DiGenova, Joe Toe

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primary 1219, game over for djt?

NO MERRI

see wife va toensing HIRED DOJ 3 PIRRO

baaaack 2x 2 25 SEE PENSION NZMX PROVES BARREL ALWAYS TO BE SCRAPED?

WHEN HOW RESURRECTED?

mma tag

https://www.mediamatters.org/joseph-digenova

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BAILLED 9 26?!

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HE WAS TRUMP PERSONAL ATTY? COI JAN 6 CLIENTS?

RUSSIAGATE BS?

HE’S BAAAACK 80?

MMA

-=-=

===

an 9 26

Trump's revenge investigation into all of the previous probes into him reached a new level of chaos, adding to yet another failure to the pile of recent legal battles.

Trump demanded that the Justice Department and FBI conduct an investigation tying together the investigations into him over the past six years to prove that they're part of some "grand conspiracy" from the so-called "deep state," the Associated Press reported.

The plan is to tie together the Russian election interference and Trump's retention of classified documents. The goal was to create a narrative of a government conspiracy, but the problem is that there was legitimate criminal misconduct with a long trail of evidence.

“The idea of connecting all those different investigations into one single conspiracy, there's no basis for that,” said retired federal prosecutor Randall Eliason. “Then, maybe more importantly, there's no basis for an allegation that any one of them was actually a criminal act against Trump. They've all been verified and upheld in one way or another.”

Last week, the efforts took a significant turn when the leader of the probe abruptly resigned.

Joe DiGenova, who's 81, has served in and out of government for decades, including President Ronald Reagan’s administration. He became well known after attacking Trump's cybersecurity official who maintained the 2020 election was legitimate. DiGenova said that the man should be "drawn and quartered."

Trump has seen DiGenova's investigation as a kind of reckoning from previous officials and administrations.

The president has been miffed about the slow pace of diGenova's progress. By Sept. 10, he was out, leaving comments in his wake that he doesn't see any indictments coming out of the investigation. A lack of evidence hasn't stopped Trump with others like former FBI James Comey.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova told the New York Post.

DiGenova swears he was taken out of context and that there is "plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others — and you can’t do that.”

DiGenova came in after Maria Medetis Long, a career national security prosecutor, was removed after conveying concerns about the legal strength of a criminal case against former CIA Director John Brennan.

In a statement after diGenova's ousting, Brennan's attorney, Ken Wainstein said, "I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this." He alleged that the DOJ is “blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction."

The reality is that "President Trump wants action in certain cases, and this seems to be one of them,” said John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney in Virginia.

He doesn't expect the DOJ to back down any time soon.

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AN 9 26

On Thursday, September 10, attorney and veteran GOP operative Joseph diGenova abruptly resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where he had been focused on a conspiracy investigation targeting President Donald Trump's foes. And according to Salon's Heather Digby Parton, the fact that he left DOJ without getting a single indictment is a major blow for the Trump administration and U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

"The definition of a mafia made man is one who has Italian blood and is formally initiated into the 'family,' having sworn an oath of omerta and promising to put the crime family above all else," Parton explains in Salon. "Traitors take their lives in their own hands, and they often do not live to tell the tale, which means that it's rare for anyone to go against the family, especially in public. That's why it was so surprising to see longtime Republican operative Joe diGenova resign from his job as a top Trump consigliere — or, more formally, 'special counselor to the attorney general' — on Thursday. If there was ever a GOP-made man, it is him."

Parton emphasizes that "expectations in the MAGAsphere were high" when diGenova was appointed to DOJ.

"DiGenova was appointed in April to oversee the Justice Department's big inquisition in Florida after the career prosecutor who had been running it resigned over concerns that they did not have a prosecutable case against former CIA chief John Brennan," Parton notes. "DiGenova, who had not prosecuted a case since his stint in the Reagan Justice Department, was a trusted GOP loyalist. He was involved in many of Rudy Giuliani's crusades during Donald Trump's first term, including the Big Lie court cases that went nowhere."

Parton continues, "This made him widely seen as the kind of partisan stalwart the administration needed to kickstart the investigation … DiGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, have been fixtures in the Republican scandal-mongering business for decades, having first made their bones during the Clinton years."

But after his resignation, Parton observes, diGenova told the New York Post, "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."

"What's clear from this episode is that Attorney General Todd Blanche — and, by extension, Trump — will take nothing less than indictments against his perceived enemies," the Salon journalist writes. "And if they don't materialize, he is ready to sacrifice even the mostly loyal MAGA foot soldiers. When I wrote about diGenova's appointment in April, I asked the question, 'Can the TV hit man do what none of the other Trump lawyers before him have been able to do: put the president's enemies behind bars?' Now, we know the answer is no, and it's not for lack of trying. It's for lack of evidence. Even a made man can't get that job done."

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MMA

John Solomon hyped Trump prosecutor Joe diGenova's work just days before diGenova resigned

Solomon a day before diGenova resigned: “Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine.”

Written by Sophie Lawton

Published 09/11/26

A day prior to Joe diGenova’s abrupt resignation from his position running Trump's “Grand Conspiracy” probe, diGenova ally and “special government employee” John Solomon — whose task force just declassified documents related to the probe, including notes from the FBI's interview of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — was seemingly caught flat-footed, boasting of diGenova's role as part of a “buzzing accountability machine.”

On September 10, diGenova resigned from his Justice Department appointment running Trump’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe into Democratic political figures, law enforcement officials, and other perceived enemies of the Trump administration.

During the September 9 episode of his program Just the News No Noise, Solomon interviewed Flynn, who also praised diGenova, calling him “absolutely the right person” for the probe and a “pit bull-type prosecutor.” Solomon also claimed that the latest documents release was “about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce.”

Solomon also appeared on Steve Bannon's War Room on September 8 ahead of the documents’ release, claiming that “there are some major cooperating witnesses that have now flipped to the state to working with Joe diGenova,” which will “accelerate the ability to bring accountability.”

Following diGenova's resignation, Solomon took to social media to reassure followers that the “Grand Conspiracy” investigation is still ongoing and that prosecutors are “continuing the work Joe started with a roadmap that includes subpoenas and some cooperating witnesses.” Meanwhile, Ryan Reilly reported for NBC that “a person familiar with the investigation” said that “Justice Department leaders had lost confidence in diGenova because they believed he was unfocused, moving too slowly and pursuing a path unlikely to succeed.”

Here is Solomon and Flynn's exchange on September 9:

Video

Citation

From the September 9, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise

JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): It isn't just about clearing Mike Flynn's name, though that's very important. It's also about providing evidence to Joe diGenova and the prosecutors of the U.S. attorney's office in Miami and Fort Pierce. They are now beginning to bring grand jury witnesses to begin securing indictments against those who weaponized the government from the summer of 2016 to January of ’25. Everything from the FBI and Russia collusion all the way to Jack Smith.

In that process, they have secured cooperation for one or two really significant FBI personnel. That's a really important thing. When someone in the middle of the drama says, we lied, we made it up, we didn't do that, that wasn't the truth, we set it up, it changes the ability of prosecutors to make a case, particularly in a partisan divide like we are in America.

Joe diGenova, the FBI, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche are getting their horses together now. For the first time, there is a buzzing accountability machine. And this — these documents today are already in the hands of prosecutors. They have it down in Florida. It would be called an overt act. It happened eight, nine years ago, which means it can't charge it itself.

…

MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): I just want to say, I appreciate what the Government Transparency Task Force is doing. You are working to get to the bottom of it, and I think that there's going to be more to come. In fact, I know there's going to be more to come.

I think that Joe diGenova is absolutely the right person at Fort Pierce and with this grand jury. I mean, Joe — and for people to know, I mean, Joe was one of the lawyers that I was consulting after I had gotten rid of my original lawyers and working closely with Sidney [Powell] to help us out. So, Joe is the right man to take this on. He is a pit bull-type prosecutor anyway, and he has the big strategic picture that I think that the country needs to have in a prosecutor that's going to dig and expose the truth. And that's what you guys did with this Transparency Task Force breaking story that you broke.

...

We have to bring these people to account. We have to — and I do believe that Joe diGenova is the right guy to build these various conspiracy cases to show that these people were undermining, not only guys like me, but they were undermining a duly elected president of the United States. They were undermining the Constitution of our country, and they and they basically did it, you know, in a very, almost — I would just say a criminal fashion. I mean, it's beyond corruption. It's criminal. And people are going to have to be held accountable.

Bartiromo “got fired because she wanted to come forward the last couple of weeks and talk about John Solomon, ... the task force, Pulte, all of it”

09/04/26 12:38 PM EDT

Cleta Mitchell: “We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China.”

08/28/26 1:33 PM EDT

John Solomon is spreading another flimsy election fraud claim

08/07/26

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GOP lawyer Joe diGenova, now running Trump’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe, said Bondi had “nixed” him from the role

Fox News apparently banned diGenova six years ago

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 04/20/26

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.”

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From the April 2, 2026, edition of Newsmax's American Agenda

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.

### By its own precedent, Fox should ban Joe diGenova

:{11/14/19

### Who Are The Right-Wing Media's Benghazi Lawyers Victoria Toensing And Joseph diGenova?

:{04/30/13

### Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing are still missing from Fox News

01/23/20

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BULWARK SOMMER 7 26

TRUMP’S PRIMETIME ADDRESS Thursday is shaping up to be a grab bag of conspiracy theories, all of them intended to help Republicans take control of the midterms. He might declare that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are somehow fake senators; or announce a national emergency on voter fraud. The latest reporting suggests Trump will claim China tried to steal the 2020 election.

Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer. For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud. Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.

Now in his gig as a short-term White House staffer, Solomon has been digging up the raw material necessary for both prosecuting Trump’s enemies and the expected attempt at electoral chicanery.

Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media.

In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the “John Solomon special”: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a “steady stream of mediocrity.”

Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.

Typically, MAGA muckrakers are liars or crackpots, like Mike Lindell, or that one rogue falconer (but not the one you’re thinking of). Compared to these folks, Solomon is a veritable Walter Cronkite. He has a serious journalistic background after working for Post and the Associated Press, and he dresses in ties and navy suits. His veneer of seriousness provides a valuable service for the MAGAverse. Watching him can almost feel like watching a grizzled mainstream investigative journalist who just happens to validate Trump’s obsessions.

A story from the final days of the first Trump administration shows how much Solomon lives in the Trumpworld pocket. The day before Joe Biden’s inauguration, then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows called Solomon to the White House to review a binder of newly declassified files from the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia—just the kind of document handout Solomon loves.

Meadows wanted Solomon to publish the contents of the binder on Inauguration Day. Solomon’s staffers at his website, Just The News, scrambled to scan them all. Then a new envelope arrived for Solomon, with new files “he was permitted to write about,” according to a lawsuit Solomon later filed against the Justice Department.

Unfortunately for Solomon, the whole plan got botched when a White House staffer recalled the files for further redaction. The binder disappeared back into the new Biden administration. Solomon’s fervor for getting access to them again led to a special favor from Trump, who named Solomon as one of his personal representatives at the National Archives, where he would have the freedom to again pursue the story (to give you a sense of Solomon’s perceived reliability to the ex-president, the only other person designated as Trump’s representative at the time was Kash Patel). It was a decision intended to redound to mutual benefit, and sure enough, Solomon eventually published the files in April 2025.

HOW DID SOLOMON WIND UP as Trump’s favorite journo? After leaving the Post in 2008, Solomon moved between journalism nonprofits and conservative media for a while, powered by a personality once described as “charming and garrulous and brimming with swagger.”

He reached a new level of prominence on the right when he became an executive at The Hill in 2017. His portfolio there was superhuman: simultaneously launching a TV channel, drumming up ad business, and filing news and opinion articles. As you might expect, it was a situation rife with conflicts of interest, with one staffer warning that Solomon was up to “reputation-killing stuff.”1

Solomon’s first big moment at The Hill came with his coverage of the Uranium One faux-scandal, during which he heavily insinuated—but did not come close to proving—that Hillary Clinton had approved the sale of rights to a key American uranium reserve to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. At the time, Republican anxieties about Trump’s own Russia ties were in overdrive, so Solomon’s articles gave them the tantalizing feeling that the “real” Russia scandal was that Clinton was the true Putin patsy.

In March 2019, Solomon waded into even murkier waters: the bizarre series of events that led to Trump’s impeachment over efforts to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Solomon inexplicably began to target American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch in articles for The Hill, portraying her as disloyal to Trump and weak on corruption. A month after Solomon’s series began, Trump fired Yovanovitch.

House Democrats later alleged that Solomon’s columns were part of a smear campaign run by Rudy Giuliani and a web of right-leaning Ukrainians and Americans, in a complex deal meant to convince Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens.

Solomon met regularly with figures involved in digging up dirt on the Bidens. The group became known as the BLT Team, named after the BLT Prime restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington where they met. The gang included Giuliani, the prolific Ukrainian-American schemer Lev Parnas, and husband-and-wife legal team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. He even shared a draft of a story with the group before publication—a major journalistic taboo.

DiGenova and Toensing seem to have made something of a cottage industry out of this. They represented at least one Ukrainian involved in the scheme. They had also, perhaps not coincidentally, represented a key Uranium One “whistleblower.” And they were also Solomon’s own lawyers, even though he used them and their clients as sources in his articles without disclosing that relationship. Once again, all of this flies in the face of journalistic standards.

Conflicts of interest aside, much of Solomon’s reporting on Ukraine was simply wrong, according to experts on the byzantine world of Ukrainian politics. Even as Solomon became a regular on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show (and used that relationship to make himself valuable to the BLT Team, according to Parnas), an internal Fox News research document I reported on at the time acknowledged that Solomon was involved in a Ukrainian “disinformation campaign.”

“It was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs,” one State Department noted of Solomon’s reporting during the first Trump impeachment investigation.

Solomon left The Hill in October 2019. The newspaper skewered him in an internal review, with some of the editor’s notes added to his Ukraine’s articles running nearly as long as the articles themselves.

DESPITE QUESTIONS ABOUT SOLOMON’S credibility during his run at the Hill, his star on the right continued to rise. In 2020, he launched Just The News, a conservative news outlet where he has run pro-Trump stories without even the thin layers of editorial oversight he faced at prior media outlets.

Solomon is also becoming a right-wing media mogul, adding minor conservative brands The Post Millennial and (the historically significant) Human Events to his holdings in November. In June 2025, the publisher of RealClearPolitics accused Solomon of convincing some of that website’s donors to withdraw their support in an attempt to soften it up for a takeover, too.

