Is it worth it to keep serving people who do not notice the effort? Two days after voters swept the Democrats back into power in the midterm elections, Jason Reding Quiñones, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, submitted his resignation from the Justice Department on Friday — the second senior Justice Department official to walk away in two days.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the resignation on X. "We are grateful for Jason's leadership in combatting violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime, including the indictment of Raúl Castro," Blanche wrote, thanking Quiñones for his distinguished career and his service to the country. The announcement gave no reason for the departure, and Quiñones has not commented publicly.
Quiñones, a former line prosecutor in the same Miami office, was the first of President Trump's U.S. attorney nominees confirmed by the Senate, and he took office in August 2025. He led one of the busiest federal prosecution offices in the country — covering Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach — through a tenure marked by the departure of a significant number of veteran prosecutors.
His office also ran the so-called grand conspiracy investigation, opened in August 2025 and based in Fort Pierce, examining whether Obama- and Biden-era intelligence officials conspired to keep President Trump out of office. The probe subpoenaed former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey, and examined whether Brennan lied to Congress about the intelligence assessment of Russia's interference in the 2016 election. For all its grand jury activity, the investigation produced no indictments. Joe diGenova, who had been brought in to help run the probe, quit in September amid disagreements with the deputy attorney general's office over its management; weeks later, Blanche told reporters that Quiñones "always has been in charge" of the investigation.
The resignation lands one day after Blanche announced the departure of Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division — two Senate-confirmed, Trump-appointed Justice Department officials gone in the two days since the midterm sweep. Yara Klukas, the office's first assistant U.S. attorney, will take over the Southern District of Florida job in an acting capacity, Bloomberg Law reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
For the families of South Florida, the change at the top is not abstract. The office Quiñones leaves behind is the one that prosecutes the violent-crime, drug-trafficking and sex-trafficking cases that decide how safe South Florida's streets are — and it now changes hands, with the grand conspiracy investigation's future in doubt, at the very moment the voters that work was done for have delivered their verdict at the ballot box.
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