Joseph diGenova
Joe diGenova, a GOP lawyer who represented President Donald Trump in his bogus election fraud cases in 2020 and a longtime fixture in right-wing media, complained in April that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had “nixed” him from a role overseeing a planned investigation of Trump’s political enemies. Now, just weeks after her removal, he’s reportedly ensconced in that position.
The Trump Department of Justice, through grand juries in Florida, is targeting a wide array of Democratic political figures and law enforcement officials while sidestepping statutes of limitation by positing that the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s theft of classified documents upon leaving office, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, are all manifestations of a single “Grand Conspiracy.”
This absurd conspiracy theory unifies a decade of wild right-wing media fantasies under a single banner, and its proponents claim that it could lead to convictions of everyone from former President Barack Obama to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to former special counsel Jack Smith.
DiGenova, asked about Bondi’s replacement by her deputy Todd Blanche during an April 2 Newsmax appearance, argued that the president fired her because “the weaponization investigation cases in Florida have basically come to a standstill because Bondi got in the way.”
“She should have been gone the minute she interfered in the Florida investigations,” he added. “And I know that for a fact, because I was involved in that. I was going to be a prosecutor in that case, I was all ready to be hired to be the chief lead counsel, and Pam Bondi nixed it because she didn't want anybody with a name in the case.”
But on Friday, Maria Medetis Long, who was overseeing a portion of the probe focused on former CIA Director John Brennan, became the latest career federal prosecutor ousted after expressing skepticism about the strength of a case against a Trump foe. Her replacement is reportedly diGenova, who will also be overseeing the broader “Grand Conspiracy” probe and has the title of counselor to the attorney general.
DiGenova has presumably been selected for the role for the very reasons that would disqualify him under any normal circumstances. He is a fierce Republican partisan with close ties to Trump who has been involved, as either a pundit or a lawyer, in GOP scandalmongering efforts dating back to Bill Clinton’s presidency.
A key player in the Ukraine-focused disinformation plot targeting Joe Biden that led to Trump’s first impeachment, diGenova regularly appeared on Fox News in 2019 to promote that conspiracy theory — even as he and his wife, Virginia Toensing, represented pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, another participant in the scheme. An internal Fox research document, which The Daily Beast reported on in February 2020, questioned the credibility of diGenova and several other players in the effort.
DiGenova was apparently banned from Fox in late 2019 after smearing two Fox personalities on-air and then using a Fox Business appearance to deliver an antisemitic screed in which he argued that Jewish philanthropist George Soros “controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department,” has “corrupted FBI officials,” and is seeking to “run Ukraine.” (He last appeared on Fox News’ weekday programming on October 8, 2019, according to a search of Media Matters’ database.)
DiGenova has since been a fixture on Fox rival Newsmax, where he recently argued that Trump, as “chief law enforcement officer,” has every right to force the Justice Department to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars as compensation for its past efforts to prosecute him.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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