Kurt Olsen, a Trump ally assigned to the Justice Department’s Florida probe of officials who investigated the president, has resigned weeks after a similar exit by Joe diGenova.

ABC News reported that Olsen left the Justice Department after being tasked earlier this year to help lead the so-called “grand conspiracy” probe based in South Florida.

Sources familiar with the matter confirmed the departure. Olsen could not immediately be reached for comment, and a DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.

The move lands just weeks after another Trump ally, Joe diGenova, announced he was leaving a similar role on the same controversial effort. That churn matters because the probe is aimed at intelligence officials and others who investigated Trump and his inner circle, from the 2016 campaign through the criminal cases filed after he left office in 2021.

Trump has denied all of those charges. Voters who watched years of investigations, leaks, and special counsel drama now see a Justice Department effort that is supposed to examine how that machinery worked, and the lawyers brought in to push it are heading for the exits.

diGenova left after claiming pressure to charge without evidence

diGenova’s departure came after he told the New York Post he was being pressured by DOJ leadership to bring charges without supporting evidence. That claim, if accurate, cuts against basic standards of prosecution and due process.

It also fits a broader pattern of abrupt personnel moves inside Trump-world legal fights, including when Joseph diGenova abruptly resigns from work tied to Trump-Russia investigators.

Olsen’s background is not that of a career federal prosecutor. He had no prior prosecutorial experience. He was deeply involved in litigation surrounding President Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election loss, the kind of hard-edged election law work that mainstream outlets treat as disqualifying and that many conservatives see as necessary pushback against a one-sided system.

Handing major conspiracy work to outside Trump allies was always going to draw institutional resistance inside a department staffed for years by people who built cases against Trump. Resignations do not, by themselves, prove the probe is hollow. They do show how hard it is to reorient a bureaucracy that spent a decade pointing its guns in one direction.

South Florida grand jury process still moving

Even as senior names leave, the investigative machinery has not gone quiet. In recent weeks, several subjects, including former CIA Director John Brennan, were subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in South Florida, according to attorneys.

Brennan’s appearance on that list is not a footnote. He was a central public voice in the intelligence-community narrative that shadowed Trump’s first term. Putting him under oath in a South Florida grand jury is the kind of accountability step Trump’s critics spent years insisting would never, and should never, happen.

Current and former federal prosecutors have questioned a novel legal theory tied to the probe. Sources have said the approach involves potential charges under the civil rights statute known as deprivation of rights under color of law, essentially alleging officials abused government power to deny constitutional rights. Novel theories invite scrutiny. They also invite career lawyers to slow-walk, leak, or walk away.

Related Trump legal battles keep grinding through the courts on a separate track, including when Judge Cannon permanently blocks a classified documents report from Jack Smith’s old operation.

Line prosecutors leave as new attorneys arrive

Staffing on the ground has been unstable. Other line prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida are said to have departed in recent days. One source said some officials had been temporarily assigned on detail and that those terms expired, an ordinary personnel explanation that still leaves the public with less continuity on a high-stakes case.

At the same time, additional attorneys were added in recent weeks to assist the conspiracy probe. That mix, people leaving, people arriving, senior Trump allies resigning, reads like a shop still trying to find a stable leadership core while grand jury work continues.

Washington personnel fights rarely stay contained at Main Justice. Similar friction has shown up elsewhere in the administration’s ranks, as when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll steps down after months of internal tension.

For a national audience, the venue matters as much as the names. South Florida is not a cable-news green room. It is a working federal district with a grand jury, subpoenas, and real exposure for witnesses who once operated with near-total insulation inside the intelligence community.

What the probe claims to cover

DOJ officials and other White House allies have described the investigation’s scope in broad terms: intelligence officials and others who investigated Trump and his inner circle, stretching from the 2016 presidential campaign through the criminal probes that followed his departure from office in 2021.

That timeline covers Crossfire Hurricane-era activity, the public messaging campaigns that followed, and the post-presidency cases Trump has always called political lawfare. Whether every chapter belongs in one “conspiracy” frame is a legal question for prosecutors and, eventually, courts. Whether the country is entitled to a full accounting of how investigative power was used against a president and his associates is a public-interest question, and a fair one.

Democratic politics around Trump remain maximalist. House members still chase show votes and branding exercises, including when Al Green forces another impeachment effort and attacks fellow Democrats for standing in the way.

Against that backdrop, a South Florida probe that actually pulls senior former officials before a grand jury is a different category of event from another press-conference impeachment stunt. It is slower, quieter, and more threatening to people who treated investigative power as a political tool.

Open questions DOJ will not answer

ABC’s account leaves basic gaps. It does not give Olsen’s exact resignation date, his stated reason, or who is running the probe day to day after the latest exits. It does not name the other subjects subpoenaed alongside Brennan, or how many line prosecutors left when detail assignments ended.

It also does not reproduce diGenova’s full New York Post remarks, only the characterization that he felt pressure to charge without evidence. A Justice Department that wants public confidence in a sensitive probe should be able to explain leadership, standards for charging, and why senior hires keep leaving. So far it has offered a no-comment instead.

Political noise around Trump never stops, and GOP midterm nerves grow whenever the president dominates the news cycle on his own terms. None of that settles the evidentiary questions in South Florida. Grand jury subpoenas do.

Olsen’s resignation is another personnel shock on a probe already short on stable leadership. diGenova’s earlier warning about pressure to charge without proof still hangs over the project. Brennan and other subjects have still been pulled toward a South Florida grand jury. The public can hold two ideas at once: process inside DOJ looks messy, and the underlying record of how Trump was investigated still deserves daylight.

Accountability for official power is not revenge, and it does not get less necessary because the lawyers assigned to pursue it keep quitting.