Trump's Grand Conspiracy Delusion

A special grand jury started sitting in Fort Pierce, Florida, this month, seemingly prepared to investigate what has come to be known as the “Grand Conspiracy”—a fantastical plot that many MAGA loyalists insist was orchestrated by left-wing leaders and officials against President Trump.

The president’s calls for the prosecution of his political enemies are both confused and confusing—linking together the myriad individuals he feels have mistreated him in a multitude of ways, even where no actual connection among them exists. 

“They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING,” he fumed in his notorious post addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” To him, the Russia inquiry, the Ukraine impeachment, the Jan. 6 impeachment, and the investigations and prosecutions that followed him throughout and following his first term are part of the same story: one where “the enemy from within” has tried time and time again to destroy the country by taking him down.

The Grand Conspiracy theory attempts to impose not only narrative coherence on these rantings and ravings, but legal coherence, too—as well as legal consequences, judging from the fact that it is now before an actual grand jury. 

The Grand Conspiracy, to be clear—or as clear as one can possibly be when explaining a theory that is essentially incoherent—fails on both the narrative and legal coherence fronts. Its proponents allege a plot against Trump that somehow manages to connect Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and James Comey to Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith. The supposed scheme with which these people are all allegedly involved manages to span three separate presidential elections and tie together matters as obviously distinct as Russian interference in the 2016 election and the classified documents search at Mar-a-Lago. 

Absurd as this is all is, the administration appears determined to pursue it, and the Fort Pierce grand jury is its most aggressive step yet in this direction. The choice of locale looks strategic; the only judge who sits in Fort Pierce is one U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who has, on multiple occasions and across multiple cases, issued startlingly pro-Trump rulings. MAGA allies have also gestured at the statute prosecutors may plan to use: U.S.C. 18 § 241—the conspiracy against rights statute, which just happens to be one of the statutes under which Trump was indicted in the Jan. 6 case. 

Trump once shared on Truth Social an image showing multiple reported targets of the grand injury investigation captioned with the text, “Now that Russia collusion is a proven lie, when do trials for treason begin?” Apparently, as soon as possible. 

But what is this Grand Conspiracy supposed to be? How has it ended up in South Florida? And how does the Justice Department plan to turn its storytelling into an actual criminal case—with actual crimes to back it up?

What is the Grand Conspiracy? 

The Grand Conspiracy is difficult to describe—mostly because it is a conspiracy theory not only in the literal sense, but in the colloquial one, too. Lawfare’s Renee DiResta has written that, “one of the clearest refutations” of the central “claim that President Obama engaged in a ‘years-long’ coup against Trump is simple: linear time.” 

But that isn’t the only way in which established reality runs counter to the spidery web of accusations. 

Distilling Russia-related documents recently declassified by high-level Trump officials—with a dash of the many wild tales circulating on the podcasts, YouTube channels and Twitter feeds of right-wing influencers thrown in—the short version of the grand conspiracy goes something like this: Hillary Clinton (who, in this telling, was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers” to tamp “uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness”) wanted to frame Trump to distract from the revelations about her private email server. Members of the intelligence community were eager to aid in her dastardly designs—so they arranged for an investigation into Vladimir Putin’s regime’s efforts to help her opponent win the election, including by relying heavily on the infamous Steele dossier. Oh, and by the way, Russia actually wanted Hillary to win. Almost everything bad that happened to Trump from there on out, from impeachments to investigations, was a byproduct of or an attempt to cover up this founding malfeasance. 

The long version of the Grand Conspiracy has unfolded over recent months in near-cinematic fashion, complete with an all-star cast of heroes and villains who bring Trump’s fantasy to life. 

Scene one: CIA Director John Ratcliffe shares the shocking revelation that Russia didn’t aspire to put Trump in the Oval Office at all—but then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and then-FBI Director James Comey, as they crafted the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) into interference in the waning days of the Obama presidency, pretended he did anyway. 

