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

The push to investigate what the president’s allies saw as a “deep state” cabal set off cascading crises, ended careers and undercut the department’s credibility.

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.

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.

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