By Evan Perez, Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN
(CNN) — Jason Reding Quiñones, the top federal prosecutor in Florida’s southern district, arrived in Washington, DC, last month for a meeting with top Justice Department officials as White House pressure continued to build over bringing criminal charges against one of President Donald Trump’s top political foes.
For months, Reding Quiñones had been promising that his office would deliver on one of Trump’s top priorities: pursuing criminal charges against a number of former government officials — chief among them former CIA Director John Brennan — who were involved in investigations of him from 2016 to 2024, according to people briefed on the investigation.
Prosecutors in Reding Quiñones’ office opened the meeting with an even firmer assessment of the investigation, which they previously warned was not a strong case.
With Reding Quiñones sitting near her, Maria Medetis Long, the seasoned prosecutor who has led the probe since its start, told acting Deputy Attorney General Colin McDonald and Trent McCotter, his top deputy, that the case against Brennan was too weak to bring, and the evidence didn’t support the charges of lying to Congress that Justice officials and House Republicans have sought, people briefed on the matter said.
Not everyone in the room agreed with Medetis Long, some of them said. Her assessment got a frosty reception, particularly since for months Reding Quiñones had sought to reassure his bosses in Washington that the case, while slow-moving, was making progress.
“That’s not good enough,” was the message she received, according to two people briefed on the meeting.
By this time, Attorney General Pam Bondi had already been fired — in part because of the slow pace of the prosecutions Trump wants.
In April, at an earlier meeting with Bondi, on the day Trump fired her, Reding Quiñones had told her that prosecutors in his office could bring the charges over lying to Congress against Brennan by the end of the year, people briefed on the matter said. The broader conspiracy case, however, appeared moribund at the time.
The probe into Brennan is a major test as the former CIA director has been a vocal critic of Trump and helped to oversee the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russia sought to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election, one of the president’s biggest political grievances.
A push to prosecute other perceived Trump enemies James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, in Virginia faltered after a judge tossed the indictments against them. Federal prosecutors in North Carolina have since brought new charges against Comey alleging a social media post showing sea shells arranged to display the numbers “86 47” represented a criminal threat against Trump. Comey has denied he intended to threaten the president.
Now, with Acting Attorney Todd Blanche under the president’s tight leash as he seeks to keep the job, the latest update from Florida set the stage for a major shakeup to deliver on what Reding Quiñones has been promising since last fall.
Medetis Long was removed from overseeing the investigation days after she delivered her assessment at the meeting in Washington. Blanche then put Joe diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer, in Florida on the case. DiGenova is a former Washington, DC, US attorney who briefly represented the president in one of the probes that he is now investigating.
Since then, any perceived progress on the investigation has been essentially reset, with investigators starting anew to build a broad case against Trump’s biggest target.
The Justice Department declined comment on ongoing investigations.
The department previously said of Medetis Long’s removal: “As a matter of routine practice, attorneys are moved around on cases so offices can most effectively allocate resources. It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.”
DiGenova in recent weeks discussed his new role with the president and plans to base himself in Fort Pierce, Florida, the courthouse where federal Judge Aileen Cannon presides, according to a person familiar with the matter. Cannon was the judge who dealt the fatal blow to the 2023 indictment of Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
A bigger fish in Fort Pierce
The choice of Fort Pierce in the southern Florida district, where Trump was indicted years ago, is an important signal of diGenova’s plans to refocus the probe on a broad conspiracy that goes beyond allegations against Brennan.
It’s a shift from the recent months of the investigation, which had been focused largely on bringing charges in Washington, DC. Career prosecutors determined Washington as the only viable venue for charges since that is where Brennan provided the congressional testimony at issue. Under federal criminal rules, indictments generally are brought in the jurisdiction where the alleged crime occurred.
Shortly before being shipped down to Florida, diGenova laid out some of his vision for the Fort Pierce-based conspiracy investigation in an April 2 appearance on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s podcast in which he decried delays in bringing indictments.
He criticized bringing the original cases against Comey and James — saying he would have saved those efforts for a larger conspiracy case against them and others.
He also accused Bondi of blocking plans to appoint him to run the civil rights section in Reding Quiñones’ office.
“If she had not done that, we would have indictments brought in the last two months,” diGenova said.
In recent weeks, with diGenova officially at the wheel, prosecutors have overseen interviews of current and former lower-level CIA employees who were involved in the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference.
More than 150 subpoenas have been issued in the investigation, including to Comey, according to people familiar on the matter. And another round is expected, this time for testimony from former officials viewed as closer to Brennan, people familiar with the matter said.