IAF

Solomon also helped launch and continues to provide office space to a foundation that doles out millions of dollars to a network of conservative media outlets and think tanks, including his own site. As Mother Jones reported, few if any of those funding connections are disclosed in Solomon’s journalism when he cites groups that have benefited from the nonprofit’s largesse. Mother Jones describes the sort of ideologically driven news sites in the foundation’s network as “pink slime,” a name that comes from “by-products added as filler to ground beef.”

But Solomon’s biggest honor came this summer, when Trump made him a special government employee tasked with helping “identify some documents, some secrets” to be declassified and released to the public. He is eligible to serve in the role for up to 130 days. Solomon, who said he’s not being paid for the White House declassification work, announced in June that he was stepping down as Just The News’s editor-in-chief, although he continues to host his show and publish articles on the Just The News website.

Solomon isn’t the only member of the BLT Team joining the administration. In April, diGenova was sworn in as a counselor to the Justice Department operating out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, where he’s reportedly working with a grand jury to indict Trump critics like former CIA director John Brennan. The judge overseeing the proceedings—and making decisions on whether to approve things like subpoenas for witness testimony or documents—is infamous Trump loyalist Aileen Cannon, who ran interference for the president during special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation between Trump’s terms in office. Earlier this spring, Cannon blocked the release of Smith’s final report on his investigation’s findings.

Toensing came out of retirement in May to be sworn in as a “deputy chief for civil rights in the criminal section” in the same prosecutor’s office, according to a statement filed in court by District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

“Ms. Toensing has extensive obligations in that [Florida] District related to a grand jury proceeding,” Pirro wrote, suggesting that Toensing too is working on some kind of urgent grand jury case against perceived Trump enemies.

Solomon has openly admitted that his role declassifying government documents is central to helping that same grand jury, suggesting the once-ridiculed group involved in crafting the anti-Biden Ukraine narrative is now helping Trump pursue his enemies through the Justice Department.

Referring to the administration’s push to declassify files about investigations into the president, Solomon told Benny Johnson in April that “those documents will help this prosecutorial team in Miami” by taking away the need for the sorts of secret and time-intensive processes that would otherwise be needed to make use of them in court.

But Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives, too. Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.

“Caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content,” the post read.

Emerald Robinson, an anchor at Mike Lindell’s online channel, wasn’t excited either.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” she wrote on X.

When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…

SOMMER REF

REF 4? CT DOC TOE 40K CS 200 PP VAUGHN INDEX?

Status Report – #25 in TOENSING v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (D.D.C., 1:24-cv-02444) – CourtListener.com

JEANINE FERRIS PIRRO United States Attorney By: /s/ Thomas W. Duffey THOMAS W. DUFFEY Assistant United States Attorney 601 D Street, NW Washington, DC 20530 (202) 252-2510 Attorneys for the United States of America /s/ Matthew D. Hardin MATTHEW D. HARDIN, D.C. Bar # 1032711 Hardin Law Office 101 Rainbow Drive # 11506 Livingston, TX 77399 (202) 802-1948 MatthewDHardin@protonmail.com

Now comes the Plaintiff, Victoria Toensing, and the Defendant, the United States Department of Justice (“Department”), by and through undersigned counsel, and hereby submit this Joint Status Report pursuant to the Court’s May 27, 2026, Minute Order. This report follows a June 18, 2026 meeting of the parties and their counsel at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. In attendance at the meeting were undersigned counsel, Plaintiff Victoria Toensing and her husband, Joseph diGenova, and Patrice Parker Hale from the Department of Justice.

Defendant’s Statement The Department represents that it has completed its review and has processed in excess of 41,000 pages. There remain outstanding 29 pages that need to be returned from the Office of Information Policy, which are expected to be returned by the middle of next month. The Department anticipates providing a Vaughn index to Plaintiff addressing approximately 1,000 pages withheld in full pursuant to FOIA Exemptions, and certain partially redacted records to which Plaintiff has conveyed its challenges. This Vaughn will be provided to Plaintiff by July 31, 2026, as contemplated by this Court’s May 18, 2026 Minute Order. The Department is not claiming that records at issue in this case are classified.

....

Plaintiff’s Statement Plaintiff appreciates the opportunity to confer with the Department and its counsel on June 18, 2026. As previously indicated, Ms. Toensing recently began serving as Deputy Chief for Civil Rights in the Criminal Section, of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, and Ms. Toensing has extensive obligations in that District related to a grand jury proceeding.

The brief postponement of the conferral allowed Ms. Toensing to better serve our country’s pressing interests in effective and efficient criminal justice. The June 18, 2026 meeting in D.C. was productive in terms of allowing the parties to better understand their respective positions and to agree on a path forward for this litigation. As indicated at ECF No. 22, Plaintiff has received less than 200 pages of records, such that Plaintiff has difficulty understanding how 41,000 pages were processed with so few pages produced. The Department has now clarified that it withheld in full approximately 1,000 pages of records. Still, the Department apparently asserts that approximately 40,000 pages of records were non-responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request. Plaintiff reserves the right to challenge the accuracy of Defendant’s assertions as to the volume of responsive records on summary judgment.

...

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an 5 26

Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies.

“Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” reports Bloomberg. “Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump.”

But “more than a dozen former prosecutors and defense lawyers” — speaking anonymously — say “there is mounting concern that the pursuit of Trump’s agenda has triggered an exodus of experienced prosecutors and hampered Miami’s expertise in building major white collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases.”

According to Bloomberg, many expressed concern that the high-profile drug, corruption, fraud and money laundering prosecutions that the district is known for will “fall by the wayside” while Trump sends his DOJ lieutenants and GOP allies to fucus on the doings of Biden and Obama from years ago.

Several dozen attorneys in the Southern District of Florida have been fired, quit or retiredsince Trump’s second term began in January 2025, which undermined the talent pool for prosecuting complex cases, say anonymous sources familiar with the office. One unit dedicated to prosecuting economic crimes is down to about a dozen attorneys from the more than 30 it traditionally had.

“A top Blanche aide earlier this year relocated to be a prosecutor in the office. Then, last month, an attorney overseeing the investigation was replaced with former US attorney and Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova following a disagreement over how best to proceed, according to people familiar with the situation,” reports Bloomberg. “Multiple grand jury subpoenas have gone out in recent weeks, and FBI officials have been conducting a flurry of interviews, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.”

But as prosecutors neglect investigations against legitimate suspected wrongdoers, Bloomberg reports Trump’s focus on his political hit list is coming up dry with prosecutors struggling with cases against current and former government officials considered to be enemies of the president.

“Charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in Virginia were dismissed last year,” said Bloomberg, and an additional case against Comey last month in North Carolina has kindled criticism that US law enforcement is being directed wielded for retribution for Trump.

---

MMA

A tale of two right-wing networks on Joe diGenova

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 04/21/26

While Newsmax hosts celebrate GOP lawyer and conspiracy theorist Joe diGenova’s appointment to a post overseeing investigations of President Donald Trump’s political foes, their counterparts at Fox News — which apparently banned diGenova from appearing years ago — have mentioned the news just one time, in passing, on Sunday afternoon.

Newsmax hosts celebrate as the DOJ hires Joe diGenova}:

News broke over the weekend that Trump’s former personal lawyer and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had appointed diGenova, a figure in numerous right-wing pseudoscandals over the last three decades who represented Trump’s 2020 campaign in election fraud lawsuits, as his counselor and tasked him with overseeing the Justice Department’s “Grand Conspiracy” probe. That investigation unifies a hodgepodge of “deep state” conspiracy theories touted by right-wing media into a single framework seemingly intended to defeat statutes of limitations and target a vast swathe of Democratic politicians and former federal law enforcement officials.

On Newsmax, where diGenova has appeared regularly in recent years, hosts cheered the news.

“We have congratulations to share with Joe diGenova," Newsmax’s Greg Kelly said on the network’s flagship prime-time show. “Good luck, Joe. Did you hear? He's got a big gig at the Department of Justice. One of our favorite guests on this show will be counselor to the attorney general. That is a big-deal role.”

“He knows what they did to President Trump,” Kelly claimed. “And he wants justice. He has said it many, many times right here on this show. I think it's part of the reason why he may have the job now. It's so awesome.”

Kelly also praised diGenova as a “superstar” and someone who “thinks creatively, ethically, honestly, but creatively” and claimed the lawyer “is so fired up for this role."

On-screen text during the segment read, “A regular on the show gets a new job."

Newsmax’s Carl Higbie likewise touted the news, calling diGenova a “friend of this network” who will be overseeing what Higbie called “the DOJ probe into this Russian origin thing.” (Trump and his media allies argue that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was corrupt and its perpetrators should be prosecuted; previous attempts to turn their conspiracy theories into federal cases failed after a three-year special counsel probe by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.)

While Newsmax’s stars throw a parade over diGenova’s appointment, their Fox counterparts have been largely silent. Thus far, the entirety of the network’s coverage since the news broke late Friday has been a single passing mention on Sunday afternoon.

“The Trump administration is dismantling the deep state,” host Tomi Lahren said at the top of a segment on The Big Weekend Show. “The DOJ has now tapped former Trump attorney Joe diGenova to spearhead the probe into ex-CIA Director John Brennan and others over the Russian hoax."

The news went unmentioned on Monday, including on the network’s flagship “straight-news” program, Special Report, and the scandal-happy programs hosted by Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity.

### Why Fox may have trouble swallowing diGenova’s new post

Fox is in a strained position, because while the network spent years feverishly demanding and supporting the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies over dubious premises, its leaders are seemingly also aware that diGenova is not credible.

DiGenova made more than 100 appearances on Fox News weekday programs in 2018 and 2019, and dozens more on its sister channel, Fox Business — but both networks appear to have banned the GOP lawyer in late 2019. He has not appeared on Fox News weekday programs since October 8, 2019, according to our database.

DiGenova and his wife and legal partner, Victoria Toensing, disappeared from Fox News following a sequence of events that demonstrated their lack of credibility.

1. DiGenova used a Fox appearance to call then-Fox senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano “a fool” for suggesting earlier that day that Trump had committed a crime by soliciting campaign aid in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

1. A few days later, diGenova and Toensing lashed out at then-Fox anchor Chris Wallace for reporting that they had been working “off the books” with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, on his effort to smear Joe Biden over Ukraine.

1. The day after diGenova’s final Fox interview, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — who had been working alongside diGenova, Toensing, Giuliani, and conservative columnist John Solomon on the Ukraine disinformation plot — were arrested by federal law enforcement en route to Vienna, Austria, to reportedly help set up an interview between Hannity and Viktor Shokin, the corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor at the heart of the disinformation campaign.

Their appearances on Fox Business, however, continued for a few more weeks — until diGenova used one to utter a widely condemned antisemitic screed, at which point the couple stopped appearing there as well.

Then in February 2020, The Daily Beast reported on a 162-page internal Fox News research briefing book detailing the “unrelenting disinformation campaign originating from Ukraine.” “Notable are the roles of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing in spreading disinformation and their parroting of beneficial narratives while employed by [pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry] Firtash,” the document noted. It also highlighted their “non-disclosure of financial motives and representation of Firtash while spreading false and misleading stories."

DiGenova and Toensing subsequently became Newsmax contributors.

Now someone Fox’s own research division panned for “spreading disinformation” will be running the Trump administration’s latest efforts to criminalize their opponents. The network has spent years feeding the flames of the conspiracy theories that diGenova will now be investigating — but highlighting his new role might force the network to confront what it means that someone it’s apparently deemed unreliable is leading that charge.

### Newsmax's Greg Kelly on Joe diGenova's DOJ appointment: “One of our favorite guests on this show will be counselor to the attorney general”

04/21/26

### Newsmax's Greg Kelly on the threat of measles: “Chillax a little bit”

04/21/26

---

DEM DOCL

A former Trump campaign lawyer who backed President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to a Florida-based U.S. attorney’s office leading a sprawling probe into a slate of former federal officials who investigated Trump.

Joseph diGenova’s appointment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida comes shortly after journalists reported that he is taking over the “grand conspiracy” investigation into intelligence and law enforcement officials, against whom Trump has long vowed to seek retribution.

In announcing the appointment Monday, Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for southern Florida, said on social media that diGenova would be “stepping into a senior advisory role on key legal, policy, and enforcement matters.”

“With decades of experience—including serving as U.S. Attorney for D.C. under Ronald Reagan—diGenova brings deep expertise in federal prosecution and high-stakes investigations,” Quiñones said.

DiGenova’s appointment to oversee the conspiracy probe marks another significant blow to the DOJ’s longstanding independence from the White House. It comes just over a week after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly claimed that Trump has a “right” to order investigations into his enemies.

Though Quiñones said that diGenova would help “advance the Department’s mission to protect Americans, enforce the rule of law, and ensure impartial justice,” the grand conspiracy investigation into Trump enemies features many hallmarks of past politically motivated probes initiated by Trump.

Jason Reding Quiñones (right0, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, shaking hands with former Trump campaign attorney Joseph diGenova in Florida on April 20, 2026. (Photo: U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of Florida)

DiGenova joined the U.S. attorney’s office after Maria Medetis Long, the previous senior federal prosecutor overseeing the probe, was removed from the case. She had questioned the legal viability of future charges, the New York Times reported.

Specifically, Medetis Long objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John Brennan, the former CIA director.

Her removal echoed personnel changes that placed Trump’s former personal attorney at the helm of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia before it pursued criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both of those criminal cases were dismissed by a federal judge last year.

Comey, whom Trump has branded a “dirty cop” and “leaker” for initiating the FBI’s probe into alleged links between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, has received a subpoena in the grand conspiracy investigation.

The exact parameters of the investigation are unclear, but prominent allies of the president and Quiñones have said it centers on the far-fetched claim that the former officials allegedly conspired to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights starting from his election in 2016 through his federal indictments in 2023.

While the statute of limitations on most federal crimes is five years, Quiñones’ office has been able to scrutinize actions beyond those limits by alleging a conspiracy against Trump.

In total, prosecutors overseeing the sprawling investigation have issued over 130 subpoenas so far.

Part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury seated in Fort Pierce, Florida, overseen by Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who showed the president unusual deference while presiding over special counsel Jack Smith’s classified documents investigation against the president after his first term in office.

In 2020, DiGenova and his wife, lawyer Victoria Toensing, were part of a legal team that included Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, challenging the results of the 2020 election. He also pushed conspiracy theories alleging election fraud during that vote.

Before that, diGenova and Toensing reportedly collaborated with Giuliani in efforts to extract compromising information on Joe Biden from Ukrainian officials during the last years of Trump’s first term. At the time, Toensing categorically denied their involvement.

That attempt to undermine Biden’s candidacy in the 2020 vote would eventually lead the House of Representatives to impeach Trump.

