By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
WASHINGTON, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Two top officials at the US Department of Justice resigned on Friday, accelerating an exodus of senior figures from the department following Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump’s Republicans lost control of Congress.
The departures of John Eisenberg, who headed the DOJ’s national security division, and Jason Reding Quiñones, who pursued probes into the past criminal investigations of Trump, follow the resignation of civil rights unit chief Harmeet Dhillon on Thursday.
The DOJ is now without leaders for two of its signature initiatives — relitigating past investigations and targeting higher education.
It is not clear why Quiñones or Eisenberg resigned. It is not unusual for senior US officials to leave the government following a midterm election, especially one that delivers a sharp setback to the party in power. Democrats plan a raft of investigations into Trump’s administration and business dealings.
As US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Quiñones was at the center of Trump’s attempts to leverage the Justice Department to investigate his political adversaries. His office was tasked with investigating the criminal probes of Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 and his campaign’s contacts with Russia in the 2016 election, among other issues.
The investigation, which officials dubbed a “grand conspiracy”, sought to establish that the president was the victim of a long-running criminal conspiracy. But it has struggled to bring criminal charges thus far and the prosecutor who had been overseeing the probe, Joseph diGenova, resigned in September.
Quiñones’ Miami office also brought criminal charges against former Cuban President Raul Castro in a major escalation of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the communist country.
(Reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff; additional reporting by David Ljunggren and Bhargav Acharya; editing by Andy Sullivan and Hugh Lawson)
