How the drive to find a conspiracy against Trump rocked the Justice Department

It was an investigation long sought by FBI director Kash Patel, and it was announced not in court papers but through a haze of cigar smoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast in early June 2025.

Patel’s prized criminal inquiry, known as “the grand conspiracy case”, sought to tie together actions by a group of people who US President Donald Trump blamed for various investigations into him, going back to the examination of possible ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, and extending into events surrounding the 2020 election and criminal prosecutions of Trump in 2023 and 2024.

In the view of Trump and his supporters, there was a “deep state” cabal that had sought to bring him down across multiple administrations and agencies.

Patel told Rogan he had found a secret room of evidence inside FBI headquarters, confirming his long-held suspicions.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Patel asked. “Because these guys were so arrogant they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

To Patel, those documents, found in government burn bags – large brown paper bags with red and white stripes used to store papers designated for destruction – justified a sweeping investigation of former officials.

To the former officials and the career investigators who looked at the evidence, the papers in the burn bags were nothing like a smoking gun. The administration’s efforts to find prosecutors willing to pursue such theories became a defining feature of the Trump administration’s politicisation of the Justice Department – and the internal resistance to it.

New details of how that period unfolded show Patel’s drive to target critics of the president set off cascading crises with US attorneys’ offices, derailed distinguished careers and undercut the Justice Department’s credibility with judges. This account is based on interviews with multiple people with knowledge of the effort, all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly.

Asked for comment on this account and the roles of Patel and other officials, a Justice Department spokesperson, Emily Covington, said the department “enforces federal law fairly, consistently and without regard to politics”, adding that all investigative and prosecutorial decisions “are grounded in evidence and the law”.

On July 14, barely a month after Patel told millions of podcast listeners about a supposed vault of dirty secrets, Todd Gilbert became the interim US attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Hours after he was sworn in, Gilbert got a phone call from Patel that would wreck his new job. On his first day, when most employees are still getting their work email set up, the new US attorney was told by Patel to pursue the grand conspiracy.

Patel instructed him to investigate how classified documents had been placed inside the burn bags found inside Room 9582 of FBI headquarters.

Some of the documents related to events from 2016 and 2017 that Patel wanted examined, specifically the actions of James Comey, who was FBI director at the time, and John Brennan, who had been the CIA director. Patel wanted both men investigated for lying to Congress and suggested that the documents supported charging them.

His call to Gilbert was unusual. FBI directors do not typically assign US attorneys to open cases. Such a directive, particularly for high-profile investigations, would normally come from Justice Department headquarters. And investigations that involved purported lies to Congress were assigned to prosecutors in Washington, not in Roanoke, Virginia.

It was also strange to give such a weighty assignment to a US attorney with little authority to question orders because he was still awaiting confirmation by the Senate. (After this article was published online, an FBI spokesperson, Ben Williamson, disputed that Patel had assigned the case involving Comey to Gilbert.)

But the administration had good reason to think of Gilbert as a loyal and willing hunter. A lifelong Republican with strong ties to Virginia’s GOP leaders, he had given up a powerful position in the state legislature to become US attorney.

The premise of the “grand conspiracy” was that Comey and his allies had concocted the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential contest to damage Trump, and that conspiracy extended into the 2020 election and the 2022 appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate him.

To Patel, the case consolidated years of his complaints and accusations about Democrats and national security officials.

To many career Justice Department veterans, the case looked more like Frankenstein’s monster – a motley assortment of long-dead investigations that were now supposed to be stitched together and brought to life.

From the start, FBI leadership wanted near-daily updates on the case – a level of attention usually reserved for national crises. The Virginia prosecutors were confused as to why the case received so much interest from Patel and so little from their actual boss, Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer.

Gilbert tried repeatedly to get advice and instruction from Blanche, even driving to Washington unannounced to try to speak to him. Instead, one of Blanche’s deputies, Aakash Singh, urged Gilbert to pursue the case aggressively. But Singh did not address many of Gilbert’s legal and factual questions. One senior Justice Department official said Gilbert and Blanche eventually did speak about the case.

Gilbert’s team decided that the law gave his office jurisdiction over only one of the issues Patel had directed him to investigate: whether the documents in the burn bags had been mishandled as part of a criminal scheme to hide them.

The other two prongs he was assigned – whether Comey had lied in congressional testimony in 2020 about leaks and Russia-related intelligence, and whether Brennan had lied to Congress about a 2017 intelligence assessment of Russian election interference that referenced a dossier compiled by a former British spy – had no legitimate venue in western Virginia, they concluded.

Gilbert angered the administration by resisting pressure to empanel a grand jury to investigate the burn bag case, since he and his team did not believe there was yet a sufficient factual basis for that step.

A related disagreement over personnel assignments in his office also hurt his standing. In mid-August, Sergio Gor, a powerful White House official, called Glenn Youngkin, then Virginia’s Republican governor, and told him that Gilbert was going to be fired and that the governor should not try to stop it.

Gilbert lasted just 37 days as a US attorney. After his departure, prosecutors in his office wrote a lengthy legal analysis, called a declination memo, detailing why no criminal charges were warranted in the burn bag case. The senior FBI agent on the investigation endorsed the memo’s conclusions.

At that point, a number of current and former law enforcement officials concluded that the administration had embarked on a new kind of fishing expedition – not for dirt on the people they did not like, but to find a prosecutor willing to file charges based on the threadbare evidence they already had.

Resistance by officials in western Virginia did not stop the pressure campaign from senior administration officials. Instead, that pressure simply migrated across the state to the federal prosecutor’s office in Alexandria, Virginia.