Ratcliffe promoted this point by releasing in June a Tradecraft Review of the ICA that questioned the high-confidence conclusion about Russia’s aim to help Trump. Documents can be boring, so to make sure their release had the intended effect, Ratcliffe gave an exclusive interview to the New York Post that billed the review as a “bombshell.” The publication of the ICA, he told the publication, was a “politically corrupted” effort to “screw Trump.” Ratcliffe’s writeup took umbrage especially over the incorporation into the original review of the so-called Steele Dossier using a two-page addendum—even though the report also contained a disclaimer saying the dossier didn’t inform its analytical conclusions. 

Cue scene two: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dashes in to release three separate document dumps purportedly proving that the Grand Conspiracy went deeper even than that. She insisted in July that papers she was sharing at long last with the public showed not only that officials tried to frame Trump by claiming Putin wanted him to win but also that, on the contrary, Russia purposely went easy on Clinton. 

The documents included declassified emails among members of the intelligence community; a declassified 2020 Republican staff report from the Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)-led House Intelligence Committee; and a declassified account of a disgruntled “whistleblower” who was upset when he discovered the Steele materials were included in the ICA. 

The “Deep State officials,” Gabbard announced, had been caught in a “treasonous conspiracy” in which they set out to investigate Russian interference, even though they actually knew Russia hadn’t “hacked” the election—then manufactured findings from “shoddy sources” to support their “contrived narrative.” 

This wasn’t enough drama to take us to a conspiracy that reaches to the present day. So, in scene three, FBI Director Kash Patel strides onto camera. He discloses that he has discovered “burn bags” in a “secret room,” stuffed full of sensitive records that reveal not only that officials lied about Russia wanting to help Trump, and not only that they lied about Russia’s real intentions being to help Clinton, but also that they did so specifically to protect Clinton from the email investigation by “demonizing” Putin and Trump. 

“Just think about this,” Patel said in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan. "Me, as director of the FBI…found a room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of. Locked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one's ever gonna find this place.’” 

The papers Patel cleverly stumbled upon, then helpfully handed over to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to release on his website as “newly declassified” material, are commonly referred to as the “Durham Annex”—because they were part of a probe by U.S. Attorney John Durham who as special counsel was charged with ascertaining whether the Crossfire Hurricane collusion investigation was improperly or corruptly motivated. 

The Grand Conspiracy believers generally neglect to mention that Durham left this material out of his report because it was based on documents evaluated as likely forgeries. That truth, of course, would have risked interrupting the gripping tale of the Grand Conspiracy. 

There are other ways in which the facts don’t line up with the picture-perfect version of the Grand Conspiracy. For example, what the papers Gabbard released actually show is that she doesn’t understand the difference between the “hacking” of voting machines and the hack-and-leak of Democratic Campaign Committee servers. Her use of the term “coup” in describing the conspiracy suggests she isn’t entirely sure what that word means, either. 

If it isn’t already obvious, as intoxicating as the movie-like narrative may be, there is no there there in the Grand Conspiracy. Multiple investigations have already confirmed as much. Durham ended up finding no significant wrongdoing with regard to the decision to open Crossfire Hurricane, and despite his criticisms of the investigation, he certainly did not find any corruption with respect to its underlying motivations. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General chided the FBI for its conduct regarding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications in the investigation—again, by leaning erroneous material in the Steele Dossier—but concluded that the investigation itself was justified.

Putting the “Grand” in Grand Conspiracy 

Yet somehow, despite all this, the Grand Conspiracy snowball continued, and continues, to roll. The trouble with the Ratcliffe and Gabbard revelations, for Grand Conspiracy believers, is that they only cover the genesis of investigations into a discrete set of matters—that is, Trump and Russia. But for the conspiracy truly to be grand it has to be bigger than just that—and more recent. 

So depending on whom you ask in the wild MAGA world, the Russia inquiries really did set off a chain of events encompassing everything that happened to Trump afterward—every impeachment, investigation and indictments. 

Recent attention, however, has focused on one more-recent act in particular. This is the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. 

