Blanche's tenure. The Justice Department under Blanche has not publicly explained Olsen's departure or responded to the Democrats' earlier demands in detail. Neither Olsen nor diGenova has issued a public statement about why he left.

What happens next

The immediate test for the investigation is whether Brennan actually appears before the Fort Pierce grand jury on October 15, or whether his lawyers succeed in delaying or narrowing the proceeding through further motions, a process first disclosed in a court filing earlier this month. Prosecutors must also decide whether to seek an indictment of Brennan or Clapper before the investigation loses more of the personnel who have carried it for the past year, or whether the loss of its most experienced attorneys signals that the government's theory is struggling to hold up under the scrutiny of career line prosecutors as well as outside critics.

For Senate Judiciary Democrats, the resignations are likely to sharpen oversight demands now directed at Blanche's Justice Department, which inherited both the investigation and the unmet deadlines the committee set last year for turning over internal communications about the case's management. For the Southern District of Florida, the more immediate task is simpler: finding prosecutors willing to take on a caseload that has already cost two of its most senior assignees their jobs in the space of a month, and has now outlasted the tenure of the attorney general who ordered it opened.