---

NYT 4 20 26

As a sprawling inquiry expands into whether former federal officials committed crimes in investigating President Trump, two unusual factors could ease the way toward securing the indictments he craves.

A former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed from that post this week, a senior law enforcement official said on Saturday.

And at least part of the investigation appears to be using a grand jury based in Fort Pierce, Fla., overseen by a federal judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who issued rulings favorable to Mr. Trump during the classified documents case against him, the official added. Mr. diGenova is expected to split his time between Miami and Fort Pierce.

Together, the moves show how the Justice Department under Mr. Trump’s control has been willing to embrace politically charged tactics and unorthodox personnel decisions in its efforts to satisfy his demands to prosecute his perceived foes — even as other prosecutors loyal to him have encountered forceful pushback from courts against his wide-ranging retribution campaign.

Mr. diGenova, 81, who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan era, has been given the title of counselor to the attorney general and detailed to the Southern District of Florida, where the U.S. attorney, Jason A. Reding Quiñones, another Trump loyalist, is supervising the inquiry.

Mr. diGenova’s appointment comes after Maria Medetis Long, a senior career prosecutor in Miami who had been in charge of the investigation, was abruptly removed from the case. Ms. Medetis Long, who leads national security investigations for Mr. Quiñones’s office, is said to have objected to moving forward with a portion of the inquiry focused on John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director.

The law enforcement official familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal issue.

Because Judge Cannon is the only federal jurist in the Fort Pierce courthouse, she could be in a position to make critical decisions if Mr. diGenova uses the grand jury there to subpoena documents or witness testimony and the recipients balk, asking her to quash the demands.

Judge Cannon was criticized by an appeals court in 2022 after she effectively stalled the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents by appointing a so-called special master to sort through reams of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida. Later, Mr. Trump praised her lavishly, calling her “strong” and “brilliant,” after she tossed out the indictment altogether, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the charges, had been improperly appointed.

In another unusual move, Christopher-James DeLorenz, who worked as a law clerk for Judge Cannon during the documents case and later served as an aide to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was sent from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington to Mr. Quiñones’s office earlier this year and is working on the portion of the inquiry that is focused on Mr. Brennan, the official said.

Mr. diGenova will work on the Brennan matter, too, but also the broader inquiry.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s allies began pushing for what they referred to as a “grand conspiracy” case that would portray all of the criminal inquiries of Mr. Trump as a unified plot to violate his constitutional rights. The conspiracy, by their telling, began with the investigation into Russia and its potential ties to the 2016 Trump campaign, then extended to the classified documents and 2020 election indictments.

That far-fetched theory would allow the Justice Department to scrutinize in a single case matters that would normally be barred by the five-year statute of limitations. It would also give Mr. diGenova and Mr. Reding Quiñones the authority to scrutinize events that took place in Washington from their jurisdiction in Florida.

The Justice Department has also given Mr. Reding Quiñones special authority under a statute known as Section 515, the official said. That would enable him to bring indictments in jurisdictions where he is not the U.S. attorney.

While many details remain unknown, Mr. diGenova is inheriting an inquiry whose most developed portion appears to be focused on trying to find a basis to charge Mr. Brennan with lying to Congress over a January 2017 intelligence community assessment. It concluded, among other things, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election in part because Moscow hoped to improve Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

As the top federal prosecutor in Washington in the 1980s, Mr. diGenova secured an espionage conviction against Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who passed sensitive information to Israel. He later became a political commentator who gravitated toward Mr. Trump during his first term in the White House.

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

A special counsel appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr in Mr. Trump’s first term, John H. Durham, already scrutinized the actions of senior law enforcement and intelligence officials involved in the early stages of the Russia investigation.

Image

John O. Brennan testifying during a 2017 Senate hearing on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times

When that inquiry began in 2019, Mr. diGenova was among the Trump supporters who celebrated, telling Fox News that he believed people like Mr. Brennan, James R. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, would go to prison.

“James Comey, Brennan and Clapper have said to themselves, ‘Which one of us is going to pay the Barr bill?’” Mr. diGenova said, adding, “This conspiracy began with John Brennan and ends with John Brennan.”

But Mr. Durham, who completed his investigation in 2023, did not find a basis to prosecute any of them, and Mr. Barr later said the Durham investigation found that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane.”

Grand jury subpoenas already issued under Mr. Reding Quiñones have sought records related to the 2017 intelligence community assessment. The effort appears focused on trying to build a perjury case against Mr. Brennan over a 2023 deposition to Congress. At the time, he discussed the relationship between the assessment and the Steele dossier, a compendium of later-discredited political opposition research making various claims about Mr. Trump and Russia.

The F.B.I. had wanted to include information from the dossier in the intelligence community assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked. Mr. Brennan, in his testimony, told lawmakers that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.” Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of the dossier was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan had long said.

Documents the Trump administration declassified last year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the main body of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix, although they also showed the appendix had a header stating that its claims did not contribute to the judgment. Released files also showed that C.I.A. analysts had objected to the appendix, too, but portrayed Mr. Brennan as having pushed back in support of the compromise arrangement with the F.B.I.

Last October, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth L. Wainstein, has said it did not.

Last December, Mr. Wainstein wrote to the chief federal judge in South Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga, urging her to block the Justice Department from steering the case to Judge Cannon. The Justice Department, he wrote, appeared to be planning to “manipulate grand jury and case-assignment procedures” to put the investigation under her.

It has not been clear whether Judge Altonaga took any action. But the broader investigation has since expanded, including with subpoenas issued earlier this year for documents about the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

:{---

WIKI 4 26

Russian interference in the 2016 election

Further information: Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections

DiGenova, who frequently appears as a commentator on Fox News, has accused FBI officials of trying to "frame" President Donald Trump for "nonexistent" crimes.^[30] On March 19, 2018, he and his spouse, Victoria Toensing, were hired to serve on Trump's legal team for the Special Counsel investigation.^[6] However, Trump backtracked the hires several days later due to potential conflicts of interest.^[16] The president hoped diGenova could function as a stand-in for him on television and spearhead the attacks on Mueller and the investigation.^[31]

In April 2018, diGenova called for the firing of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, said that special counsel Robert Mueller's team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election were "legal terrorists" and called former FBI Director James Comey "a dirty cop".^[5] In May 2018 tweet, Trump quoted diGenova as saying "The recusal of Jeff Sessions was an unforced betrayal of the President of the United States."^[32]

On February 21, 2019, diGenova stated in Laura Ingraham's podcast that the US is in a civil war and that he advises friends to prepare for total war by voting and buying guns.^[33]

Kavanaugh appointment

On September 18, 2018, diGenova discounted charges that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, then 17 years old, had allegedly sexually assaulted a 15-year-old Christine Blasey Ford at a party. The allegations referred to a time when Kavanaugh was attending Georgetown Preparatory School. On Fox News, diGenova said if Ford testified, "she's going to look like the loon that she is."^[34]

---

GGL 4 26

[### U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead 'Grand Conspiracy ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/us/politics/digenova-trump-lawyer-conspiracy.html)

1 day ago — A former lawyer for Mr. Trump's campaign, Joseph diGenova, has been selected to lead the inquiry after a career prosecutor in Miami was removed ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### Trump loyalist who challenged 2020 election results ...

Democracy Docket

https://www.democracydocket.com › News](https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-campaign-attorney-digenova-grand-conspiracy-florida-investigation/)

2 hours ago — DiGenova's appointment to oversee the conspiracy probe marks another significant blow to the DOJ's longstanding independence from the White ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### AP sources: Witnesses subpoenaed to testify before D.C. ...

PBS

https://www.pbs.org › newshour › politics › ap-sources-...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-sources-witnesses-subpoenaed-to-testify-before-d-c-grand-jury-in-john-brennan-investigation)

2 hours ago — The Justice Department since then has tapped Joseph diGenova, 81, a Trump loyalist who served as the U.S. Attorney in Washington for part of ...Read more

[### Joseph DiGenova, a conservative attorney, is being tapped ...

Facebook · CBS News

720+ reactions · 2 days ago](https://www.facebook.com/CBSNews/posts/joseph-digenova-a-conservative-attorney-is-being-tapped-by-the-us-justice-depart/1366005498724624/)

Joe DiGenova, a Republican U.S. attorney appointed ... The pair is under investigation for potential wrongdoing in the Trump-Russia probe.Read more

[### Joseph diGenova

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Joseph_diGenova](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_diGenova)

In March 2018, President Donald Trump announced that diGenova and Toensing would join his legal defense team during the Mueller investigation; the appointments ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### DOJ sends an unsubtle signal to prosecutors about ...

MS NOW

https://www.ms.now › doj-brennan-digenova-nyt-cannon](https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/doj-brennan-digenova-nyt-cannon)

8 hours ago — The Times' report noted that the conspiratorial Republican lawyer, known for his frequent Fox News appearances, “has claimed the Russia ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### Trump lawyer from effort to overturn 2020 election ...

CBS News

https://www.cbsnews.com › Politics](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-lawyer-joseph-digenova-oversee-probe-of-ex-cia-director-official/)

2 days ago — Joseph DiGenova, a conservative attorney who previously represented President Trump's campaign when it challenged the results of the 2020 ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### Justice Department adds former Trump lawyer to ...

CNN

https://www.cnn.com › 2026/04/18 › politics › joseph-...](https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/18/politics/joseph-digenova-florida-brennan-probe)

2 days ago — Joseph diGenova, who has worked with Donald Trump's legal team on a variety of matters, including the 2020 election, will be joining the ...

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

[### Trump Lawyer diGenova to Lead Miami Grand Conspiracy ...

Bloomberg Law News

https://news.bloomberglaw.com › us-law-week › trump...](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-lawyer-digenova-to-take-over-miami-grand-conspiracy-probe)

2 days ago — Her replacement, diGenova, represented Trump during Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and ...Read more

Missing: GOP ‎| Show results with: GOP

---

mma

February 11, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Finnerty

BOB BROOKS (HOST): Now you know their intentions — erase the whole Trump presidency. That will be their goal at the end. For reaction, let's welcome in former U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C, Joe DiGenova and the host of The Tudor Dixon Podcast, the one, the only Tudor Dixon. Good to see you both.

JOE DIGENOVA (GUEST): Good to see you.

BROOKS: Joe, I want to start with you. You know, the courts. You know D.C, who's running things now? Judges or the President of the United States. What's going on?

DIGENOVA: Well, what you've seen over the last few days, both in New York, Washington, D.C, and Boston, are a group of federal district court judges who don't understand their role. They have overreached. They have done things which are clearly in error. They are interfering in the executive function. And I think President Trump ultimately will win. The problem is, there's going to be a time delay in his victory, but he will win. What he's doing is perfectly legal. There's no legitimate constitutional objection to what he's doing. And in particular, Judge Engelmayer in New York, who said that the Secretary of the Treasury could not look at certain accounts — he should be impeached for that.

Let me just tell you something right now. There needs to be a new project started in the House of Representatives, and that's to start getting names of federal district court judges who need to be impeached.

BROOKS: Well, hey, House members, maybe they're listening to Joe tonight because we got some problems. If the president can't control our websites — my God.

:{===

- Prompted by a quote from actor Rob Schneider, Donald Trump Jr. argued that “we don't have a choice” and that the GOP will have to prosecute Trump critics as retribution. *Triggered*, [5/30/24]

- On his radio show, Fox News host Sean Hannity lashed out at Judge Juan Merchan. *The Sean Hannity Show*, [5/30/24]

- Fox News guest Brett Tolman: “I really blame the judge.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [5/30/24]

- A Newsmax host made clear that Trump jurors can never go anywhere without being harassed. Newsmax, [5/30/24]

- Fox News reporter Shannon Bream hyped criticism of the judge’s jury instructions. Fox News, *Special Report*, [5/30/24]

- Laura Ingraham speculated that two attorneys on the jury steered the rest of the jury’s deliberations. Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [5/30/24]

- A Fox News guest called Trump’s conviction a result of a “show trial” and said it shows why presidents “need immunity from criminal prosecution to do their jobs.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [5/30/24]

- Newsmax guest Joseph di Genova warned jurors to be “very careful.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [5/30/24]

---

mma 8 23

right-wing media are attacking Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over Donald Trump’s pending criminal case in Washington D.C.

Chutkan was randomly selected to preside over the case. Appointed by former President Obama, she has been described as a “tough Jan. 6 sentencer”of defendants who participated in the insurrection, though she has “avoided some of the most pointed criticisms of Trump that some of her colleagues on the federal bench in D.C. have delivered.”

Media figures on the right have leveled numerous attacks and charges against her, describing her as politically motivated, and calling for her recusal in the case against the former president.

Fox News host Mark Levin described Chutkan as “the worst, radical, left-wing, Obama judge in America”on Fox and Friends, adding that Trump would be indicted for “drinking too much orange juice.”
On his radio show, Levin reiterated his claim and called Chutkan “a whack job.” He then asked, “Do you think Trump will get a fair shot with her? Of course not.” He added, “And so the system is really truly rigged. Really truly rigged.”
On WABC’s Chat with the Mayor, alleged co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani called her “the most inhumane sentencer on the court for January 6 people.” He went on to claim, “This is the Soviet Union, Red China, or Nazi Germany. That judge should recuse herself if she has any ethics.”
Newsmax host Greg Kelly called Chutkan “a bad judge” for Trump’s case and said, “She has major conflicts.”
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro called Chutkan “a very left-wing judge” and said, “It is certainly fair to point out that Jack Smith is filing in a court in Washington D.C. with probably the most Trump-hating judge in Washington D.C.”
Newsmax host Eric Bolling called Judge Chutkan “a very harsh judge on anything surrounding January 6.”
On her SiriusXM show, Megyn Kelly**p**redicted, “This judge is going to hate Trump, and she's not going to dismiss this case on the papers.”
Newsmax host Sebastian Gorka said, “This is their attempt to steal 2024,” and called Chutkan “the worst January 6 judge possible — an Obama appointee who has given the harshest sentences to people who walked through the velvet ropes on January 6.”
Laura Ingraham said she has “doubts about her” and said, “I want to remind you tonight that she worked for Hunter Biden's law firm at one point, Boies and Schiller.”
On Fox Business, Alan Dershowitz and Kash Patel called for Chutkan to recuse herself from Trump’s case, with Derschowitz calling her former law firm “one of the most corrupt firms” and accusing them of being “Democratic hacks.”
Dershowitz also appeared on BlazeTV’s The Glenn Beck Program and asserted that Chutkan “has a very questionable background” and “worked for years for a firm that’s highly questionable.”
On Steve Bannon’s War Room, Patel again called for Chutkan’s recusal, saying, “She’s so entrenched through her past legal representations and family to the Democratic national party and the Hillary Clinton campaign that she could not be a fair, detached … arbiter of facts.”
On Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime, an over-the-shoulder graphic featured an image of Chutkan with the words, “the Obama Punisher,” and host Jesse Watters described her as “an Obama donor.”
Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson called Chutkan “a very nasty judge” and added, “This judge worked with Hunter Biden at a law firm. This judge should be recused, of course.”
On Newsmax, co-host Bianca de la Garza pointed to the ties between Chutkan’s law firm and the president’s son, saying, “The person who runs it is ahuge donor to the Democratic party.” She predicted that Trump’s team would request a different judge to preside over the case.
On Newsmax’s special coverage of the indictment, Newsmax contributor Joe diGenova said Chutkan will be “very, very bad for Donald Trump” and suggested there’s a risk “that she will not conduct a proper jury selection process” in Trump’s case.
On hisradio show, Fox News host Sean Hannitysaid, “The Obama-appointed judge overseeing this case once worked for the same law firm as Hunter Biden. Is anybody going to call that a conflict of any kind? I’d say that might be a conflict.”

willard world soc

...After Trump announced on November 14 that he would be challenging the election results in court, Giuliani was tasked with creating a team of lawyers. In a November 19 press conference, Giuliani announced the team, which included Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Joseph diGenova. Less than three weeks after joining Giuliani’s team, diGenova appeared on a far-right Newsmax podcastand called for the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs,to be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” for stating that the 2020 election was free of manipulation.