Remember those “burn bags” that Patel says he found upon in an FBI facility? Well, according to Grand Conspiracy enthusiasts, their contents are even more explosive than previously understood: The burn bags contained printouts of records related to the Russia inquiry, the Durham investigation and the search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. This takes the Grand Conspiracy from 2016 all the way to 2022, by alleging every spy film fan’s favorite narrative device: a coverup. 

These events, the Grand Conspiracists allege, were clearly all connected, and officials tried to expunge them from the record. Add to this the newly declassified FBI emails shared by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealing agents’ concerns about whether there was probable cause for the Mar-a-Lago search, and the Grand Conspiracy finally begins to live up to its name. 

Mike Davis, the conservative strategist and Article III Project founder who first alerted the press to the standing up of the Fort Pierce grand jury, has claimed in conservative media that the search was itself a coverup: “a political hit…to get back the damning Crossfire Hurricane records” that, had the FBI succeeded, would never have seen the light of day. That raid, conveniently in the views of Grand Conspiracy believers, also provided an opportunity to bring a sham case against Trump “to end his future political prospects.” 

Davis—who has called for officials such as Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, FBI Director Chris Wray and Special Counsel Jack Smith to be compelled to testify to the grand jury investigating the Grand Conspiracy—has suggested that all the civil and criminal cases against Trump could be violations of federal law. But the Mar-a-Lago case is the only one he has explicitly connected—or tried to connect—to the rest of the plot that Grand Conspiracy theorists have concocted. 

Narratively, it is certainly dramatic to have the Grand Conspiracy extend all the way down the coast, and all the way into the 2024 race for the presidency. 

But the Mar-a-Lago case is essential to the legal side of the Grand Conspiracy, too. To take their tale from rhetoric to reality, with people behind bars—for so the president has suggested he desires—the Department of Justice needs to turn all of this into a criminal case. Statutes of limitations have long since run on the events of 2016. And securing individual indictments for discrete acts of, say, lying to Congress isn’t good enough. Not all of the supposed malefactors have testified recently enough.

Hence the need to prosecute the Grand Conspiracy as just that: a conspiracy. And that requires bringing in events—like the Mar-a-Lago search and the indictments of Trump—that are recent enough to bring the whole long chain of events into a single narrative thread.

Treating the Mar-a-Lago search as an overt act in furtherance of a plot that began years earlier with the Russia probe  provides the government a jurisdictional hook, however flimsy, in the extremely hospitable Southern District of Florida, where it has both a prosecutor willing to pursue the matter and a particularly credulous judge.

Why Are We in the Southern District of Florida? 

Last October, Davis was asked on “The Charlie Kirk Show” about the latest developments in his push for a criminal investigation into the president’s political opponents. He responded that his “buddy,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones, had received the chief judge’s approval there for a grand jury in Fort Pierce—precisely where, incidentally, Davis had been calling for an investigation to take place “for three years.” Indeed, a previously unnoticed court order matching Davis’s description had been posted on the website for the federal courts there a few weeks prior. 

Over the holidays, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Just the News that, at her direction, “our U.S. attorneys and federal agents are actively investigating instances of government weaponization nationwide” as part of an ongoing election-meddling conspiracy that she called a “ten-year stain on the country.” She (properly) wouldn’t say where this investigation was being conducted, but officials (less properly) confirmed to the outlet that “a large part” of it was taking place in, yes, Florida.

Shortly thereafter, Quiñones issued more than two dozen subpoenas to people connected to the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election, including former Director of National Intelligence Clapper, former CIA Director Brennan, and other big names associated with the Russia investigation. 

All this happened after Grand Conspiracy-related investigations petered out elsewhere—presumably because the case was discovered to be baloney. The U.S. attorney’s office in the Western District of Virginia was probing whether FBI officials hid or destroyed those “burn bag” documents. The U.S. attorney there, Todd Gilbert, was eventually forced to resign, however, because he wouldn’t sideline a skeptical high-ranking career prosecutor. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, were focused on former CIA Director Brennan over his testimony related to his role in the  Russia investigation. Prosecutors “struggl[ed] to put together a criminal case,” according to the New York Times. In the Eastern District of Virginia—also assisting with the burn bag matter—investigators also conducted interviews of Brennan. That office gave up, too, according to a letter from Brennan’s lawyer, after “a couple of weeks.” 

