U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks to the media as U.S. President Donald Trump listens, at the White House in Washington D.C., June 27, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
President Donald Trump's revenge investigation into all of the previous probes into him reached a new level of chaos, adding to yet another failure to the pile of recent legal battles.
Trump demanded that the Justice Department and FBI conduct an investigation tying together the investigations into him over the past six years to prove that they're part of some "grand conspiracy" from the so-called "deep state," the Associated Press reported.
The plan is to tie together the Russian election interference and Trump's retention of classified documents. The goal was to create a narrative of a government conspiracy, but the problem is that there was legitimate criminal misconduct with a long trail of evidence.
“The idea of connecting all those different investigations into one single conspiracy, there's no basis for that,” said retired federal prosecutor Randall Eliason. “Then, maybe more importantly, there's no basis for an allegation that any one of them was actually a criminal act against Trump. They've all been verified and upheld in one way or another.”
Last week, the efforts took a significant turn when the leader of the probe abruptly resigned.
Joe DiGenova, who's 81, has served in and out of government for decades, including President Ronald Reagan’s administration. He became well known after attacking Trump's cybersecurity official who maintained the 2020 election was legitimate. DiGenova said that the man should be "drawn and quartered."
Trump has seen DiGenova's investigation as a kind of reckoning from previous officials and administrations.
The president has been miffed about the slow pace of diGenova's progress. By Sept. 10, he was out, leaving comments in his wake that he doesn't see any indictments coming out of the investigation. A lack of evidence hasn't stopped Trump with others like former FBI James Comey.
“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova told the New York Post.
DiGenova swears he was taken out of context and that there is "plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”
DiGenova came in after Maria Medetis Long, a career national security prosecutor, was removed after conveying concerns about the legal strength of a criminal case against former CIA Director John Brennan.
In a statement after diGenova's ousting, Brennan's attorney, Ken Wainstein said, "I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this." He alleged that the DOJ is “blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction."
The reality is that "President Trump wants action in certain cases, and this seems to be one of them,” said John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney in Virginia.
He doesn't expect the DOJ to back down any time soon.