In the meantime, Giuliani and Ellis were pressuring Republican state lawmakers to unilaterally overturn the results in their states. Previous reporting has established that they met with the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on November 25, during which Ellis urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to fix a “corrupted, irredeemably compromised election,” either by arranging for a new, “special election” or directing “the manner of your electors.”

Similar appeals were made by Ellis and Giuliani toArizona lawmakers on November 30, Michigan lawmakerson December 2 and Georgiarepresentatives on December 4.

The Post report states that on January 2, 2021 Trump, Giuliani and Eastman spoke to 300 state legislators on a conference call to provide “evidence of fraud” and galvanize the lawmakers to “decertify” the election results. “You have the real power,” Trump told the lawmakers, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. “You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”

atl mo anne a

ingraham:

And if the real America, the true America, is disappearing, then extreme measures might be required to save it. In 2019, Ingraham nodded along on her Fox News show when one of her guests, the conservative lawyer Joseph diGenova, began to speak of the coming cultural conflict in America: “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over . . . it’s going to be total war,” he said. “I do two things; I vote and I buy guns.”

an 421 no twt lnx

Devin Nunes is caught up in Giuliani’s 'Russian mob' scandal: Trump impeachment prosecutor

Bob Brigham and Raw Story April 29, 2021

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has exposure in Rudy Giulian's legal scandal, according to former prosecutor Daniel Goldman, who served as majority counsel in Donald Trump's first impeachment trial.

Goldman offered his analysis after The New York Times reported that FBI agents also executed a search warrant at the home of Giuliani ally Victoria Toensing.

"This makes sense because, during the Ukraine impeachment investigation, we obtained draft retainer agreements between a Ukrainian official and Toensing and diGenova that Giuliani brokered," Goldman tweeted.

Podcast host Eric Garland noticed Goldman's analysis and added his summary of the situation.

"UM. SO GIULIANI AND TOENSING AND DIGENOVA WERE SIMULTANEOUSLY UNREGISTERED AGENTS OF UKRAINE *WHILE ON THE PAYROLL OF RUSSIAN MOB BOSS DMITRO FIRTASH* - while working for Trump. When he was President. And they all were conspiring with Russian intelligence," he wrote.

"Correct," Goldman said.

"And don't forget Devin Nunes and his sidekick Derek Harvey were involved too," he added.

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:{diGenova and Victoria Toensing are still missing from Fox News:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:01/23/20 8:12 AM EST

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/bill-barr-has-been-covering-up-lev-parnas-explosive-evidence-for-the-past-three-months/

no lnx

Bill Barr has been covering up Lev Parnas’ explosive evidence for the past three months

Lev Parnas and his attorney appear on The Rachel Maddow show.

Written by Joshua Holland January 16, 2020

Among the eye-popping revelations from Lev Parnas, a low-level Republican hustler and associate of Rudy Giuliani who has been thrust into the spotlight of Trump’s impeachment, is that the president* “knew exactly what was going on” as his flunkies tried to coerce the Ukrainian government into opening a sham investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter–as did Vice President Mike Pence–and that Attorney General Bill Barr “was basically on the team” along with Giuliani, Parnas, his associates Igor Fruman and Semyon Kislin, and lawyers (and frequent Fox News guests) Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova, among others.

It is important to understand that not only did Parnas implicate Barr in the corrupt scheme, but Barr’s Justice Department has been in possession of the trove of documents and recordings that Parnas just turned over to House investigators for several months. Parnas was arrested by federal agents back in October with six electronic devices, and authorities confiscated another eight from his Florida home shortly thereafter.

Democrats requested documents from Parnas, Fruman and Kislin back in September, prior to their arrests. Barr’s Justice Department has fought those efforts tooth-and-nail–including Congressional subpoenas of Giuliani and subsequently of Parnas himself–according to Barr’s theory that the president and his advisors enjoy absolute immunity from Congressional probes. Parnas’s attorneys had to ask a federal judge to allow their client to comply with Congressional document requests.

If Parnas’s allegations are true, then Barr was a participant in a conspiracy to violate the law and has been actively covering up evidence of that scheme. But it’s important to note here that while Parnas has documentary evidence to support much of what he has said on the record, the claim that Barr was personally “on the team” has yet to be corroborated.

A Justice Department spokesperson issued a denial, but there are some aspects of Parnas’s narrative that fit with what we know from previous reporting.

On Wednesday night, Parnas told Rachel Maddow that he and Giuliana had cut a deal with Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who has been holed up in Vienna for six years fighting extradition to the US on corruption charges. According to Parnas’s account, they promised Firtash that the Justice Department would make the charges against him disappear in exchange for fodder to use against Biden. “We had to promise Firtash something,” he told the MSNBC host. “It was basically telling him we knew his case is worthless here and that he’s being prosecuted for no reason and basically it could get taken care of….It was all connected At the end of the day, the agenda was to make sure that the Ukrainians announced the Biden investigation.” He added that Barr was “in the loop” on this offer.

Last September, Firtash deposited $1 million into Parnas’s wife’s account for unknown purposes. Parnas subsequently retained Rudy Giuliani’s firm despite the fact that he was working for Giuliani. This was just days before Parnas departed for Kyiv on his “secret mission” for Trump, and The New York Times reports that having Rudy represent both Trump and Parnas was “a move that might afford their shared mission the confidentiality of attorney-client privilege.” Giuliani denies this account but Firtash’s payment to Parnas was established when prosecutors asked a judge to revoke the latter’s bail for failing to disclose it.

Although Barr ultimately decided not to intervene in the case, The Washington Post reported that Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova “secured a rare face-to-face meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr and other Justice Department officials to argue against the charges” last summer. The DOJ also refused to respond to repeated questions over an 18-month period by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about why Firtash had not yet been extradited, according to NBC.

Of course, everything about Barr’s past would be consistent with his covering up Trump’s extortion scheme, if not actively participating in it. Recall that last September it was reported that “Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

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Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That wonGiuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-the-hills-john-solomon-undermined-journalism

no lnx

How The Hill’s John Solomon undermined journalism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington MonthlyDecember 6, 2019

With the release of the report from the House Intelligence Committee on their impeachment hearings, Trump’s enablers are outraged that Representative Adam Schiff got access to the phone records of key players in Giuliani’s extortion scheme. According to Byron York, of particular concern is the fact that those records include telephone calls by John Solomon.

Finally, the publication of John Solomon’s records raised still other issues, this time about freedom of the press. In the excitement over the Democratic report, there was little or no discussion about the problems that might arise from the House Intelligence Committee publishing a journalist’s phone records. But in the past, at least when President Trump was not involved, similar issues have been a concern of press advocates…

Searching media coverage Tuesday and Wednesday, there was little or no discussion on whether Schiff’s disclosure touched on Solomon’s First Amendment rights. Solomon is the target of much criticism in mainstream reporting, but he is a journalist who should enjoy the same protections as others in his profession.

York isn’t the only one complaining. The guy who smeared a U.S. ambassador with a mountain of lies in order to get her fired actually had the nerve to talk about a lack of decency.

The problem with claiming that someone like Solomon deserves the protections of the first amendment is that he wasn’t acting as a journalist. While he calls himself an “investigative journalist,” he’s not simply a conservative reporter as some would suggest. He’s been a political operative for years now.

I first noticed stories by Solomon when I began tracking down the origin of the smears about the Clinton Foundation. He wrote volumes spreading those lies. As it turns out, one of his sources was Victoria Toensing, a pattern that has persisted to the current impeachment hearings about Ukraine. At the time, Toensing was representing an undercover FBI informant who claimed he could blow the whistle on Clinton corruption.

What we eventually learned is that the Justice Department determined that they had “serious credibility concerns” with Toensing’s client and that there were inconsistencies between his testimony and the documents they had obtained as part of their investigation.

You might, however, notice a pattern here when I point out that, while Solomon was collaborating with Toensing, the same lies about the informant were being repeated by Trump on Twitter and by Representative Devin Nunes on Fox News. The cast of characters looks very familiar, doesn’t it?

Solomon went on to write about the Trump-Russia investigation. He specifically focused in on the Steele dossier and often quoted anonymous sources that sounded an awful lot like members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Since March, Solomon has been writing articles related to Giuliani’s Ukrainian racket – including smears against Ambassador Marie Yavanovitch, claims that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and attacks on the Bidens. He admitted that Lev Parnas is the one who connected him to the source of much of his material—former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko.

Documents shared with congress by the State Department inspector general give us an inside look at how these kinds of stories were coordinated.

Included in the roughly 50-page packet was an email from Solomon to Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas previewing an article he’d written that was not yet published…

After that email became public, Solomon claimed he was simply fact-checking the piece before it was published. But Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas are not mentioned in the article, raising the possibility that the trio, who had been working to find evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens in Ukraine, had been working directly with Solomon on the story.

In other words, Solomon was running the article by his handlers to get their input and/or approval prior to publication.

Just as we saw with the efforts to smear the Clinton Foundation, the team of Toensing and diGenova would sign on as lawyers to represent people who had dirt on Trump’s opponents to sell, usually in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump’s Justice Department. Parnas or Toensing connected those people with Solomon, who wrote the stories that were spread by Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and a whole host of right wing news outlets. In the midst of all of that, Solomon was also a client of Toensing and diGenova.

It is in that sense that I would challenge Solomon’s claims to be a journalist. Just like Giuliani, Toensing, diGenova, Parnas, and Nunes, he was working as a political operative on Trump’s behalf. Beyond the fact that he spread lies that benefited the most corrupt individual to ever serve as a U.S. president, he contributed to the undermining of journalism, which is equally disturbing. Any time a political operative disguises themselves as a journalist, it infects the entire culture with suspicions about who we can trust.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fox-news-commentator-sean-hannity-appears-to-be-knee-deep-in-trumps-ukraine-scandal-despite-his-profusive-denials

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Fox News commentator Sean Hannity appears to be knee-deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal — despite his profuse denials

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon November 20, 2019

Fox News host Sean Hannity raved that he never spoke with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about ousted Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch after a third witness confirmed the alleged call to impeachment investigators.

David Hale, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, testified under oath that Yovanovitch was the victim of a baseless smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of President Donald Trump, which led to her ouster. According to a transcript of the closed-door deposition released Monday, the smears originally stemmed from the conservative columnist John Solomon, who wrote in The Hill that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had claimed that Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute list.” Lutsenko later retracted that claim.

Hale, the third-ranking official at the department, claimed to impeachment investigators that Hannity had pushed the same narrative on Fox News and that Pompeo had reached out to Trump’s favorite host.

“It did come up at some point with the secretary,” Hale said. “I understood that he did call Sean Hannity.”

Hale testified that Pompeo told Hannity, “I need to see what the evidence is.”

The State official added that no one at the department believed the allegations against Yovanovitch, though officials did not act to prevent her ouster.

Hale’s testimony is backed up by both Yovanovitch and George Kent, another senior State Department official.

Yovanovitch testified at her closed-door deposition that she was told Pompeo “was going to place a call to Mr. Hannity on Fox News to say, you know, ‘What is going on? I mean, do you have proof of these kinds of allegations or not? And if you have proof, you know, tell me, and if not, stop.’”

“I understand that that call was made,” she added. “I don’t know whether it was the secretary of somebody else in his inner circle, and for a time, you know, things kind of simmered down.”

Kent testified under oath that Solomon’s report was “primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs.”

Kent testified that a top official at the State Department reached out to Hannity but said it may not have been Pompeo.

“I believe, to the best of my recollection, the counselor for the department, Ulrich Brechbuhl, reached out and suggested to Mr.Hannity that if there was no proof of the allegations, that he should stop covering them,” Kent said.

Hannity previously called Yovanovitch’s testimony “fake news” and claimed that he did not “know anything about this woman.”

The host went off on his Fox News show Monday after Hale’s testimony was released.

“So apparently David Hale’s testimony was released a short time ago, and he says in the transcript it was his understanding that Pompeo called me to ask you what evidence you had of allegations regarding Yovanovitch,”Hannity told guest Gregg Jarrett. “Gregg, how many times do I have to say it? We barely mentioned this woman! Four times in passing. No, I never got a call from Secretary of State Pompeo or anybody else. Why would they lie about this?”

“You are being smeared,” replied Jarrett, the network’s legal analyst. “Donald Trump has been smeared for three years.”

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Sean Hannity addresses David Hale’s testimony by reiterating the same denial and asking “why would they lie about this”

Gregg Jarrett says Hannity is being smeared

The testimony Hannity is denying was given under oath while Hannity’s denials are not

Embedded video

Even as he called Yovanovitch’s testimony “fake news” earlier this month, Hannity conceded that “her name came up a few times on the show” and that he “did ask one question about a news report if she was involved in something.”

“It was a question,” he said, “We do news here.” (While his show appears on Fox News, Hannity is a political commentator.)

Hannity referenced Solomon’s report, which has not been retracted despite his main source walking back his comments. Solomon was a frequent guest on Hannity’s show. The question Hannity mentioned was to attorney Joe diGenova, who Trump wanted to add to his legal team. DiGenova played his own role in Trump’s Ukraine saga and received an advance copy ofSolomon’s reporting linking the State Department’s work in Ukraine to billionaire Democratic donor George Soros.

Shortly after Kent testified publicly, diGenova was back on Fox airwaves pushing the baseless Soros conspiracy theory.

