The Trump “Grand Conspiracy” Case Is Losing Momentum. What Does That Mean for the Justice Department?

The resignation of Joseph diGenova is the latest setback for a politically explosive investigation that has struggled to turn a sweeping theory into criminal charges.

Joe diGenova resigned from the Justice Department on Thursday, September 10, 2026, abruptly stepping down from the role overseeing the sprawling “grand conspiracy” investigation into Obama- and Biden-era officials — an inquiry he’d led for barely five months. “It was an honor and a privilege to serve the president and the department,” the 81-year-old told reporters, declining to explain why he was actually leaving. His wife, attorney Victoria Toensing, who had also joined the prosecution team in Fort Pierce, Florida, left the department the following day.

The resignation is more than a personnel change. It raises a much larger question about the limits of politically driven investigations: what happens when prosecutors are asked to turn a sweeping political theory into a criminal case that can actually survive contact with a courtroom?

The investigation, run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, has spent months examining whether former federal officials and other Trump critics coordinated a long-running effort to keep him out of political office, beginning with the original scrutiny of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Despite dozens of subpoenas issued over the past year, it had not produced a single indictment by the time diGenova walked away.

According to people briefed on the matter who spoke to NBC News and CNN, Justice Department leadership had already lost confidence in his ability to run the investigation and felt it wasn’t moving fast enough — even after diGenova was given a team of Washington-based DOJ lawyers to help accelerate it. His exit came days after clashing repeatedly with senior Justice officials, including one recent conversation in which he was reportedly told directly that he’d lost his superiors’ confidence.

A Case Built Around a Broad Theory

At the center of the investigation sits an unusually expansive legal theory. Rather than treating the original Russia investigation, the classified-documents case, and other Trump-related episodes as separate events, investigators have explored whether they can be tied together as pieces of one larger conspiracy. That’s an ambitious legal reach: these events span years, multiple agencies, and different sets of prosecutors and officials, and connecting them requires far more than showing that individual decisions were controversial or politically inconvenient for Trump. Prosecutors ultimately have to prove that specific people committed specific crimes, with evidence that satisfies the actual elements of federal criminal law. A political narrative can link events through motive and timeline. A criminal case needs evidence that meets a legal standard — and those are not the same bar.

DiGenova Was an Unusual Choice From the Start

DiGenova brought real experience — he served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under Reagan — but he’d been out of active prosecutorial work for decades before Trump tapped him for this role in April 2026. He was, by that point, best known as a Trump loyalist: he’d worked on Trump’s failed 2020 election challenge and had spent years on television echoing Trump’s grievances about the investigations that had targeted him going back to his first term.

His appointment landed just days after the Justice Department removed Maria Medetis Long, the career prosecutor who had been running the related investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, after she told her superiors she didn’t believe there was sufficient evidence to bring charges. Long’s removal, first reported by CNN on April 17, came shortly after she’d delivered that assessment directly to DOJ leadership in Washington — and after Attorney General Pam Bondi had already been forced out, reportedly in part over frustration with how slowly Trump-priority cases were moving.

DiGenova, notably, chose to base the reconstituted investigation in Fort Pierce, Florida — the courthouse of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the same judge who dismantled the 2023 classified-documents indictment against Trump. That venue choice was widely read as a signal that diGenova intended to broaden the case well beyond the original Brennan-focused inquiry.

Legal analysts questioned the wisdom of putting someone with such an openly close political relationship to Trump in charge of an investigation into Trump’s perceived opponents. That controversy didn’t fade once the investigation actually got underway — if anything, diGenova’s five months in the role, and the way they ended, gave it new life.

The Investigation Has Struggled to Produce Charges

The most consequential fact here may be the simplest one: despite an expanding subpoena list and a full year of investigative activity, prosecutors have not obtained a single indictment in the broad “grand conspiracy” case. That doesn’t necessarily mean investigators found no wrongdoing anywhere. It does mean that the underlying theory hasn’t yet translated into a case prosecutors are confident can survive scrutiny in front of a grand jury, let alone a trial jury.

That gap matters enormously, because politically charged investigations get judged very differently once they move from gathering information to actually filing charges. Subpoenas can compel documents and testimony. Grand juries can hear evidence. But securing an indictment requires prosecutors to believe they can establish probable cause — and eventually, if it goes to trial, to defend both the evidence and the legal theory in open court.

