A senior prosecutor working on the so-called grand conspiracy investigation into a wide array of President Trump’s enemies has resigned from the case, adding to the turmoil that has recently plagued the inquiry, according to people familiar with the matter.
The prosecutor, Kurt Olsen, stepped down from the case on Monday after facing issues with his security clearance, one of the people said, making him the second prosecutor in a month to do so.
Mr. Olsen’s unexpected departure came only three weeks after the prosecutor in charge of the case, Joseph diGenova, also abruptly quit his post. Mr. diGenova, who is 81 and served as the U.S. attorney in Washington during the Reagan administration, stepped down after his superiors in Washington lost patience with him for his taking too much time in bringing charges.
The twin resignations, in such proximity, were a serious setback to the most sweeping effort by the Justice Department to follow through on the president’s desire to take revenge against the many federal officials who have investigated him over the past decade. The case had already had significant staffing shake-ups — including its first lead prosecutor being sidelined after telling her superiors there was insufficient evidence for charges to be filed.
One of the lead F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, Jack Eckenrode, also departed in recent weeks, according to the people familiar the matter. Mr. Eckenrode was best known for having spent years under the special counsel, John H. Durham, investigating the investigators in the inquiry into the ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The grand conspiracy case has long been the most ambitious — and far-fetched — of the many retributive investigations that Mr. Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors trying to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and another into his mishandling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 — into a single, multiyear plot to damage his political prospects.
The day after Mr. diGenova quit, lawyers for one of the central targets of case, John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, spoke to Mr. Olsen, according to court papers. The lawyers said that Mr. Olsen told them that the inquiry involved “multiple” grand jury investigations in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., including a “far-reaching” one that touched on a key aspect of the classified documents investigation: the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
Mr. Olsen’s problems with his security clearance complicated his ability to remain involved in an investigation in which classified materials figured prominently, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Just last week, lawyers for a group of former F.B.I. agents who took part in the search of Mar-a-Lago and were subpoenaed to testify about it in front of the grand jury said in court papers that the search had been conducted properly.
Mr. Olsen did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Olsen came to the grand conspiracy case with no experience as a prosecutor. He had previously served in the White House as the director of “election security and integrity” and in late 2020, he pushed the Justice Department to file a motion to the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Trump, asking the justices to nullify the election that year.
Mr. Olsen was central in persuading the F.B.I. to search an election office in Fulton County, Ga., in late January and haul away boxes of ballots as part of an effort to investigate the 2020 race. He also pushed the bureau — unsuccessfully, it turned out — to look into allegations that an election technology firm whose owner had bought Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been falsely blamed for rigging the 2020 election, had also manipulated voter registration records in Bexar County, Texas.
Mr. Olsen’s departure has added to the leadership void atop the grand conspiracy case, which is nominally being run by Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-friendly U.S. attorney in Miami. It remains unclear who is now in charge of the day-to-day management of the inquiry. But the Justice Department has plans to put two more prosecutors on the case.
