Trump spent years promising the "deep state" traitors would finally pay — Brennan, Comey, Obama, the whole 2016 cast. But here's what actually happened behind the scenes, according to former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer: back in April, the senior career prosecutor already leading the "grand conspiracy" investigation met with Attorney General Todd Blanche's top deputies and told them flat out — the facts and the evidence did not support criminal charges.
She was removed from the case for saying so.
Her replacement: 81-year-old Trump loyalist Joe diGenova, a man who bought into every conspiracy theory Trump ever sold — the stolen election, the "Russia hoax" — and who once said Pam Bondi needed to be fired for not moving fast enough on this exact case. DiGenova spent five months running the investigation with a full team and a slew of subpoenas, chasing Brennan, Comey, Obama, and anyone else on Trump's grievance list.
And MAGA media ran with it the whole time. Back in April, NOTUS reported indictments could come "as soon as this week." By August, when nothing had happened, John Solomon and outlets like RVM News were blaming Senate Republicans Thune and Cotton for "blocking" the case, with commentators fuming about wanting to "flip the whole mahogany table." Worth remembering how this all got started, too — the probe was leaked to Fox News while the administration was drowning in Epstein-file backlash and needed MAGA's attention pointed elsewhere. Tulsi Gabbard even ran a "treasonous conspiracy" declassification blitz to feed it, built on claims the Durham investigation already debunked years ago.
Then this week, diGenova quit — and told the NY Post the quiet part: "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem." Translation: even the guy who believed all the conspiracy theories couldn't make the case work, and he wasn't willing to risk his law license doing it — no interest in ending up disbarred and broke at 82 like Rudy Giuliani. He walked it back hours later to the AP, claiming there's "plenty of evidence," it just "takes time." Sure, Joe.
So the real story isn't just that diGenova failed. It's that Blanche fired the prosecutor who told the truth, replaced her with the craziest true believer he could find to get the answer Trump wanted — and even that guy came back empty. Trump's own revenge case, hyped for months by his own media, run first by someone honest and then by someone desperate, and it still produced nothing.
The rule of law held. Barely.