Miami prosecutor expands 'grand conspiracy' probe of Trump's investigators to 2016 Russia inquiry

On February 26, 2026, The New York Times reported that Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, had widened a criminal "grand conspiracy" investigation into the former law-enforcement and intelligence officials who had once investigated Donald Trump. Subpoenas issued by his Miami office in recent weeks now reached back to the F.B.I.'s 2016 inquiry into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as to F.B.I. interviews conducted in the inquiry into the 2020 false-electors scheme.

The expansion built on a round of more than two dozen grand-jury subpoenas the office had issued in November 2025 to figures who had scrutinized Trump — among them former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former C.I.A. Director John Brennan, former F.B.I. Director James Comey, and former F.B.I. officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — and on a broadened late-January 2026 round seeking documents about the January 2017 intelligence-community assessment of Russian election interference. The animating theory, which the Times noted is unsupported by the evidence, holds that a cabal of Democrats and "deep-state" officials — possibly led by former President Barack Obama — waged a yearslong plot against Trump stretching from the 2016 Russia inquiry to the criminal charges he faced after leaving office.

By folding the Washington-based Russia and false-electors matters into the Florida classified-documents case as a single "grand conspiracy," prosecutors could present the combined matter to a grand jury in Miami — drawn from a jury pool less Democratic than Washington's. The Times reported no evidence that the separate inquiries were in fact one plot.

Prosecutors may of course investigate genuine crimes, and no charges had been filed. What places this in the archive is the direction of the inquiry: the federal government turning its criminal-investigative power on the very officials who had investigated the president, repackaging long-closed and separate matters as one conspiracy and steering them toward a more favorable venue. That is the Justice Department's prosecutorial machinery aimed at perceived political enemies — a politicized investigation and a deployment of state power against critics — regardless of whether any indictment ultimately follows.