Two More Chairs Empty at the Justice Department: Eisenberg and Quiñones Resign as the Post-Election Exodus Accelerates
The head of the national security division and the prosecutor who ran the 'grand conspiracy' probe of Trump's past investigations both resigned Friday — a day after the civil rights chief. Reuters reports it is not clear why either man left.
WASHINGTON — The departures at the Justice Department stopped being a resignation and became a pattern on Friday. John Eisenberg, who headed the department's national security division, and Jason Reding Quiñones resigned, Reuters reported, accelerating an exodus of senior figures following Tuesday's midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump's Republicans lost control of Congress. Their exits follow Thursday's resignation of Harmeet Dhillon, the civil rights unit chief whose planned departure this station staged on Thursday.
The practical consequence, as Reuters frames it, is that the department is now without leaders for two of its signature initiatives: relitigating past investigations of the president and targeting higher education. Quiñones, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, sat at the center of the first of those — his office was tasked with investigating the criminal probes into Trump's handling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021 and his campaign's contacts with Russia in the 2016 election, an effort officials dubbed a "grand conspiracy" that has struggled to bring criminal charges; the prosecutor overseeing that probe, Joseph diGenova, resigned in September. Quiñones's Miami office also brought criminal charges against former Cuban President Raul Castro.
Reuters is explicit about the limit of what is known: it is not clear why Quiñones or Eisenberg resigned, and this desk prints no motive in their place. What the wire does note is the ordinary rhythm underneath the extraordinary week — it is not unusual for senior U.S. officials to leave government after a midterm election, especially one that delivers a sharp setback to the party in power — and the changed landscape ahead: Democrats plan a raft of investigations into Trump's administration and business dealings, and the department those investigations will face is, as of Friday, missing the chiefs of its national security division, its civil rights unit and its most politically charged prosecution.