“There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department,” he told Fox host Lou Dobbs.“He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs — work with NGOs. That was very evident in Ukraine, and Kent was part of that. He was a very big protector of Soros.”

Soros’ Open Society Foundations ripped the network for airing diGenova’s conspiracy theory in a letter to Fox News head Suzanne Scott.

“It is bad enough that Mr. Dobbs continues to repeat the widely discredited reporting of John Solomon . . . that has been debunked by the U.S. State Department and recanted by Mr. Solomon’s main source,” the letter said, adding that diGenova’s comment was “beyond rhetorical ugliness, beyond fiction, beyond ludicrous. It’s patently untrue; it’s not even possible. This is McCarthyite.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/trump-impeachment-inquiry/its-own-precedent-fox-should-ban-joe-digenova

after a year that has seen Fox News battered by advertiser boycotts over the bigoted language common to its programming, the network's parent company held Thursday’s annual shareholder meetings embroiled in a new controversy over over the regurgitation of vile anti-Semitic tropes on its airwaves.

If Fox had actual standards like a normal news outlet, it would already have announced a permanent ban on future appearances by Joe diGenova, a Republican lawyer and frequent guest on pro-Trump Fox programs, in light of his Wednesday night interview.

During an appearance on Fox Business’Lou Dobbs Tonight alongside his wife and legal partner Victoria Toensing, diGenova downplayed impeachment inquiry testimony that day from State Department diplomat George Kent by arguing that Kent is a pawn of George Soros, a Jewish billionaire whose support of U.S. progressive causes and foreign anti-corruption, pro-democracy efforts has made him the frequent target of conspiracy theories steeped in**anti-Semitic trope**s.

According to diGenova’s bonkers, evidence-free theory, “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” using that influence over the U.S. government to benefit his business interests.

DiGenova’s comments, suggesting that the Jewish financier is a shadowy puppet master controlling vast swaths of the federal government for his own dark purposes, are “right out of the propaganda mills of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and other rightist anti-Semitic movements in Eastern Europe,” as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted. Indeed, they are so reprehensible that Fox has previously ruled that such remarks earn a lifetime ban from the network’s platform.

When Judicial Watch research director Chris Farrell said the “Soros-occupied State Department” had funded caravans of Central American migrants during an October 2018 appearance on Dobbs’ program, the network condemned his “rhetoric” and said he would not be invited back. (Dobbs himself did not react to Farrell’s statement and in fact undermined the network’s response; he has his own record of anti-Semitic Soros smears.)

In the wake of diGenova’s comments, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called on Fox to “hold the same standard” on diGenova as on Farrell.

But Fox has done no such thing. That may reflect how Fox punishments tend to be based on a sliding scale reflecting both the level of criticism the network is receiving and the relative importance of the perpetrator. And diGenova’s role as a key player in the Sean Hannity Extended Universe of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists grants him a great deal of protection.

Farrell’s comments caused a firestorm for Fox because they drew attention in the wake of a murderous rampage at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a white supremacist who was obsessed with the idea that Jews were behind the caravans.

Farrell’s relatively low status as a sometimes guest made the calculus easy for Fox: By cutting him loose, the network’s PR team could head off the subject and forestall niggling questions about the Soros conspiracy theory’s pervasiveness on its airwaves. Meanwhile, pro-Trump hosts like Dobbs and Hannity could simply slot in Farrell’s Judicial Watch boss, Fox regular Tom Fitton, for future segments.

By contrast, diGenova is essential to Fox’s conspiracy theory machine. He and Toensing were deeply enmeshed in Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to help Trump’s reelection by running a shadow foreign policy effort in Ukraine. They have employed or been employed by leading players in the plot to smear Joe Biden and undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election, all while making dozens of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business to detail the ins and outs of the twisted narrative they helped assemble (diGenova alone has made at least 65 appearances this year, according to Media Matters research).

Indeed, the best argument that diGenova didn’t engage in anti-Jewish animus on Wednesday is that he was simply acting in the interests of his client Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime. Firtash, who retained diGenova and Toensing to prevent his extradition to the United States on bribery charges, has clashed with Ukrainian anti-corruption organizations supported by Soros.

Of course, that’s simply another reason Fox shouldn’t allow diGenova on its airwaves: He has an irreconcilable conflict of interest on the topics he discusses -- one that he hid from the network’s audience.

The network’s latest failure to take action hammers home the reality that there are no real rules at Fox.

omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19

mma 1019

As the last credible journalist to have a daily show on Fox News, Shep Smith probably should have resigned a long time ago. The network has been a right-wing propaganda network for years, and under Trump has turned into regime TV. On Friday, he finally did resign, and initial reports have indicated that his actions were driven by how bad the network has gotten.

Smith's resignation comes shortly after Fox News executives reportedly sided against him in an on-air feud with Fox News host Tucker Carlson over the seriousness of Trump's behavior in regards to Ukraine. In the end, Carlson said thatSmith was giving partisan opinion and not news. The entire episode was extremely telling: Tucker Carlson portrayed Smith's show -- at first implicitly and then explicitly -- as leftist fake news,much the same way he does nightly with CNN and MSNBC, even teaming up with close Trump ally Joseph diGenova. And Fox News executives were fine with it.

Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz wrote in the wake of Smith's announcement, "Smith’s willingness to push back against the misinformation rampant elsewhere on the network had made him extremely valuable to Fox. It provided the network’s executives with a fig leaf they could wave whenever critics argued that Fox was nothing more than a propaganda apparatus on behalf of the president and his allies. That fig leaf is gone. Fox belongs to the Seans Hannity and Lous Dobbs. And now, everyone knows it."

Gird your loins: Fox News is about to get even worse.

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy

At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.

It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.

What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.

Here’s how it went down.

Key Takeaways

Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.
The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.
Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.
During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times.
Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.
On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.

Key players

Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.

Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former businessassociate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”

Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.

John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.

Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.

The plan

According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.

The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.

In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.

Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.

As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure, the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.

Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.

NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”

The media strategy

Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon

Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.

In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:

He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.
Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.
He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.
He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated andreleased to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).
He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.
He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.
And, of course, he claimedthat Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.

Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.

At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though.

Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”

Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox

The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to SeanHannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period.

The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.

However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.

Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.

The payoff

Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:

Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”

Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/giulianis-ukrainian-born-clients-arrested-on-campaign-finance-charges-dined-with-trump-in-the-white-house-after-showering-gop-campaign-committees-with-nearly-500000/

no lnx

Former Trump attorney John Dowd reveals men arrested on campaign finance charges ‘assisted’ Giuliani in his work representing the president

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement October 10, 2019

The former lead lawyer for President Donald Trump, representing him during the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia and Trump, John Dowd, is now representing the two Ukrainian-born men arrested overnight attempting to leave the country. The two men were arrested in relation to a campaign finance investigation on charges that include conspiracy, falsifying records, and falsifying records to the FEC.

The men also worked with Giuliani to help him try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

The former lead lawyer for President Donald Trump, representing him during the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia and Trump, John Dowd, is now representing the two Ukrainian-born men arrested overnight attempting to leave the country. The two men were arrested in relation to a campaign finance investigation on charges that include conspiracy, falsifying records, and falsifying records to the FEC.

The men also worked with Giuliani to help him try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

Dowd in a statement says his clients, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, “assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump.”

That’s huge, given the charges against them.

“Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman,” Dowd continues, “have also been represented by Mr. Giuliani in connection with their personal and business affairs.”

“They also assisted Joseph DiGenova [sic] and Victoria Toensing in their law practice.”

Both diGenova and Toensing are Fox News regulars who defend Trump on-air. They were rumored to have been hired by the White House to assist Trump with his defense during the Mueller investigation but that appeared to have been thwarted by Trump himself.

Politico congressional reporter Kyle Cheney makes this important – and damning – observation:

@kyledcheney

IMPORTANT: Fruman and Parnas' lawyer (former Trump lawyer John Dowd) just laid out all of their connections to Trump world (in his famous Comic Sans letter).

It's not just Giuliani but DiGenova, Toensing -- and they even helped with Trump-related legal work. >>>

View image on Twitter

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

If prosecutors are correct, this means two people who worked on legal matters for Trump were simultaneously running a straw donor scheme on behalf of foreign interests.

2,419

8:04 AM - Oct 10, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

1,055 people are talking about this

That, too, is huge.

Here’s Dowd’s statement, which was in the form of a letter sent to the House Intelligence Committee:

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

IMPORTANT: Fruman and Parnas' lawyer (former Trump lawyer John Dowd) just laid out all of their connections to Trump world (in his famous Comic Sans letter).

It's not just Giuliani but DiGenova, Toensing -- and they even helped with Trump-related legal work. >>>

3/18

scrape the barrel to stock the swamp, booted, then recycled by rudy?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/fox-news-outs-two-network-analysts-for-working-off-the-books-with-trump-and-giuliani-to-find-biden-dirt/

kos

Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace broke a bit of genuine news on Sunday morning when he reported that two of Fox News’ own frequent guests and Trump supporters may themselves be enmeshed in the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

Lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing have been working with Rudy Giuliani in his attempts to conduct opposition research on former Vice President Joe Biden, said Wallace. “According to a top U.S. official, all three were working off the books apart from the administration. The only person in government who knows what they were doing is President Trump.” This is a significant nugget for several reasons. First, Rudy Giuliani is still flatly denying he worked with other lawyers to collect Biden “dirt”; the Fox News anchor is therefore calling Giuliani a liar. Well, even more of a liar.

And second, the top-of-the-program callout of two of the network’s own frequent guests and analysts for undisclosed, “off the books” involvement in one of the scandals the network has been hosting them to opine on is, regardless of the obvious conflict of interest, nearly unheard of. From Lou Dobbs to Sean Hannity, the network has taken a notably lax attitude when it comes to network mouths splitting their time between the network and the needs of the Trump administration. They normally wouldn’t so much as peep about overtly conflicted guests!

Whatever’s going on, diGenova and Toensing seem to have peeved someone in the network off mightily.

That’s not quite the idle speculation it would appear to be. DiGenova appeared recently on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend Trump in the Ukraine scandal—an appearance that led to Carlson directly attacking “straight news” anchor Shepard Smith’s credibility. But Fox News as an entity relies on maintaining a largely fictional separation between the loud-mouthed opinion hosts and the self-described “trustworthy” news side of the business; if Tucker is going to threaten that separation by suggesting that the news side is itself biased, it’s going to threaten the paychecks of everyone in the building.

Wallace’s high-profile knifing of Tucker’s recent guest diGenova might signify, then, that the “straight news” producers have had just about enough lip from the likes of Tucker and his guests. Fox has been doing next to no original reporting on the Ukrainian scandal; suddenly, though, it has a line on new scandal participants that just happen to be two of its own network’s favorite guests?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-host-laura-ingrahams-guest-says-the-country-is-in-a-civil-war-and-people-should-buy-guns/

On a disturbing episode of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s “The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast” Thursday, guest Joe diGenova echoed the calls of some of the darkest parts of the far-right movement in the United States.

“We are in a civil war in this country,” diGenova, as first pointed out by Media Matters for America. “There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left — they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things-- I vote and i buy guns [video]

One particularly odd fact about his claims is that they seemed to come out of nowhere. Ingraham had just ended a diatribe about how liberals supposedly shifted attention away from discussions about the imperiled Democratic leadership in Virginia government to allegations of a hate crime made by actor Jussie Smollett, who has since been arrested on charges of filing a false police report. It was a bizarre and twisted theory, completely out of line with reality. but it had nothing to do with a supposed “civil war.”

But for many on the fringes of the far right, casual talk about political divisions in the United States easily slips into discussions of open warfare and violence.

President Donald Trump, it should be noted, once announced that he was hiring diGenova for his legal team, but he never came on board.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted on Twitter that a man prosecutors say was a domestic terrorist, Chris Hasson, had, according to a court filing, googled “civil war if Trump impeached.”

“Where could he possibly get such an insane idea?” Hayes asked — and then he linked to diGenova’s comments. “Oh.”

Hasson was also found with an apparent “hit list” of Democratic politicians and media figures, according to prosecutors — a list that included Hayes.

thug swarm pension plan ever trump:

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/06/08/fox-joe-digenova-celebrates-doj-seizing-new-york-times-reporters-records-they-should-go-after/220405

Trump this week seemed to hire controversial attorney Joseph diGenova, a regular Fox News guest who is known for spouting conspiracy theories about the “deep state” conspiring to frame the president for crimes.

However, CNN is now reporting that Trump isn’t sure diGenova and his wife, fellow lawyer and Fox News regular Victoria Toensing, are the right people for the job after meeting with them just once.

“The Thursday meeting was the first time the husband-and-wife legal team met with the President since the Monday announcement,” CNN reports. “One source said that while Trump liked their message, the President is not convinced they are right for the legal jobs.”

In particular, CNN’s sources say the Trump White House has concerns over whether “diGenova can reasonably claim a lack of conflict when his wife represents clients like Mark Corrallo, who has spoken to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about how the President and his team responded to the revelations regarding the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had with a group of Russians.”

On Thursday, top White House lawyer John Dowd resigned after he reportedly grew tired of Trump not listening to his legal advice. Were Trump to renege on his plans to hire diGenova, it would lead to even more chaos in his legal team as he prepares to face down special counsel Robert Mueller and his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

https://www.alternet.org/cornered-mueller-trump-hires-hatchet-man

With the hiring of talking head attorney Joseph diGenova for his legal team, President Trump signaled Monday how he plans to fend off special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation: with a conspiracy theory.

Trump’s previous defenses have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of facts. The president’s claim that the charges of collusion between his campaign and the Russian government are a “hoax” and “fake news” have been refuted by guilty pleas from three former top aides, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Richard Gates. All three have admitted making false statements to Mueller’s investigators.

The indictment of 13 Russians for interfering in the 2016 election is replete with references to collaborating Americans "known and unknown to the grand jury." In light of Mueller's recent subpoena for the records of the Trump Organization, those words elevate the threat to the White House.

By firing career FBI agent Andrew McCabe, denouncing Mueller's alleged "Witch Hunt" and hiring diGenova, Trump is doubling down on the theory that a cabal of liberal FBI agents and Justice Department officials have invented the charges against him. DiGenova will fill in the details.

Hatchet Man

DiGenova is a theatrical character. The son of an opera singer, he grew up fascinated by politics. He worked on the Church Committee, which investigated the CIA in the mid-1970s. He became chief of staff for Republican Senator Charles Mathias, a moderate, and then U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In the 1980s, he launched the corruption investigations that would eventually ensnare D.C. Mayor Marion Barry.

“Barry didn’t understand that law enforcement is a continuum, and that there are a lot of people who care about corruption,” diGenova once said, an observation that also applies to his newest client.

