Joe diGenova Quit the 'Grand Conspiracy' Probe at 3 P.M. Thursday. In a Year, It Charged No One.

Joe diGenova, the veteran Washington prosecutor and Trump loyalist who was brought in this spring to supervise the Justice Department's sprawling "grand conspiracy" investigation into Obama- and Biden-era officials, abruptly resigned on Thursday without having charged a single person.

"I resigned by letter today at 3 o'clock. It was an honor and a privilege to serve the president and the department. I'm not going to say anything further. I wish them well," diGenova told ABC News, which first reported his departure. To NBC News he was even briefer: "I'm moving on." The letter went to Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had appointed him in April. A department spokesperson said only, "We are grateful to Joe diGenova for his many years of service."

The reasons were not hard to find. Sources told CBS News, Fox News and ABC News that diGenova had "lost the confidence of both the Justice Department and the White House" and had been "effectively sidelined well before his departure," his role shrinking internally over a period of months. Justice Department officials told NBC News the investigation simply was not moving fast enough, even after Washington-based DOJ lawyers were sent to Florida to help. Over roughly a year the probe issued dozens of subpoenas and produced zero prosecutions. DiGenova had pitched himself to President Trump as the man who could "ramp up" the effort.

The investigation is run out of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida, overseen by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, with grand jury proceedings in Fort Pierce, the courthouse of Judge Aileen Cannon. Its central premise is that intelligence officials and others conspired across nearly a decade, from the 2016 campaign through the criminal cases brought against Trump after 2021, to keep him out of office. A second, related probe examines whether former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress in 2023 about the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference in 2016. Much of the alleged conduct falls outside the usual five-year statute of limitations.

DiGenova, 81, served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from 1983 to 1988 under Ronald Reagan and later became a fixture of Trump's legal orbit, including the failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. When Blanche installed him in April, he replaced career prosecutor Maria Medetis Long, who had been removed after raising concerns about the strength of the evidence and objecting to the Brennan investigation. DiGenova then brought in his wife, attorney Victoria Toensing, along with Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, all of whom had worked on the 2020 election challenges. Toensing will leave the department on Friday.

In perhaps the most revealing comment of the day, diGenova told the New York Post: "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem." He did not elaborate, and he declined to say whether that described his own situation.

The Justice Department has not named a successor. Officials told NBC News the investigation will continue under the Washington lawyers already assigned to it. Critics of the probe, who have called it a politically driven effort to punish the president's enemies, seized on the resignation as evidence that even a hand-picked loyalist could not find a case to bring. Its defenders in the administration have offered no public explanation for why a year of grand jury work has yet to produce an indictment.