Some subpoenas had been withdrawn under diGenova, but are expected to be reissued, people familiar with the matter said.
The conspiracy idea has made the rounds on right-wing social media for months — including in the podcast with diGenova — and centers on the idea Trump was the victim of a wide-ranging plot that spanned from the 2016 Russia election interference investigation to special counsel Jack Smith’s probe that resulted in charges against Trump. Cannon’s 2024 dismissal of the classified document charges that Smith brought against Trump have made her a favorite among the president and his allies.
Reding Quiñones outlined to Justice officials last fall plans to use a grand jury in Fort Pierce to conduct the broad conspiracy investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
The idea immediately won support from top brass at the Justice Department, where Trump’s retribution agenda was already faltering. On her first day in office, Bondi ordered the creation of a so-called Weaponization Working Group that would focus on investigating people from previous administrations who the president believed targeted him unfairly.
It was part of a broader push to punish government officials associated with investigations of Trump and his supporters. Hundreds of Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents and other employees have been lost their jobs in a more than yearlong purge.
Even now, the department’s push against so-called weaponization had little to show for it. Blanche has overseen the claimed anti-weaponization effort, though Bondi is the one who has lost her job in part over its shortcomings.
Trump himself had expressed his frustrations, including in social media posts and in meetings with department leaders. At a White House gathering with a group of US attorneys in January, Trump complained that some were weak and that they needed to move more quickly to deliver on his agenda, CNN previously reported.
From poor reviews to a man in charge
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, Reding Quiñones was not at the top of the list Trump allies had drawn up to run the third largest US attorney’s office, a sprawling district that stretches from the Florida Keys to coastal central Florida counties. At the time, the Air Force officer and military lawyer was a Florida state court judge overseeing domestic violence and other criminal cases.
He grew up in Miami and spent most of his life known by the surname Reding, only beginning to use Reding Quiñones around the time he sought a state judgeship. In documents provided to the Senate for his nomination, he said he opted to honor his Cuban American mother’s surname when he applied for the judgeship in 2023.
His career as line prosecutor from 2018 to 2024 in the Miami office he now runs didn’t seem to stand out, former colleagues say. At the Justice Department, prosecutors start out doing major-crimes cases and other matters that tend to have a high volume of work, with goal of getting as much experience as possible.
In documents provided to the Senate for his nomination, Reding Quiñones said he had tried three criminal jury trials, one criminal bench trial, and one civil bench trial. He said he has appeared in court, filing documents or making motions hundreds of times. His supervisors in Miami noted his low productivity in performance reviews at the time, according to former colleagues.
“He didn’t stand out exactly,” one former senior prosecutor said, “I’d say his work ethic wasn’t what you’d see in lawyers at that stage.”
Asked about a report in the Miami Herald that first described his poor performance reviews, Reding Quiñones pushed back in the documents.
“While I was an Assistant U.S. Attorney, an initial evaluation contained significant factual errors regarding my productivity,” he wrote. “Once this matter was brought to the attention of leadership, the evaluation was immediately corrected.”
He noted that during some of the period he worked as a line prosecutor, he served in overseas as a JAG Air Force lawyer.
A Justice Department spokesperson said: “Judge Reding Quiñones has presided over more than 200 bench and jury trials, served nearly a decade as a Department of Justice attorney handling complex national security and criminal matters, and currently serves as an Air Force Colonel after more than two decades of military service. He brings proven courtroom judgment, operational leadership, and public service experience to the Southern District of Florida, and the results of his office reflect that commitment every day.”
In the Miami-based US Attorney’s Office, Reding Quiñones’ high profile within the Trump administration has come with a price.
Attorneys were bracing for change after Trump’s election. Some made their exit, anticipating that their previous work would make them targets for retribution. But others believed that the change of administration would be like others in the past, with new priorities and career lawyers following those new objectives.
“We all saw what Trump had said during the campaign, so people knew what was possible,” a former senior prosecutor in the office said. “But no one expected them to just come in and destroy everything. So much experience in that office, just gone.”
More than 100 vacancies now exist, according to people familiar with the Miami office. The loss of some of the top experienced lawyers in the office has an impact on cases, current and former Justice officials say.
At his investiture ceremony in December Reding Quiñones vowed to pursue the administration’s priorities, including reducing violent crime. He invoked his military experience to help the office win cases, according to a person at the ceremony.
In her remarks at the ceremony, Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga had a more staid message, reminding the room of the heavy responsibility of federal prosecutors. She cited a famous quote from the 1935 Berger v. US Supreme Court ruling that reads in part:
The role of US attorney, “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done…”
“He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor — indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones,” she added. “It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.”
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