Trump's Justice Department hit by 2 high-profile departures this week
Jason Reding Quiñones, who oversaw probes into past criminal investigations of U.S. President Donald Trump as the top federal prosecutor in Miami, has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Friday. His departure follows the announcement on Thursday that Harmeet Dhillon was leaving her post leading to the Justice Department's civil rights unit.
Jason Reding Quiñones, Harmeet Dhillon, who each led controversial probes, leaving administration
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Jason Reding Quiñones, who oversaw probes into past criminal investigations of U.S. President Donald Trump as the top federal prosecutor in Miami, has resigned, Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Friday.
“We are grateful for Jason’s leadership in combating violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime,” said Blanche.
It was not immediately clear why Quiñones resigned. In a statement on X, Quiñones said his resignation was effective Friday and called it an honour to serve in the role.
His office has been involved in investigations related to the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, and had also brought criminal charges against former Cuban president Raúl Castro in a major escalation of the Trump administration's pressure campaign against the communist country.
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As U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Quiñones was at the centre of Trump's attempts to leverage the Justice Department to exact revenge on his political adversaries.
The investigation, which officials dubbed a “grand conspiracy," sought to establish that the president was the victim of a long-running criminal conspiracy.
The office was tasked with investigating whether officials in the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations had engaged in criminal conduct while overseeing probes of Trump's handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 as well as his campaign's contacts with Russia in the 2016 election, among other issues.
Former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI agents were among those subpoenaed to answer questions as part of the probes.
The efforts have not led to any charges being filed. Lawyers Joseph DiGenova and Kurt Olsen, who each supported Trump as he sought to prevent his 2020 presidential election defeat, had joined the team based in Florida but announced their resignations in recent weeks.
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On Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, who reshaped the Justice Department's civil rights unit to pursue Trump administration priorities including voter data requests and gun rights cases, also resigned.
Leading into this week's midterms, in which Democrats flipped many Republican seats to win back control of Congress, Dhillon led an effort to obtain voter rolls from about 30 U.S. states, most of them with Democratic leadership. Those lawsuits were rejected 27 times by the courts, with a federal judge in a California voter roll case calling them "unprecedented and illegal."
The efforts were motivated by a belief from the Trump administration that the voter list was filled with noncitizens.
Harmeet Dhillon is shown at a news conference in Washington on Aug. 7, 2025. (Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)
Dhillon also led investigations to pressure dozens of universities she viewed as too liberal. Many of those centred on alleged antisemitism, diversity initiatives, and treatment of transgender people. Those probes helped the department extract hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement agreements from some of the nation’s premier universities but one high-profile target, Harvard University, refused to pay a large settlement and instead has repeatedly fought the Trump administration in court.
“We ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more,” Dhillon said in a social media post announcing her departure, using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. Dhillon, a Sikh born in India to parents who immigrated to the U.S. when she was a child, is expected to return to her private law firm.
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The civil rights division in prior administrations conducted investigations into police departments accused of systematic civil rights violations, including after high-profile killings of Black people by local police. Under Dhillon, police reform settlements brought about after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were scrapped.
More than three quarters of the unit’s workforce at the beginning of Trump’s second term have left.
"For almost 70 years, the Civil Rights Division brought to fruition the civil rights laws that Americans demanded. Dhillon decimated it," said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department official who now heads Justice Connection, an advocacy group.
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Blanche on Friday also announced the resignation of a less visible figure in the department, John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the national security division.
Eisenberg was involved in the prosecution of former national security adviser John Bolton, according to a Politico report. Bolton, a former Trump administration official often criticized by the president, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a count of illegally retaining classified information.
Both Eisenberg and Bolton in Trump's first term refused requests to appear before Democratic committees investigating a controversial phone call between the U.S. president and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but later acquitted in the Senate.
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