Kurt Olsen, the guy who tried to help Ken Paxton convince the Supreme Court to throw out the 2020 election, then got a White House job titled 'Director of Election Security and Integrity,' then got assigned to the Justice Department to build a criminal conspiracy case against Obama and Biden officials, has now resigned. According to CBS News, he is one of several prosecutors to recently bail on the so-called 'grand conspiracy' investigation. The case has produced zero charges.
Who Is Kurt Olsen and Why Was He At the DOJ At All
Let's do a quick resume review. In 2020, Olsen worked alongside Texas AG Ken Paxton to urge the Supreme Court to simply void the election results and hand Trump a second term. The Court declined. In 2022, the House January 6 select committee subpoenaed him, alleging he had contacted senior DOJ officials at Trump's direction to pressure them into filing election challenges. The committee also said Olsen spoke with Trump personally, multiple times, on January 6, 2021.
Then Trump came back. And rather than being a cautionary example, Olsen became a hire. CBS News reports he was installed at the White House under the title 'Presidentially Appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity' before being moved over to the Justice Department, specifically to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. His job was to help build the 'grand conspiracy' investigation targeting Obama and Biden-era officials.
This is the DOJ. The United States Department of Justice. Staffed, in this instance, with a man who spent the previous term trying to help the president whose election loss he was now being paid to re-litigate.
The 'Grand Conspiracy' Case That Has Conspicuously Produced Nothing
The investigation Olsen was attached to has a suitably dramatic name: the 'grand conspiracy' case. It targets officials from the Obama and Biden administrations, and it is being built out of the Southern District of Florida, which is conveniently the home turf of Trump's legal world. CBS News has been tracking it for months.
So far, it has produced no charges. Not one.
CBS News has previously reported that law enforcement veterans have been raising serious concerns about the whole operation, specifically that the Trump DOJ has been systematically filling this investigation with politically motivated personnel who are gunning for a partisan indictment. Olsen's departure doesn't exactly disprove that theory. Neither does the fact that Joe diGenova, the prosecutor Attorney General Todd Blanche had tapped to work on these cases, also resigned earlier this month after tensions erupted over case management and pace.
The Fulton County Angle, Because This Gets Weirder
While at the Justice Department, Olsen was not just passively reading files. CBS News reports that he made the Fulton County election case referral to the FBI, which then prompted federal agents to execute a search warrant and seize dozens of boxes of ballots and other election materials from 2020. An FBI affidavit confirmed the scope of that seizure.
Olsen also made several other 2020 election-related referrals to the Justice Department, according to a source with direct knowledge of his work. So a man who was subpoenaed by Congress for allegedly pressuring the DOJ to challenge the 2020 election was then handed a DOJ badge and asked to, among other things, direct federal resources toward 2020 election investigations. The circularity is dizzying.
The Justice Department did not comment when CBS News reached out. Olsen did not comment either.
The Team Is Thinning Out
Olsen is not alone in walking out the door. CBS News reports that several prosecutors have left the grand conspiracy team in recent days. One source offered the reassuring spin that some of the attorneys had come in from out of state on temporary assignments and were simply returning to their home offices now that those assignments had ended. That's one way to read it.
Another way to read it is that multiple lawyers, one of whom had been specifically recruited to lead this effort, are leaving an investigation that has been running for months and has nothing to show for it, right as internal tensions over how it's being run are spilling into public view.
The DOJ has reportedly brought on two new former prosecutors to join the investigative team. The hunt, apparently, continues.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is a serious, apolitical criminal investigation. You are supposed to look at a team built around a man who called the Supreme Court and asked them to cancel an election, who spoke with Trump on the day of the Capitol attack, who was then handed a White House title and a DOJ assignment, and conclude that justice is being pursued in good faith. That is the ask.
What's actually happening is that the Trump administration turned the Justice Department into a retroactive grievance machine, staffed it with loyalists whose entire professional identities are bound up in the lie that 2020 was stolen, and pointed them at political enemies. CBS News has documented the concerns of law enforcement veterans who watched this unfold and called it exactly what it looks like. Those veterans are not wrong.
The fact that this investigation has produced nothing after months of work, that it is now hemorrhaging personnel including its own leadership, and that the DOJ's response to all of this is to quietly hire replacements and keep going, tells you everything. This was never about justice. It's a political operation wearing a badge, and the only thing collapsing faster than the case is the pretense that it was ever anything else.
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