WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two top officials at the US Department of Justice resigned on Friday, accelerating an exodus of senior figures from the department following the 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 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 sought to establish that the president was the victim of a long-running criminal conspiracy. But no criminal charges have been filed so far as a direct result of the probe, and the prosecutor who had been overseeing it, Joseph diGenova, resigned in September.
During Quiñones' tenure as Miami's top federal prosecutor, dozens of prosecutors left the office and some who prosecuted people accused of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, were fired.
Quiñones' office was at the forefront of the administration's pressure campaigns against Venezuela and Cuba and brought criminal charges against former Cuban President Raul Castro. Quiñones’ office is prosecuting Alex Saab, a Colombian-born businessman close to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro whom Venezuela deported in May.
While Eisenberg has kept a relatively low profile, his National Security Division was involved in some of DOJ's most controversial actions, including an unusual raid on a Washington Post reporter's home as part of a leak investigation. The division helped bring the first-ever case in a secretive court set up in 1996 to handle alleged "alien terrorists," to deport a lawful permanent resident from Afghanistan who had not been charged with any crime.
The division helped oversee redactions before DOJ released millions of files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which Democrats and some Republicans criticized as overly broad.