DiGenova can’t help Trump and Co. much on the legal front. All the president’s men are learning that bleating “Benghazi" or “email server” may appeal to Fox News and Breitbart editors, but provides no protection from a subpoena or jail term. And so guilty pleas and cooperating witnesses are proliferating.

“The nation, in fact, could conceivably benefit from the indictment of a president. It would teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law.”DiGenova first emerged as a partisan hatchet man during Bill Clinton’s presidency when he was deeply offended by the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. At that time, diGenova argued that a sitting U.S. president could be indicted. In the Wall Street Journal he wrote:

Since then diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, also an attorney, have built a law practice while forming a partisan attack team.

Toensing has been pushing the Uranium One conspiracy theory in order to undermine Mueller, talking about it no less than 18 times on Fox News. The Uranium One theory contends that Hillary Clinton approved the sale of America's uranium to Russia in order to pay back a Clinton Foundation crony.

Toensing's hobby horse is hobble by the facts: nine federal agencies approved the sale. Clinton was not involved in the decision, and no uranium left the United States. (See Politifact for the details.)

The beauty of this defense is that nobody in the Justice Department has found much evidence to support it. The texts, to which diGenova referred, have already leaked. While they disclosed some anti-Trump exchanges among FBI officials no longer involved in Mueller's investigation, they revealed no conspiring or violations of the law. The absence of evidence is cited by diGenova as proof that the Justice Department and the FBI are biased.DiGenova has already weaponized his conspiracy theory. In January, he told Fox News, “There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said. “Everything we have seen from these texts, and from all the facts developing, shows that the FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law, and deny Donald Trump his civil rights.”

Target: Wray

Now that Trump is no longer pretending to cooperate with Mueller, we can expect two themes to emerge from the White House defense team.

First, FBI director Christopher Wray will be subject to the McCabe treatment: vilification in the conservative media, followed by firing.

“Wray's performance has been extremely unimpressive, with regard to how to lead an agency during a time of crisis, how to respond publicly, how to respond to Congress, how to carry out your duties,” diGenova said. “It has been an abysmal performance by Director Wray. “

Just as firing McCabe was a way of testing if any important Republicans would object to Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department (answer: no), the smearing of Wray will measure if any influential Republicans will object to the firing of Mueller. (Answer: probably not.)

Second, we can expect to hear a chorus of demands, first from the right-wing media platforms that the Justice Department must appoint a special prosecutor or impanel a grand jury to look into the unsupported allegations of an anti-Trump conspiracy.

“We're long past the time when that should have been done,” diGenova said in January. “I hope they have. If they haven't I can't imagine they are not about to do so shortly."

When no such thing happens—because there is no evidence to justify it—Trump can claim that the "system is rigged” against him. Then he will have both the excuse to fire Mueller and an army of apologists who will say the Justice Department's “witch hunt” gave him no choice.

But Trump has tweeted about witch hunts before, with telling results.

In 2011, Trump said that sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain amounted to a “witch hunt." In fact, Cain had paid settlements to two women who accused him of sexual misconduct.

In 2015, Trump endorsed the idea that New York state’s investigation of the ripoff factory known as Trump University was a "Liberal Witch Hunt." In November 2016, he paid $25 million to settle the litigation.

When Trump and diGenova talk about a witch hunt, chances are the target is already in deep legal trouble.

hmmn, bs wacko

http://winsipcuster.blogspot.com/2016/10/james-comeys-feud-with-joseph-digenova.html

quote by digen]

An Interview with Lowell P. Wigglesworth

by Fabian Colbachi CPW News Service

The conservative Judicial Watch assembled a panel of five to review the recent developments in the Hillary Clinton email scandal.

Moderated by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, the panel included Paul Schweizer the author of Clinton Cash,Jerome Corsi,author of Partners In Crime: The Clinton's Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit,

Christopher J. Farrell, a member of the OSS Societyand Investigative Reporters and Editorswhose 1996 debate between Gary Webb and the Washington Post's Jeff Leen was moderated by the University of Missouri's Professor Emeritus of Journalism, Steve Weinberg, attempted to skewer Webb's reporting for the San Jose Mercury Newsand his book Dark Alliance. Also on the panel was former U.S. Attorney in Washington D.C. and founding partner of the K Street legal firm of DiGenova & Toensing, Joseph E. DiGenova.

The subject of the Clinton emails and their handling by a sitting and retired Secretary of State is a significant aspect of the 2016 Presidential campaign and ranks right up there with the 2000 and 2004 GWB Texas Air National Guard Memo story in this author's opinion. However, it now appears evident that not only are the concerned members of Judicial Watch correct in their assessment of the Clinton's criminality, but in their evaluation of a two-tiered legal and justice system that in the words of South Carolina Congressman, Trey Gowdy, is "suppose to be blind".

To better understand what is going on with respect to the Clinton email scandal historian Lowell P. Wigglesworth has agreed to be interviewed.

FC: Do you agree with Judicial Watch in their assessment of the Clintons?

LPW: Which part?

FC: Start where you'd like.

LPW: Are the Clinton's crooks? You'd have to be blind, deaf and really, really dumb not to so conclude. But the problem is bigger than Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. The Democratic National Convention invited to speak the granddaughter of the Nicaraguan dictator whose soldiers blew away the ABC newsman, Bill Stewart, in 1979 as he investigated Anastosio Samoza's relationship to the Contras, to Iran and probably to Samoza's partners in the banana business with GWB's Yale fraternity brothers, Linden and Neal Blue. The Blue brothers made their fortunes in uranium like that Hillary Clinton's brother, Tony Rodham, manages at UraniumOne a fuel and weapon that has helped make the British royal family's estate grow from $500 million to $14 billion. Fuel, depleted uranium weapons and the Blue's General Atomic Inc.'s, Predator and Reaper drones. The message was pretty obvious. The gloves are off. The RNC opens up with blood-sport cage-fighting entrepreneur, Dana White. The Democrats with wheelchair bound Anastasia Somoza in keeping with their more compassionate image. But wait! That's the family of the murderous Nicaraguan dictator that FDR called "a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch." The message? "You squeal on us and we'll squeal on you!" It was, from a Madison Avenue spin meister's viewpoint, a brilliant ploy. It sent a signal, a message to the despots that contribute to the Clinton Foundation...."you are welcome here. The U.S.A. is safe haven." On the other hand, it told the NeoCon's campfire sitters that they weren't doing anything that the Reagan/Bushies didn't do in Central America. We had only to remember LBJ's war in Vietnam and Obama's continuation of the Bush NeoCon's policies in the Middle East to know that. Of course, the DNC convention had other issues like Julian Assange's little bombshell that may show up again before November 8. This crap is what makes the election years in any nation a potential mine field not just for the informed, but for the innocent who happen to step into it.

The nation is on a precipice. I saw a homeless man at a Detroit intersection with a sign of a two-headed snake. On one snake head was "Trump" and other snake was "Hillary". Across the body was "2016". At the bottom it said "Help me, please! They won't!"

So when Joe DiGenova says that the nation is in trouble it's much broader, wider and deeper than he is saying. Hell, old Joe cut his teeth working in the Church Commission, with government's approach to the Teamsters whose Washington legal voice was Edward Bennett Williams whose client list on both sides of the political isle and $1000/hour fees dispels any nothing that justice is blind. Both Joe and EBW were dutiful Roman Catholic educated parochialists that remined me in some ways of Joseph McCarthy and Joseph P. Kennedy whose boys appeared to have left the reservation, or maybe not. It is hard to fathom how they ended up so far to the left of their father when he was recalled as British Ambassador during World War II for his Nazi sympathies while the British royals were, thanks to Wallis Simpson Windsor, the Godmother of Elizabeth Kauffman Bush, GHWB's sister-in-law and Senator Joseph McCarthy was the Godfather for one of the Kennedy boys, Bobby, I think....none of whom really resisted the image of Camelot in America....not exactly reconcilable to American democracy except for the image of a round table, but around which sat not freely elected leader but the military....the noblemen/oligarchical kingly appointed knights. You cannot find a NeoCon cause that these panelists didn't like in the 80's and 90's and by 2000 they were eating the NeoCon agenda up and spreading its agenda, all of the Judicial Watch panelists.... the repeal of Glass-Steagall and Bush's yellow cake bamboozle. They topped that yellow cake off with massive scoops of ice cream and put a cherry on top.....the evolution of new weaponry including eye-in-the-sky drone strikes that insured massive war profits and firing enriched depleted uranium shells that had an ungodly half-life.

FC:General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a real business plot that was echoed in films like Dr. Strangelove or Seven Days In May,the plotters with clearly fascist leanings that would have aligned with Joseph P. Kennedy and Wallis Simpson Windsor's Nazi leanings. So you are saying that JFK and Bobby's emphasis on civil rights or ending the war in Vietnam would have been to jump their father's ship after he had negotiated JFK's 1960 victory with that celebrated deal with the Chicago underworld who promised to deliver the vote for Jack?

LPW:There are a number of celebrated cases of defiance by the children of major military industrialist insiders that sends shivers down the spines of their parents and friends. Take Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors whose Admiral father was in charge of the Gulf of Tonkin Affair. There's William Ayers, the Chicago Weather Underground member and bomber, friend of Obama, whose father was on the boards of a number of major defense contractors. Patty Hearst is often cited. There's Albert Maher the close friend of singer Bob Dylan who clearly jump the family reservation and organized a banned trip to Cuba at the height of the Cold War.

FC: Where is Obama in this mix?

LPW:He has essentially avoided talking about Glass-Steagall. He has continued the NeoCon agenda in the Middle East. Remember that Michelle and Barack met at the Springfield, Illinois law firm of Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln who was nearly mad after Abe's assassination, Sidley Austin, that merged in 2000 with the New York firm of Brown & Wood that was a leading law firm for National City Bank against which Smedly Butler rails in the his book War Is A Racket. Sidley Austin was a Republican law firm and the newly merged firm had moved into the World Trade Center in New York in 2000 with 600 employees only one of which died on 911. Remember, too, that the first Scottish Rite President of the United States was Andrew Johnson who was initiated in a ceremony by White House insider Benjamin Brown French, but into a monarchial tradition of Jacobite origins and not the York Rite Masonry of Washington and Franklin and the other Founding Fathers.

Of course, I have written extensively about the fact that public motives for the U.S. Civil War over which Lincoln presided were not the U.S. power elites' real motive. That motive was the rail route to the Pacific and the China Trade.

Today's endless war on terror is the prescription for the perpetual racket of war that brought forward Smedley Butler. It has been convincingly argued that when in the 1930's Lowell Thomas made a big tour of Britain with a film tour lionizing T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia", for the English Speaking Union of the U.S. and Britain with significant support from William Howard Taft who joined his fathers' Cincinnati Scottish Rite temple in 1908, that they were prepping Lawrence and Britain for Butler's counter-part in England, a role that Lawrence, like Butler, refused. That would have meant that Rudolf Hess' midnight flight to the estate of Lord Hamilton, of whose family Lawrence was a part, was doomed and that Churchill's parliamentary democracy would not be a nut so easily cracked. Can you now see how Joe Kennedy would have been aligned in the U.S. with the business plotters who were tempting Butler and how he and Wallis Simpson who met her husband, Prince Edward Windsor of the German Saxe-Gotha-Coburg clan at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, California near the USN base where Wallis' goddaughter, Elizabeth Kauffman Bush, sister-in-law of George Herbert Walker Bush trained as the USN's first "frogman"?

FC: So neither the Clinton Dems or Bush, now Trump, Reps are unbiased?

LPW: They are all involved in what DiGenova calls a Potemkin City cover-up. Neither side wants us Americans to know just how bad things have become, but for Christ's sake isn't it like, OBVIOUS!?

We have a 20 trillion dollar debt that can be hung on the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, the arrival of Bush in 2000, the war racketeering all of which both sides have now shown they endorse. It's one big slimy cluster fu......well, a cloistered, copulative assembly of smegma lathered criminals awash in the camouflaging suds hiding their co-equal deficiencies and each claiming that the other is not performing to expectations. We have both of the Bush and Clinton cabals promoting the wholesale disembowelment of the American middle-class with the giant sucking sound that Perot warned us was coming.....while, hell, Perot sold EDS to India and while Facebook imports from India workers to the USA to undercut those high tech jobs we were told would replace those lost to NAFTA and GATT.

Glass-Steagall was to the American middle class what a cactus thorn in the beak of a Darwin Finch was to its survival. It was an economic survival tool. A bank is suppose to be safe! Glass-Steagall was forged by two younger brothers whose legislation compartmentalized the bank the absence of which led to the Great Depression. It was to protect their hard earned deposits from criminals like we have seen with Wells Fargo's fraud and theft. If Glass and Steagal had been part of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, they would have been the first to axe the king's sleazy neck. Now, we see that Bank of America that bought with their bail out money Merrill Lynch, formerly Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith with its connections to Mrs. Barbara Pierce Bush. Merrill along with Wells Fargo were part of the too big to fail culture of U.S. banking that threatened our very existence and which Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would have gladly flattened. The 1980's S&L crisis was the dress rehearsal for the 2008 sub-prime housing bubble and mixed in was the WorldCom and Enron debacles that sent to prison Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay, Bush's choice for Energy Secretary, like the CEO Chairman of the board of Wells Fargo should experience for his lawlessness and go to jail, too.

FC: That purchase of Merrill by Bank of America was forbidden under Glass-Steagall and Hank Paulson supposedly forced the money on BofA. These banks are connected to the Vatican and the old European monarchical, pyramidal and oligarchical models of government?

LPW: Decidedly so and never forget that Hitler's SS was modeled on the pyramidal authoritarianism of the Jesuits and that Allen and Avery Dulles were hooked at the hip with the Vatican for ratlines that delivered Nazis to the West after the war to help fight communism. Communism. Which time has taught us doesn't work, and which Anthony Sutton long argued was the left side of a bamboozling dialectic that the rich and powerful created to spawn worldwide conflict and managed like Thomas Edison did the plus and minus poles of a Dynamo.

FC: DiGenova says that Clinton is the problem. You say it's bigger than that. Just how big is it?

LPW: Well, let's start with DiGenova's statement that the FBI isn't trustworthy. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Federal. Let's consider that South Carolina's Congressman Trey Gowdy is absolutely dumfounded that such a bamboozling by Comey has come into his purview. But consider this. Gowdy graduated from Baylor University in Texas where the college President who investigated Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky and other debacles if not debaucheries, Kenneth Starr, formerly at Pepperdine, just became the focus of his own mismanagement of women's issues on the Baylor campus. Does anyone tell you of Starr's connections to Cornelius Vander Starr, founder of AIG? But there's a lot more than that. Waco is in McClennan County, home of the GWB Crawford White House and also of Buffalo Airlines which was owned by the major middleman in the Iran-Contra weapons shipments, rich Iranian mule, Farhad Azima. Mr. Azima is not only a major Clinton Foundation contributor, but his attorney was Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, God rest his deep-throated soul, and DiGenova and his wife not only saw the Iran-Contra affair as a small blip in U.S. diplomatic blunders, but DiGenova worked closely with Fred Thompson.