But in Florida, Quiñones is apparently undaunted. He took over the Brennan case this fall as part of a Justice Department decision to expand its scope, and the grand jury now sitting in Fort Pierce might be presented with anything gleaned from his work so far in Miami and can start calling witnesses any time it pleases.

Why Fort Pierce Specifically?

“Why Florida?” was already a difficult enough question, for which arriving at an even-close-to-plausible answer requires the tying together—perhaps with red string on a manically cluttered bulletin board—of the Mar-a-Lago search, Crossfire Hurricane and the ICA.

But Mar-a-Lago isn’t in the Fort Pierce division of the Southern District. It’s in the West Palm Beach division. Indeed, the only conduct plausibly related to the Grand Conspiracy for which Fort Pierce actually is, as Davis put it, “ground zero” occurred in the courtroom of one Aileen M. Cannon—who presided over and eventually dismissed the federal criminal case against Trump for hoarding those highly sensitive materials at his club.

Judge Cannon, who robustly demonstrated her friendliness toward the president during her time overseeing that case, is the most obvious reason Quiñones would choose to take the case he’s building 130 miles away from Miami to Fort Pierce. Typically, in the Southern District of Florida, one of a rotating cast of “duty judges” in a given division oversees any disputes arising in grand juries there—such as requests for quashing of subpoenas, or, on the flipside, for compelling testimony by witnesses. (Grand jury disputes are rare, but this case seems preposterous enough to invite them.) Fort Pierce, however, is small. Judge Cannon is the only judge at its federal courthouse, and that means she is by default the duty judge, too.

At least, she was supposed to be.

An order by Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga issued in October listed Judge Cannon as the Fort Pierce duty judge for the entirety of 2026. Yet, interestingly, an order issued one month later amends that schedule, listing Judge Cannon as the duty judge only every other month, with U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz—whose courtroom is in the Miami division— taking on the job on alternate months. No reasoning is provided for the change, but it may come as a disappointment to prosecutors to the extent they were particularly looking forward to having Judge Cannon supervise their case.

Of course, what matters even more than where the grand jury for an investigation sits is where, should it choose to indict anyone, the case is actually heard. Prosecutors appear to be playing for Judge Cannon here, too. The Southern District’s assignment process is complicated: Cases are randomly distributed by means of the spinning of a “wheel” of active judges—sort of. The district’s “one division” rule actually limits that distribution to judges in the division neighboring the one in which a case “originated,” meaning the one in which the grand jury handed down its indictment and the charges were formally filed. Fort Pierce neighbors only West Palm Beach. The result is that if the Fort Pierce grand jury were to bring a Grand Conspiracy case, only Judge Cannon and the handful of judges who sit in West Palm Beach would be on the wheel—the same odds Special Counsel Jack Smith faced when he brought an indictment against Trump in 2023. 

There’s another hitch: Participation in the Fort Pierce wheel, according to the district’s internal operating procedures, is actually voluntary. Judges from any other division may choose to join it. Or they may not, in which case some sort of “unanticipated emergency” would have to divert the case from Judge Cannon’s purview. That emergency could be an unexpectedly heavy caseload, or perhaps it could be a conflict of interest. After all, Cannon’s involvement in the classified documents case could conceivably make her a Grand Conspiracy fact witness.

So far, Brennan’s lawyer has written a letter to Chief Judge Altonaga requesting that she intervene to prevent the conspiracy case from being steered toward Fort Pierce. (Bondi dinged him for this in her Just the News interview: “These bad actors are clearly concerned about their liability and want to preserve a two-tiered justice system: one for them and one for everyone else. No more.”) But he and attorneys for other subjects could take other action—from resisting subpoenas, to moving to dismiss any case the grand jury approves—in an effort to force prosecutors to articulate an actual theory of the case that withstands judicial scrutiny before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

How is This a Case At All? 

So the Department of Justice has a narrative, and it has a venue. But does it have a case? 

