Everyone has been talking about the grand jury investigating Trump's "grand conspiracy" theory here in the Southern District of Florida. Bloomberg covered it last week (including two AUSAs being fired or having to resign --depending on who you ask -- for not participating) and the New York Times has the story this morning. From the Times:
Far-right influencers have been hinting
in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a
federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised
charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries.
Their
theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of
Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President
Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a years long plot
spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced
after leaving office.
But that
narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and
taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal
investigation.
Last week, Mr. Reding
Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of
Florida, issued more than two dozen subpoenas, including to officials
who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s
2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Among
them, they said, were James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of
national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence
agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former
lawyer at the bureau.
Bloomberg has more details about the politics inside the office:
The national security unit has long been organized as a section within the office’s criminal division, but Reding Quiñones this week informed staff that he stripped the criminal chief’s authority by ordering the national security group to start reporting directly to the US attorney’s executive office, according to a Nov. 3 email obtained by Bloomberg Law.
That announcement came 14 hours after prominent MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec
denounced the criminal chief, Peter Forand, on X for donating $2,300 to the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign and other Democratic causes.
Forand will “be in charge of” of the newly empaneled grand juries “to investigate Crossfire Hurricane and the Mar-a-Lago raid conspiracy,” Posobiec posted. “Can Forand be trusted to fairly investigate the Biden regime and Jack Smith if he’s friends with them and donates thousands of dollars to them?”
About two hours after Reding Quiñones emailed out the new leadership structure, Posobiec referenced his earlier Forand criticism in
a new post to his 3.2 million followers: “UPDATE: Hearing good things on this.”
Forand, who former colleagues say has operated as a nonpartisan prosecutor willing to implement any administration’s objectives, had previously been removed from an office directly outside of Reding Quiñones’ executive suite to a different part of the building, three people said.
That office space is now occupied by a newly hired chief of staff to the US attorney—an unusual position under any top prosecutor. That chief of staff, Jim Poland, is an FBI agent on detail, who’s overseeing the office’s “non-litigation and administrative functions,” Reding Quiñones wrote to staff Nov. 3.