Trump’s pick to lead that office, Erik Siebert, was an experienced lawman, and unlike Gilbert he had allies among the Justice Department’s leaders. Siebert’s law enforcement career began as a DC police officer, and he heartily embraced Trump’s agenda.

But in the summer of 2025, Siebert suddenly found himself on thin ice, having inherited not just the Comey case but a separate investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney-general who successfully sued Trump over his business accounting. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), made a criminal referral to the Justice Department against James in April 2025, accusing her of falsifying information in mortgage paperwork to obtain a more favourable interest rate.

Pulte levelled a similar allegation against Democratic senator Adam Schiff, who, while in the House, had led impeachment proceedings against Trump. Pulte suggested that Schiff had claimed two different places as his primary residence.

In July, Blanche summoned FBI agents, Virginia prosecutors and senior FHFA officials to a meeting at the Justice Department to discuss the James investigation. The meeting began with a detailed presentation from FBI agents, emphasising the lack of evidence of criminality surrounding James’ mortgages.

Then Blanche declared that the evidence simply did not support a criminal case against James for either property. When Pulte’s aides tried to argue or interject, Blanche shot them down.

The agents and prosecutors on the case were encouraged to see the deputy attorney-general support their view. Their optimism, however, was short-lived. Within days of the meeting, law enforcement officials were told that the White House still wanted to see James charged. (One senior Justice Department official who was not authorised to speak publicly disputed that characterisation of the meeting as “inaccurate and oversimplified”, saying that investigators still wanted to pursue the case against James.)

The administration was not giving up on the Comey investigation either. Siebert had been handed the case in mid-August, after federal prosecutors in western Virginia successfully argued that they did not have jurisdiction. It was the second time in months that Siebert and his team were pressured by superiors to investigate Comey.

In May, deputies to Blanche had pushed Virginia prosecutors to open a criminal investigation of the former FBI director for posting a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged on a beach to read “86 47,” the slang reference 86 meaning “get rid of” – in this case, the 47th president.

Trump and his supporters called the message a criminal threat of violence. Comey denied that this was his intent, saying he knew it as a restaurant term for nixing items on a menu or removing an unruly patron.

The morning after Comey’s post, Blanche’s deputies told prosecutors in Siebert’s office to investigate the seashells. Secret Service agents tracked Comey and his wife as they travelled from the North Carolina seashore to their home in Virginia – a level of surveillance some agents said they felt was overkill.

Comey quickly agreed to sit down with Secret Service agents for an interview, and insisted again that he had no intention whatsoever of threatening Trump. Given Comey’s co-operation and statements, Secret Service investigators concluded there was no point in opening a full investigation.

Blanche’s deputies disagreed and pressed both the Secret Service and the FBI to pursue the case. The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security and therefore did not report to Blanche. Their agents refused to pursue the case, a decision that made it easier for the FBI and prosecutors in Virginia to say no in turn.

The seashell case revealed just how badly administration officials wanted to arrest Comey. That June, Trump had declared himself “the hunter” and federal law enforcement officials came to believe that Comey was the president’s most sought-after prey.

Just two months later, Siebert was again pressed to go after him — this time over his statements to Congress on September 30, 2020, the investigation initially given to Gilbert. Siebert was under the gun, since the five-year statute of limitations gave him less than two months to investigate and indict a former FBI director.

Through deputies, Blanche pressured the Virginia prosecutors to be “tough” and see the Comey case through. Personally, though, Blanche kept a certain distance from the conversations, relying on aides to relay his wishes. Three Blanche deputies – Singh, Christopher-James DeLorenz and Diego Pestana – were most involved in the discussions about the Comey case. (The senior Justice Department official insisted the case against Comey was strong, and denied that Blanche’s office pressured career prosecutors to file criminal charges.)

When Virginia prosecutors outlined the ways in which the evidence was weak, Pestana suggested the prosecutors were weak — a particularly galling critique to the prosecutors, given that Pestana had never worked as a prosecutor. Inside the Justice Department, experienced lawyers chafed at being hectored by the deputy attorney-general’s younger, greener aides, who often came across as cocky and uninformed. Behind their backs, some career lawyers referred to them as “Blanche’s bros”.

The pressure from Blanche’s office to indict Comey intensified in early September. FBI officials were told to draft a criminal complaint against Comey, while prosecutors were told to draft an indictment. One senior department official denied that prosecutors were pressured to bring charges and insisted that the case against Comey was strong.

On the weekend of September 13, 2025, Patel told officials that Comey would be charged in three days. When no charges were produced in that window, it seemed that his big talk had served only to ratchet up the pressure on Siebert to deliver.

Siebert would happily have charged Comey with crimes if he thought the evidence warranted it, but he felt it was not even a close call, according to colleagues.

On Thursday, September 18, Singh called Siebert to warn him that the president planned to fire him, and the hammer fell one day later.

In a social media post written as if it were a private message to then attorney-general Pam Bondi, the president expressed outrage that Comey, James and Schiff hadn’t been charged with any crimes.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote, adding: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Trump then picked Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience, to replace Siebert. She quickly secured indictments of Comey and James, though those cases were dismissed by a judge who found Halligan’s appointment was unlawful.

The spree of firings and indictments showed just how much control Trump had over basic Justice Department functions long considered off-limits to the White House. Blanche had pushed for the Comey indictment and fought against the James indictment, but ultimately it did not matter much because prosecutorial discretion was superseded by presidential directive.

The president’s fishing expedition for his kind of prosecutor continued. The “grand conspiracy” case was transferred to the US attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quinones.

In April, prosecutors in North Carolina indicted Comey over the 86 47 photo. Blanche, by then the acting attorney-general, declared the seashell charges were the product of work by career agents and prosecutors. He never mentioned that other career prosecutors and agents had previously rejected the case.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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