The Case Has Already Seen Real Turnover

DiGenova wasn’t the first prosecutor pushed out of this general investigative effort. Long’s April removal came specifically after she resisted pressure to move quickly on charging Brennan without what she considered adequate evidentiary support — a career prosecutor, notably, who wasn’t a political appointee and had served across multiple administrations, exactly the kind of person whose presence on a case is typically meant to signal that charging decisions will follow the evidence rather than political timelines. Her departure was an early warning sign of the tension between what the administration wanted and what career prosecutorial judgment was willing to support.

DiGenova’s resignation is now the second major disruption to hit this investigation within the same year. Together, the two departures raise a real question about whether the effort can sustain any consistent legal strategy while pursuing a theory that spans multiple presidential administrations and touches nearly every major Trump-era controversy at once.

A Political Demand Is Not the Same as a Criminal Case

The Trump administration has repeatedly emphasized accountability for officials it believes participated in what it characterizes as politically motivated investigations of the president. There’s nothing inherently improper about a government investigating alleged misconduct by former officials — that happens under administrations of both parties. The trouble starts when the desired outcome appears to be settled before the evidence has actually established the case, which is precisely the dynamic Long’s removal exposed in April and which diGenova’s own frustrated exit now underscores from a different angle.

The Justice Department’s real challenge isn’t whether it’s allowed to investigate Trump’s opponents. It’s whether it can demonstrate that those investigations are being driven by evidence and applicable law rather than by political demand for a specific outcome — a distinction that matters even more when the targets are former senior national security and law enforcement officials.

Why the Courts Matter

Even if prosecutors eventually do bring charges, the investigation faces one more major hurdle: the courts themselves. Judges don’t decide cases based on political narratives — they evaluate jurisdiction, the legal validity of the charges, whether evidence was lawfully obtained, and whether the government can actually meet its burden of proof. A grand jury can approve an indictment, but an indictment is not a conviction, and it never has been. The louder the political rhetoric surrounding a prosecution, the more these legal safeguards end up mattering, not less.

The Investigation Could Still Continue

DiGenova’s departure doesn’t necessarily end the inquiry. According to NBC News, the Justice Department doesn’t plan to immediately name a specific replacement, hoping instead that the team of Washington-based DOJ attorneys already assigned to the case can get the investigation back on track without further delay. Subpoenas have already gone out to former officials and others connected to earlier Trump-related investigations, and the underlying legal work doesn’t simply disappear because its most visible public face just left.

There’s also a real possibility the investigation narrows rather than folds entirely. Earlier reporting had already indicated some prosecutors were considering smaller, more clearly defined conspiracy cases rather than trying to prove one enormous conspiracy spanning years and administrations — an approach that would be considerably easier to explain to a jury and prove within the bounds of actual criminal law than the sweeping theory diGenova was reportedly brought in specifically to expand. In other words, the investigation may not be disappearing. It may simply be forced to become far more precise than its original framing ever was.

The Bigger Test Is Institutional

The most important consequence of diGenova’s resignation may have little to do with him personally. It’s about the Justice Department’s own institutional credibility. When a government investigates its political opponents, the public needs some reliable way to distinguish legitimate law enforcement from political retaliation — and that doesn’t require assuming every allegation against a former official is baseless. It requires applying the same basic standard regardless of who’s under investigation: evidence has to come first, the law has to actually define the offense being charged, and prosecutors need to be willing to walk away when the evidence simply doesn’t support charges — which is exactly what Maria Medetis Long did in April, and exactly what appears to have cost her the assignment.

The Real Question Now

The “grand conspiracy” investigation began with an extraordinarily broad premise: that a series of seemingly separate investigations and government actions against Trump, stretching back to 2016, could be understood as connected pieces of one coordinated effort. The question now is whether that premise can survive the transition from political argument into an actual criminal prosecution, and diGenova’s abrupt exit — after five months, zero indictments, and an admitted loss of confidence from his own superiors — makes that question considerably harder to avoid.

If prosecutors eventually do uncover evidence strong enough to support real charges, they’ll have to present that evidence in open court, in front of a judge and jury who owe the political framing surrounding the case no particular deference. If they don’t, the continued absence of indictments will become part of the story in its own right. Either way, the investigation appears to be approaching a point where political expectation can no longer stand in for legal proof. For the Justice Department, that may be the most important test running underneath this entire episode.