FC: Senator Fred Thompson the actor from the American Enterprise Institute, the Counsel on Foreign Relations and the T.V. series Law & Order?

*LPW: Lot of laws, not much order. In fact, you could say that we have planned disorder. Disorder is the name of the game. A nation built on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, you would think....is a place of law and order. So why isn't it?

FC: I have my suspicions.

LPW: I have read your stuff. You have a lot more than that.

FC: I believe that Comey knows that if he takes a hard line he or his family is in danger. I believe that's why H. Ross Perot got out of U.S. politics altogether. I believe that there is a power behind the public curtain and that it does not want that curtain pulled back. Is that wrong?

LPW: That's right, but don't ask Noam Chomsky or the other Ivy League Delphians to direct you to the truth of the matter and to clearly define it. Dissent is allowed within limits. Anthony Sutton dissented by rebelling and leaving the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which by the way, owns the personal diaries of Joseph Goebbels, but they did everything in their power to sideline Sutton.

Col. Daniel Marvin dissented and in Trey Gowdy's home state of South Carolina Marvin, a warrior who refused to acquiesce to the CIA's command to depose Prince Norodom Sihanouk, not only survived to tell the story, but was sued by the U.S. Special Forces Association for slander and won his law suit. Bernie Sanders took Hillary Clinton to task for using Henry Kissinger as a serious foreign policy consultant while she was Secretary of State. Marvin's commanders to pull off the Cambodian job would have started with Kissinger. There are good people everywhere and some really slimy ones. You can't tell if Marvin's CIA handlers were pushing for regime change in Cambodia for the import of American-style shared governance, itself a lame brained idea hiding the real motive or because he sat on the edge of the Golden Triangle, the poppy plantation that evolved like the Columbian black-tar poppy plantations to compete with the Pakistani and Afghani stuff over which the British fought the Ottoman Empire for control.

FC: Trey Gowdy went to school in Waco, but that was a long time ago. Do you think he is aware of just how events there influenced the FBI's rank and file?

LPW: Are you thinking of the Davidians?

FC: Yes.

LPW: The Branch Davidians were there and running guns in a county where Farhad Azima was doing Iran-Contra. Meanwhile in Mena, Arkansas Clinton had to have been running cover for the same operation? The FBI was totally compromised in that deal, but hey, what about Ruby Ridge? What about the assent of William Sessions to the Director of the FBI over the body of murdered Texas Judge John Howland Wood, shot and killed by Woody Harrelson's father, Harrelson heading off to a Presbyterian College, Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana on a scholarship. Wood was a bigot, but a law and order, anti-drug bigot known as "Maximum John". Woody's father's "hit" money and actions were paid for by the Chagra Brothers from El Paso and Juarez? You'll have to read Gary Cartwright's book Dirty Dealing to understand that the Chagra's weren't Mexicans that Trump is so worried about, but Lebanese drug and weapons smugglers. Middle Easterners. The Southern border of the USA has been a porous gunpowder pumping point since before Spanish Hebrew, Jacob Di Cordova, made his 1849 map of Texas and before Bagdad was the port city at the mouth of the Rio Grand River on the early caravan route from what today is Brownsville to Baja on the Pacific with the Middle Eastern poppy fields of the Golden Crescent beyond just waiting to be dumped for other goodies in China. It was there in the other Baghdad, Iraq that the Sephardic Israelite, David Sassoon's opium route through Basra would feed the British lust for empire before the U.S.'s New England Brahmins took it over and with the Castillian's and French lusting after the same prizes.

FC: I'm glad Woody found a good home after all of that.

LPW: Hanover, you mean? That Presbyterian school was founded by folks from North Carolina which was a Jacobite and Tory stronghold during the American Revolution. Flora MacDonald who saved "Bonnie Prince Charlie" in Scotland and immigrated to North Carolina with her husband and both were Jacobite Presbyterians which meant that they favored a monarchy even if they had to accept Bonnie Prince Charlie the Roman Catholic interloper to the British throne which had been vacated unwillingly by Charles I thanks to Oliver Cromwell the anti-monarchial Congregationalist. They would have definitely been American Federalists and show just how, for example, CIA Director Alan Dulles and his cousin who converted from Presbyterianism, Avery Dulles, became the first Cardinal without first becoming a Roman Bishop. Not ironically, the Founding Fathers rejected primogeniture law upon which the British monarchy was based with its first-born favoritism and opted for gavelkind law. While academics like Professor Jonathan Turley, a self-avowed anti-Jeffersonian, Federalist who taught at Tulane in New Orleans where both Albert Pike and Jacob De Cordoba heavily influenced Jacobite sympathies within a receptive culture, Jefferson had, at the instructions of the First Continental Congress, written primogeniture, first-born, dynastic, pyramidal biases out of U.S. law. I cannot tell from an academic's positions on torture or the death penalty or Guantanamo or even free speech where they stand on this essential element in the U.S. model of governance. Blacks in America know what it's like to be late arrivers in a world where everyone was once a "later arriver" and that was essentially what the American colonists rebelled over....being dominated by the first arrivers, in England and Europe the kings, who always take the lions share of the resources which up until we codified their rebellion in law....had no chance of anything, but serfdom. Their wars with indigenous indian monarchs were basically battles over the same thing they left in Europe. No wonder Congress is so damn disillusioned and confused when standing as they are on the holy grail, but feel it fading beneath them to what? The past. The U.S. Congress is in essence the embodiment of shared governance as the Founders envisioned it and they are being neutered. Can a Federalist like Jonathan Turley....joined as he is by the likes of C. Boyden Gray and his father, Gordon Gray, who stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his national security clearance for wanting to democratize peaceful nuclear energy while the Grays were wealthy heirs of the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company that democratized lung cancer....renew the vision? Consider that that Gordon Gray's work of spreading cancer paralleled the criminal Pruitt-Igoe undisclosed radiation experiments in the 60's and 70's, built as Pruitt-Igoe was by Minoru Yamasaki the architect for the Bin Ladens and also the architect of the World Trade Center.

So Woody went to Hanover, but "Presbyterian" come from the Greek word Presbuteros which means "elder" and the whole pyramidal, monarchial and potentially despotic model was based on elder-worship. That is quite clear. Flora MacDonald's Presbyterianism claimed to have flatten the pyramid, but some Presbyterians didn't flatten it! Federalist claim that they are the leadership backbone of the republic and they are correct that the masses can, as with the Peasants Revolt in Europe, become bruts, but kings weren't? Same with all models in the Dark Ages including the Roman Catholicism of the Inquisition and Sharia models of government that are primogeniture biased and the Saudi royals like it that way. They don't have the Bible's "the first shall be last and last first" and as Mario Puzo did in his best selling book The Godfather with Michael Corleone being a last born and leader, like Israel's King David, leaders by default, but quite capable. There sat the inclusion that opened up through the Reformation and Enlightenment the shackled minds and hearts that created a new age. There is an irreconcilable difference between Sharia and the parallel primogeniture laws of Europe which in America is resurrected in family dynasties and corporate boardrooms....even the Presidency from time to time....Joe Kennedy practiced it like a Tudor king, Bush, too, and Trump if he's elected and the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Enlightment and Reformation gets cooked when this becomes the norm. Society turns in on itself as in the Dark Ages and I think in 2016 its getting darker by the day.

The 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall by first-born Bill Clinton turned back the progress upon which American democracy was first built.

FC: I know that you have written extensively about this untaught part of our history. You say that this is part of the reason that our students aren't taught about two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, who said that most of our current history is based on the racket of war.

LPW: Not just Butler. Read C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite. Mills lived in Texas, taught at Columbia University in New York. Go listen to former NATO Commander, General Wesley Clark and his story on how he came to learn of the NeoCon's Middle East agenda at the Pentagon. One thing is clear. The American "arsenal of freedom" has become the "arsenic of freedom" and it is that freedom that is under assault. The FBI has been a part of the problem for a very long time, just like Michael Rupert said of the CIA at that Bill Clinton-called town meeting in South Central LA after Gary Webb's reporting shook the nation and the CIA Director, John Deutsch, showed up to calm nerves before he, like Colin Powell, David Petraeus and now, Hillary, walked off with classified information....which is sometimes difficult to know just which file to put it into. Ruppert, who claimed that Webb's two shots to the head were definitely a suicide also killed himself.

It was this FBI that was in place during the Tuskegee Experiment, the Pruitt-Igoe Experiment, which if you are unaware of that one you are in for a real eye-opener that remains untaught in our schools like Smedley Butler's story. This FBI was in place during the Rudy Ridge murder of Rebecca Weaver. It was murder. There's no way around it.

FC:Help me understand something. You said that Oppenheimer appeared before the Gordon Gray Committee and stripped of security for wanting to promote peaceful uses of nuclear energy. I have read that the key witnesses to that witch hunt were Rice University President Kenneth Pitzer and William Liscum Borden. That Pitzer was a chemist working for the fossil fuel industry in Houston and that Borden was a Yale grad who was working on the 1940 Yale Political Union debate led by William Gardiner "Ted" White who was opposed the America First Committee and the American Liberty League fascist isolationists who would have aligned with British Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. I also know that Al Qaeda was formed in Egypt with help from the Muslim Brotherhood and our CIA to create fighters against Russia in Afghanistan and that Houston's Joanne King Herrin lived there, her husband's name on buildings at Rice University and that he had created Houston Natural Gas that created Enron, god-bless its bleeding soul. Is that right?

LPW:Spot on. Now consider that when the 911 Commission's Hamilton Committee is laying out the Official 911 Report, a key player is from the U.S. State Department, David Rhodes, a Rice University Graduate who also worked on Iran nuclear agreement. He's also the brother of the President of CBS, David Rhodes, and CBS's Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, had in late 1999 and for sure in 2000 the GWB Ellington Field, Texas Air National Guard memo story that they waited to totally botch in 2004. Meanwhile, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN....they all follow the proper line, which is clearly improper on any other planet in the universe. David Rhodes will be the assistant to State Department manager and firewall of the Benghazi report to Congress. Something that sends Trey Gowdy, Jim Jordon and the other Republican Congressmen up the tree.

FC: Who was William Gardiner "Ted" White?

LPW: He was a Yale grad ahead of GHWB who having read the reporting of Louis Nizer opposed American isolationism that had the US companies like those being supplied by Hitler oil agent in Texas, William Rhodes Davis, who was buying oil for the Reich up until Pearl Harbor. Ted White was also the tailgunner on the Barbara II, the WWII torpedo bomber of GHWB when it went down at Chi Chi Jima in the South Pacific. White wasn't suppose to have been the tailgunner that day. It was a story refute by another tailgunner, Chester Magurski, before his death.

FC: What about FINCEN?

LPW: The big one!

FC: It's huge isn't it?

LPW: Enormous. Where to being? Let's start with Serpico.

FC: The movie? Al Pacino? The real Frank Serpico?

LPW: Frank. An honest NYPD cop. He reported the corruption in the narcotics division and runs it up the flagpole. The Knapp Commission was formed. Its prosecutor wasn't Trey Gowdy, obviously. It was a young Rudy Giuliani. The FBI liaison to the Knapp Commission wasn't Whitey Bolger's buddy, John Connolly, but it was Brian Bruh who would go on to be the FBI liaison for the FINCEN or Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

FC: But Giuliani cleaned up the NYPD.

LPW: Did he? His police commissioner who was touted as the next Director of Homeland Security by GWB, Bernie Kerik, went to jail for corruption. Frank Serpico was so sure that the clean up was complete that he moved to the mountains of Switzerland under an assumed name and now we have Hillary, Trump, Comey, Giuliani....and don't forget across the bridge in New Jersey, Chris Christi all ready to descend on Washington.

FC: And FINCEN?

LPW: You'll have to ask the NYFD fire fighters and their families what they think of Giuliani. FINCEN was commissioned to investigate Saudi influence peddling in America and in 1992 when it was focusing in on the roommate of GWB from his Texas Air National Guard days when the FBI stood down FINCEN. Why? Because it was getting too close to the agent in the USA for the Saudi royal family and their banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Would that investigation have found money going to terrorists in the USA? You aren't suppose to ask that! You also aren't suppose to ask about whether it was Saudis that took down the WTC, either. You are to accept the fact. That's a wonderfully powerful sword blade to hold over the rich and powerful Saudi royal family's collective necks, isn't it?!

FC: The roommate was James R. Bath whose fuel company at Ellington Field, Houston was sold to the Carlyle Group? It was only a few miles from the Bin Laden owned Houston Gulf Manor Airport where the NASA astronauts parked their private planes. Both men were on the Iran-Contra bank board....BCCI....Bank of Commerce and Credit International....the one also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals. And you wonder what Wells Fargo is up to with it banking history? Quit wondering!

LPW: Right, and 15 of the 19 September 11th hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and we invade Iraq.....if you can believe the official story which a growing and impressive list of skeptics....David Ray Griffin.....Morgan Reynolds and over three thousand Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth have questioned quite effectively.

FC: What is at stake in this battle between Clinton and Judicial Watch?

LPW: The Clintons are interlopers....hillbillies from Arkansas who saw an opening and invited themselves in. So long as they did the order's bidding they got their cut, but that's not what they or the order likes. They both want it all. But the ruling order is itself in jeopardy. It evolved out of the early American independence that was the irresistible force of the American experience, but they are coming up against an older immovable object of the old European top-down, pyramidal, autocratic, oligarchical elements of the old Hapsburg and Prussian empires reimagined who stood up in some ways together against the old Ottoman Empire whose opioids made empires and, eventually, in China Mao's Cultural Revolution. This was what H. Ross Perot was warning against and it was a lot bigger than a simple sucking sound of U.S. jobs leaving the country. They say that the problem with Christianity and the universal golden rule and as Ayn Rand counseled....."achievement without plunder" has never really been practiced. The world is waiting and the world is losing.

FC: So what can Americans do?

LPW: Don't do as the 49er's are doing and squat during the National Anthem. Stand up proudly and put your hand over your heart and hold with your left hand a flag that you carry with you always. A flipped flag. A flipped American flag the universal symbol of distress and cry for assistance. The American experiment was and is the best thing going anywhere. Embrace it. Clean it up, but don't abandon it. Share the governance. That'll scare the holy hell out of them and force them back under the rocks where they belong.