Lawyers for the recipients of the subpoenas so far issued have said that the government has refused to describe what alleged statutory violations it’s probing. They’ve also said it has failed to explain why the investigation is taking place in Florida. Brennan’s lawyer, in a footnote in his letter, indicates that the only reference to a criminal statute in his team’s conversations with prosecutors is an allegation that his client lied to Congress about the Steele dossier’s inclusion in the ICA. 

Here, however, Davis’s loquaciousness comes to the rescue once again. The law that could possibly underpin this case, he has explained, is 18 U.S.C. § 241—the conspiracy against rights statute. This statute is grounded in the Enforcement Act of 1870, a Reconstruction-era response to white supremacist violence in former Confederate states. The statute’s reference to going “in disguise on the highway” may seem arcane today, but at the time the reference to Ku Klux Klan members terrorizing Black Americans would have been unmistakable. 

There’s an extra bonus to bringing conspiracy charges: While the statute on limitations would seem to have run out on much of the conduct prosecutors are interested in, because a conspiracy continues until its last act, prosecutors could push it until, assuming the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago search is key to their case, at least 2027. 

The conspiracy against rights statute has, for most of its history, been used primarily to prosecute conspiracies threatening the right to vote—from violently massacring voters; to stuffing ballot boxes; to enforcing an unconstitutional grandfather clause that disenfranchised Black citizens. But, crucially, Special Counsel Jack Smith relied on it to charge Trump with one of the four counts in his indictment of the president for his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. 

His thinking, as detailed in his final report to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland: The right to vote for president is fundamental. By urging officials to disregard legitimate majorities for his opponents and discard legitimate electoral certificates—including by focusing on select states, cities and counties with large numbers of voters who didn’t reelect him—Trump and his co-conspirators “sought to deprive…citizens of their constitutional right to have their presidential election votes counted.” 

Trump is demonstrably fond of doing unto others what he perceives them as having done unto him. So it should come as no surprise that the conspiracy against rights statute may now feature in a quest for revenge against his political enemies. The Justice Department could deploy the statute as it was deployed against him: alleging, in short, that the object of the Grand Conspiracy was to intimidate or oppress Trump and his supporters from the free exercise and enjoyment of the right to vote for the candidate of their choosing and have their votes counted—by preventing Trump from appearing on the ballot, or merely by deterring his supporters from exercising their right to vote for him. 

The government could similarly present a First Amendment argument that defendants conspired to violate citizens’ right to free association or expression in organizing around their preferred candidate—or to violate Trump’s own First Amendment or 14th Amendment right to run for office. 

It could argue these things, that is, if it were singularly uninterested in factual truth or rigor. Smith’s case, recall, focused on attempting to dispose of or ignore already-cast votes, which had actually been counted. This one would be based on the transparently silly notion that law enforcement and intelligence officials across time and space and elections were trying to dissuade voters from casting votes for Trump by investigating things. 

But prosecutors would have a tougher time still satisfying the requirement of the conspiracy against rights statute that the officials under scrutiny entered into an agreement with one another and did so with the specific intent to deprive people of an identifiable constitutional or statutory right. 

They would have to show, in other words, that officials like Barack Obama and Jack Smith, who never even worked with each other, formed a plan that touched the 2016 election, the 2020 election and the 2024 election, a plan whose concrete aim was to prevent Trump from running for office successfully, and that they took overt steps along the way motivated not by their good-faith professional obligations but by this bad-faith desire. And they would somehow need first-hand witnesses to testify to this non-reality in a fashion that included admissible evidence. 

The Grand Conspiracy is a conspiracy theory, not a real legal theory. 

The only reason to take it seriously at all is that the administration is, by all accounts, taking it seriously—seriously enough that federal prosecutors have stood up a grand jury, which is now poised to consider the matter, seriously enough that they prosecutors already begun to subject subjects of the probe to all that this process entails.

The trouble is that while prosecutors may have a narrative, and they may have a venue, and they may even have a legal strategy, the story is still deranged; the venue is dubious, and the legal strategy remains incoherent.

The biggest problem of all? The evidence doesn’t even exist.