The Prosecutor Who Flunked Up
Trump’s Miami Enforcer Targets Obama-Era Officials
Jason Reding Quiñones’s rise from washed-out rookie prosecutor to Trump’s handpicked hammer in Miami says everything about the second-term Justice Department—and none of it inspires confidence.
If you ever wanted a case study in how to turn the U.S. attorney’s office into a loyalty-first clubhouse, buckle up: this is the one. Jason Reding Quiñones, a prosecutor who literally flunked the office’s boot camp and earned lousy performance reviews, is now leading an aggressive investigation into top Obama-era intelligence officials. Yes—the guy who couldn’t cut it in the gun-and-drug rotation is now subpoenaing John Brennan and James Clapper. What could go wrong?
The subpoenas have been flying out of Miami like T-shirts at a minor-league baseball game. Brennan, Clapper, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, and even Peter Strzok and Lisa Page have all gotten the paperwork. The theory? A sweeping “deep state” conspiracy that somehow stretches from the 2016 Russia assessment all the way through the Mar-a-Lago documents case. It’s basically every Trump grievance stuffed into one giant legal piñata.
Morale inside the office, meanwhile, has cratered. Veteran prosecutors have bailed, supervisors who once gave Reding Quiñones poor reviews fled before he started, and the office is now so politicized that career prosecutors are being pressured to sign bizarre penalty-of-perjury documents just to avoid accusations of leaking. One former AUSA (Assistant United States Attorney) summed it up: “I have never seen anything like this before.”
This whole saga has a fairy god-lawyer, too—Mike Davis, the conservative activist who helped push Reding Quiñones into the job and now cheers him on with social-media posts like “Justice is coming.” Davis even previewed the entire conspiracy-theory-as-federal-charges blueprint months ago, arguing that Trump’s investigators should be prosecuted for “conspiracy to deprive a person of his civil rights.” If this sounds more like revenge cosplay than law enforcement, that’s because it is.
And for the grand finale? A grand jury impaneled in Fort Pierce—conveniently routed to Judge Aileen Cannon—is expected to take up the conspiracy case. The same judge who tossed Trump’s documents indictment now stands ready to call the balls and strikes on the most political criminal probe in years. You can’t make this up, but apparently you can subpoena everyone who once annoyed Donald Trump.
Source: Washington Post