For three years, Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and former legal counsel to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has pushed for federal criminal investigations of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and senior FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials.
Now, a series of recent investigations approved by Attorney General Pam Bondi suggests to Davis that his long-sought goal is most likely approaching.
Bondi this month approved two federal criminal investigations of New York Attorney General Letitia James and one of Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. Bondi also instructed an unnamed federal prosecutor to begin a grand jury investigation of whether Obama administration officials committed federal crimes when they assessed Russia’s actions during the 2016 election.
Bondi’s order came weeks after National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard accused Obama and his aides of a “treasonous conspiracy” and said she had sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
Davis applauded Bondi’s actions in a recent interview.
“This is the greatest conspiracy in American history,” he said, referring to what he says are Democratic plots against President Donald Trump. “There must be the most severe legal, political and financial consequences for this unprecedented weaponization. This must never happen again.”
Bondi’s office and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Obama, Biden, Clinton and former FBI, Justice Department and CIA officials have repeatedly dismissed the allegations. Democrats say new probes are an effort to distract attention from allegations that Trump has abused his power in his second term and from his failure to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Former senior Justice Department and FBI officials note that a Trump-appointed special counsel and Republican senators already investigated the claims and found no crimes. They called the idea “absurd,” “bananas” and “insane.”
Davis said he is unaware of Bondi’s next step. But he praised the recent party-line Senate confirmation of a new U.S. attorney in South Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, whom he called a personal friend and urged senators to support.
“I want Jason to set up his own grand jury and pursue this aggressively,” Davis said. “And I want him to put criminals in prison for a very long time.”
Road map for a Florida federal investigation
Davis called for Quiñones to convene a special federal grand jury in Port St. Lucie, the seat of St. Lucie County, which Trump carried by 10 percentage points last year. It would investigate what he calls a Democratic conspiracy to undermine Trump stretching from the 2016 campaign to the 2022 FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate to today.
Quiñones, a Miami-Dade County judge appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a year ago, is a former federal prosecutor in Miami and a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve. He was a major crimes prosecutor but received poor performance evaluations, The Miami Herald reported. Quiñones filed and dropped a racial discrimination complaint and moved to the Civil Division, where he received satisfactory reviews.
Quiñones and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Viewing the Mar-a-Lago search as part of a decadelong anti-Trump conspiracy serves a legal purpose: It could allow prosecutors to treat alleged acts from 2016 and 2017 as part of a single conspiracy and bypass a five-year statute of limitations on denial of rights charges.
Three former FBI and Justice Department officials with direct knowledge of the Mar-a-Lago search told NBC News that it was conducted properly and approved by a federal judge and that it was the result of Trump’s own actions.
The officials said the National Archives first alerted them that Trump appeared to have classified materials. Trump then declined repeated requests to return the documents for a year. A former senior Justice Department official dismissed Davis’ calls for a criminal investigation of the Mar-a-Lago search.
“It’s outrageous,” the former senior Justice Department official said.
Multiple investigations of Democratic rivals underway
Three people familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News this month that the Justice Department has opened a federal criminal investigation of lawsuits James’ office filed against Trump. James has dismissed the Justice Department investigation, which is based in Albany, New York, as political payback.
The James probe is examining whether the state attorney general’s office committed “conspiracy against rights” and violated Trump’s civil rights when it brought a lawsuit that claimed Trump grossly inflated the values of his assets for personal profit. A Manhattan judge ruled last year that Trump did so and ordered him to pay a roughly $500 million fine, a ruling that infuriated him.
Separately, the Bondi Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation in Virginia into possible mortgage fraud by James and another into Schiff in connection with an allegation of potential mortgage fraud in Maryland. James and Schiff have said the investigations are political retribution. Bondi appointed Ed Martin, a Trump loyalist who represented Jan. 6 defendants and praised Trump’s mass pardons of them, to oversee both probes.
Davis said the “conspiracy against rights” charge could be used in the Florida investigation he believes should be conducted. Legal experts have noted that the charge was created by the Enforcement Act of 1870, which Congress passed to prevent white people from blocking freed slaves from voting.
Davis said special counsel Jack Smith used the same charge when he accused Trump of trying to illegally reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.
“The Democrats set the precedent that former presidents are fair game,” Davis said.
Could Democrats be indicted and convicted?
Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law School professor whom Republicans have accused of conspiring with former FBI Director James Comey, said filing criminal charges based on debunked claims is possible. “If you’re willing to ignore the facts,” Richman said, “you can come up with criminal charges.”
But Richman cautioned that securing a federal indictment, trial and conviction — even in areas where the majority of voters voted for Trump — would be difficult given the many actors and elements involved. Prosecutors need indictments from grand juries, judges can dismiss weak cases, witnesses must be credible, and jurors must unanimously agree on guilt.
“Jurors take their duties seriously,” Richman said. “I’m not ready to say the people in these jurisdictions are totally in the tank for this administration.”
A former senior national security official who spoke anonymously, citing the Trump administration’s public attacks on former officials, suggested two potential scenarios: “Either Bondi and Gabbard know that there is indeed no evidence of any criminal activity, in which case it’s completely corrupt and a political stunt,” the former official said, “or, more darkly, they actually believe this stuff and are acting out of authoritarian instinct and this is something out of Orwell.”