FC: Is Comey in danger?

LPW: The leading attorney for the most astounding array of criminals and Washington politicians has been Edward Bennett Williams. I'd put both Williams and DiGenova in the same circle. People died around Williams all the time. People die around Bill and Hillary, but they died around the Bush NeoCons, too. I believe that the U.S. is finding the traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the founding Fathers being assaulted by a resurrected Jacobite element in America that's as hard to kill off as a vampire. Good grief....that Jacobite element that was all about oligarchy found its way into the KKK, even into the Scottish Rite Masons through Albert Pike, through the Good Fellows with Jacob De Cordoba in Texas, and certainly through the history of the Roman Catholic Church, and even the Jacobite Presbyterians of which Flora MacDonald was one.....think about that when you think of Woody Harrelson who was cast in the Cormac McCarthy film No Country For Old Men opposite Anton Chigurh. Sound like Chagra who hired Woody's father? McCarthy knows and his apologist at Yale, Harold Bloom, has canonized McCarthy's book, Blood Meridian, as equal to Melville's Moby Dick. It's not of course. The Pequod went down with the captain's quarters. McCarthy affirms the current status quo, but offers the only solution....the 30 Years War solution...."War IS God!" he proclaims. Music to Alan Dulles ears or his cousin, Cardinal Avery Dulles. The Jesuits, by the way, find that one of their schools just hired Melissa Click the woman at the University of Missouri who was captured on camera shutting down the press and free speech outside of Steve Weinberg's office. Yes, Comey knows full well he is in danger. He's in the crossfire as any FBI agent can tell you "it's all a game....and a very deadly one!".*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/19/trump-is-reportedly-hiring-a-conspiracy-theorist-for-his-legal-team-heres-what-joe-digenova-has-said/?utm_term=.57232fa973c4

Trump just hired a deep-state conspiracy theorist as his lawyer. Here’s what Joe diGenova has said.

By Aaron Blake March 19 at 2:55 PM Email the author

President Trump has stepped up his attacks on special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigation in recent days, and his lawyer even suggested that the inquiry should be shut down. And just in case the direction in which this whole thing is headed wasn't clear, Trump has now hired a lawyer who argues the president is being framed.

Trump's legal team on Monday announced the hiring of Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who served as an independent counsel and a special counsel in the 1990s and was later hired by the New York Senate to investigate Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D). The hiring was first reported by the New York Times.

DiGenova clearly has experience, but what may make him most attractive to Trump is his thoughts on this particular case. He told Fox News Channel in January that the investigation is “a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.”

“Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime,” diGenova said.

That interview was the most notable in a series of TV appearances that seem, in a way, to have been auditions for joining Trump's legal team. We know that Trump seems to like hiring people who say things he likes on cable TV, and diGenova has supplied no shortage of that. Much of diGenova's commentary has described a vast law-enforcement conspiracy to take down Trump.

As the many Russia investigations continue, President Trump has gathered a group of lawyers to represent him, from within the White House and outside it. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Here's a sampling:

Feb. 2: 'The largest law enforcement scandal in history'

“We are headed toward a very sad ending for the FBI and senior DOJ officials. ... I believe that several high FBI officials will be charged criminally. And it is conceivable that some DOJ people will also be charged criminally. ... I would consider this the largest law enforcement scandal in history for this reason. The activities of McCabe and others and Bruce Ohr and others were designed to subvert the Constitution and a national election, the most serious offense under our Constitution.” (“Hannity”)

March 15: Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe should be fired ...

“He's done a number of things worth punishment, including careening through obstruction of justice from the beginning of the Trump campaign, doing everything he could to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email server case corruptly. ... He should be fired. He should have been fired a long time ago. And if he loses some of his benefits, that's good for the country. And it's the least that can be done to him.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

... and the people involved should be arrested

“It means that the system of equal justice has been rent asunder by the conduct of James Comey, America's best-known dirty cop, Andrew McCabe and others, including senior Obama administration Justice Department officials. This is a moment in history that has sullied the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and deservedly so. Every one of these people should be put in a wanted poster at a post office, even though they may never be arrested.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Dec. 4: The raid at Paul Manafort’s home was a ‘disgusting display’

“Or show up at your house in the morning while you and your wife were in bed in order to frighten you like they did with Mr. Manafort. What a disgusting, awful display of raw political power. Not law enforcement power, political power.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

March 7: A federal grand jury should investigate the investigators

“This is why, Lou, the only way to get these answers, once the Nunes committee is done, is to have a federal grand jury force all of these State Department people, CIA, DNI people, FBI, DOJ senior people under oath in a grand jury. It's the only way we're ever going to get the full story. ... This is the single most important scandal of the last 50 years because senior DOJ and FBI officials engaged in conduct that was designed to corrupt an American presidential election. It wasn't the Russians who corrupted the presidential election; it was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)

1:08

Trump takes aim at Mueller. Lawmakers were steadfast in response.

President Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation on March 18, prompting a swift response from lawmakers. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

Jan. 20: Loretta E. Lynch and Sally Yates broke the law

“We're going to discover that the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division, John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials and, regrettably, line attorneys — people who were senior career civil servants — [allegedly] violated the law.” (Daily Caller)

Feb. 2: Attacks on FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein

“I have a lot of confidence in [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions ultimately doing the right thing. I have very little confidence in Rod Rosenstein, no confidence in Chris Wray.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Jan. 23: Peter Strzok’s ‘secret society’ tweet was evidence of the plot against Trump

“It suggests, as we have said from the beginning, that there was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. Everything that we've seen from these texts and from all the facts developing shows that the FBI and senior DOJ officials conspired to violate the law and to deny Donald Trump his civil rights.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Feb. 1: Wray planted stories about threatening to resign

“Chris Wray planted these stories himself. He is trying to show the employees of the FBI and the former agents that he is brave. He is stalwart. He is standing up for them. This is nonsensical. If he offers to resign, the president should accept his resignation. This type of behavior by an FBI director is childish. It's immature.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Aug. 4: Leakers are committing ‘regicide’

“They are encouraging these people to continue to leak and basically to commit regicide. I mean, they want to kill the president politically, and they'll do it any way they can.” (“Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Jan. 30: Rosenstein's appointment of special counsel was illegal

“But Rod did something worse. He created a mandate for Mueller, which had no limitations of time, money, subject matter. He didn't even name a crime that was being investigated, which was a violation of the Department of Justice regulations. I think when all was said and done, Rod Rosenstein's memorandum and the appointment of a special counsel will go down in history as one of the worst decisions ever made by a Justice Department official.” (“Lou Dobbs Tonight”)

Dec. 1: Flynn’s transition actions didn’t break the law …

“All of Flynn's conversations with the ambassador to Russia were perfectly legal during the transition period and even before. It's not a crime to communicate with an ambassador of a foreign country about foreign policy when you are the foreign policy adviser to the incoming president. So, I don't know why he lied. It's inconceivable to me. If he had told the truth, there would be no crime.” (“Ingraham Angle”)

… and Jared Kushner may have done something wrong 10 to 15 years ago

“As far as Kushner goes, if there is anything with Kushner, it involves transactions involving real estate deals 10, 15 years ago.” (“Ingraham Angle”)

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trumps-new-defense-attorney-burdened-controversial-past#break

Benen

It was just last week when we learned Donald Trump was eyeing an addition to his legal defense team. The New York Times reported that the president had already had discussions with Emmet Flood, a veteran D.C. attorney with an exceptional reputation who has exactly the right kind of background Trump needs given the seriousness of the Russia scandal.

The president insisted soon after, however, that the report was wrong and that he was “VERY happy” with his current lawyers. (My personal hunch is that Flood turned the president down.)

As it turns out, Trump has hired added a member to his legal defense team – but it’s not someone of Emmet Flood’s caliber.

President Trump has decided to hire the longtime Washington lawyer Joseph E. diGenova, who has pushed the theory on television that Mr. Trump was framed by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials, to bolster his legal team, according to three people told of the decision.

Mr. diGenova is not expected to take a lead role but will instead serve as a more aggressive player on the president’s legal team.

Though Trump hasn’t directly confirmed the news, Jay Sekulow, another member of the president’s defense team, told NBC News, “I have worked with Joe for many years and have full confidence that he will be a great asset in our representation of the president.”

At this point, I imagine some of you are asking, “Who’s Joe diGenova?” And I’m very glad you asked.

Recently, diGenova has been appearing on television quite a bit – remember, Trump’s TV remote dictates a little too much of his presidency – pushing a conspiracy theory about a cabal of FBI agents who manufactured the Russia scandal as part of an anti-Trump plot. This cabal, diGenova has said on Fox News, set out to “frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

That’s obviously quite nutty given the total lack of evidence to support the claim, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who’ve followed diGenova’s career over the last couple of decades. Rachel noted on the show last year that diGenova became a prominent political figure during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, where he peddled all sorts of strange claims during hundreds of television appearances.

Years later, when the right was excited about Benghazi conspiracy theories, diGenova was once again on the airwaves, pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Obama administration intimidating witnesses. He soon after cited secret sources who told him Hillary Clinton would be indicted over her emails and was bound for prison.

More recently, diGenova was worked up about claims that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice ordered intelligence agencies to cooperate in some kind of illegal scheme involving Donald Trump’s communications with his staffers.

And against the backdrop of him getting one thing wrong after another, diGenova then started talking up an FBI conspiracy theory – which apparently helped him land a gig on the president’s legal team.

Obviously, diGenova’s track record of pushing strange, right-wing conspiracy theories on television makes it difficult to take him seriously, but because Donald Trump is Donald Trump, the opposite is true in the White House: this president loves those who push strange, right-wing conspiracy theories on television. The same qualities that make Joseph diGenova appear foolish in the eyes of the American mainstream are the very qualities that make him appealing to Trump.

For those who support the president and want him to succeed, none of this is good news. Trump is facing a serious scandal of historic significance, which may very well bring his presidency to a premature end. He needs the best legal defense possible.

I’m not sure he’s getting it. Trump – who already had to replace the former head of his legal team, who seemed completely out of his depth – has assembled a group of attorneys who haven’t necessarily served him especially well, and he’s now adding a conspiracy theorist whom the president probably saw on Fox News, peddling a strange tale with no basis in fact.

Those who want the best for Trump – those who want to see him benefit from a sound, responsible legal defense – have no reason to be pleased by these developments.

When a special prosecutor was needed to investigate if George Herbert Walker Bush had abused his office by having the State Department search through Bill Clinton's passport application during the 1992 campaign, Sentelle appointed the partisan Republican former prosecutor Joseph DiGenova (husband and law partner of the FOX talking point attorney, Victoria Toensing). DiGenova's job was, we assume, to clear Poppy Bush and everyone on his staff of any improprieties. Case Closed.

buzzflash

off bs

VICTORIA TOENSING, Op-Ed Pieces

**What Alleged Illegality is Mueller Investigating? Trump Exercising Lawful Presidential Authority?**

FOXNews.com, January 28, 2017

**The Time for Kurdish Independence has Come**

TheHill.com, October 1, 2017

**Missing: The 'Frank' in Sen. Al Franken's Anti-Sessions Rant**

TheHill.com, February 6, 2017

**Jeff Sessions, Trump's Pick for Attorney General, is a Good and Decent Man**

FOXNews.com, January 3, 2017

**Benghazi Hearings: Three Truths Not Revealed During Clinton Questioning**

FOXNews.com, October 23, 2015

**The Truth About Hillary Clinton's Email Server and the Law**

FOXNews.com, August 13, 2015

**Hillary Clinton's Empty Excuses on Emailing Classified Info**

NYPost.com, August 11, 2015

**Libby Trial Shows Dangers of Political Prosecutions**

TheHill.com, April 15, 2015

**Doesn't Hillary Clinton Know the Law?**

WSJ.com, June 17, 2014

**Benghazi and the Smearing of Chris Stevens**

WSJ.com, January 28, 2014

**A** **'Rigorous and Unsparing' Review? ARB Report Full of Gaps, Unanswered Questions**

FOXNews.com, September 17, 2013

**A****dministration Relying on Shoddy Benghazi Report to Absolve Itself of Blame**

WeeklyStandard.com, May 12, 2013

**Pro-Choice Republicans Go Public**

WashingtonPost.com, November 29, 2012

**Troubling Questions in the Benghazi-Petraeus Mess**

FOXNews.com, November 12, 2012

**Obama Overloads a Tale of Equal Pay**

WSJ.com, October 24, 2012

**T****he Time Is Now for a Special Counsel**

FOXNews.com, June 22, 2012

**In Newt Gingrich's World Rules Do Not Apply to Him**

TheDailyBeast.com, January 23, 2012

**Are We Becoming An Uncivil Society?**

Time.com, January 14, 2011

**The Road to Wahhabism**

National Review Online, September 13, 2010

**K****SM Deserves Military Justice**

Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2010

The Case for Military Tribunals

The Weekly Standard, February 1, 2010

Trying Abdul Mutallab

National Review Online, January 5, 2010

Questions for Abdulmutallab

Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2009

What About the Next Time?

National Review Online, August 26, 2009

Is Obama Striking the Right Balance

The Washington Post, May 24, 2009

Critics Still Haven't Read the 'Torture' Memos

The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2009

Welcome, Businessmen, to Government Oversight

The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2009

Fitzgerald Should Keep His Opinions to Himself

The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2008

Pardon is only remedy

USATODAY.com, June, 2007

Letter to Gen. Hayden

VIA FACSIMILE, April 4, 2007

House Testimony before the Committee on Oversight on and Government Reform

March 16, 2007

Does the Libby Verdict Have Appeal?

NRO. March 6, 2007

Trial in Error

The Washington Post Outlook, Sunday February 18, 2007

What a Load of Armitage!

The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2006

Toensing vs David Corn

Blog

Leak Soup

The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2006

Constitutional Surveillance

The Weekly Standard, March 6, 2006

Terrorists On Tap

Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2006

Investigate the CIA

Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2005

The White House's Legal Katrina

Human Events Online, October 18, 2005

[BRIEF AMICI CURIAEIN SUPPORT OF PETITION FOR REHEARING EN BANC OF :{APPELLANTS

JUDITH MILLER, MATTHEW COOPER AND TIME INC.}:](http://www.digenovatoensing.com/15_page_brief_by_Vt_&_BS.doc):{

}:Washington, DC, March 23, 2005

The Plame Game: Was this a crime?

Washington Post, January 12, 2005

ACLU MisleadsNational Review Online, October 19, 2004

Oversee? More Like OverlookWashington Post, June 13, 2004

Safety in Athens

By Peter Spatharis/Victoria Toensing, May 10, 2004

‘We Need These Laws’

American Legion Magazine Interview, April 2004

Justice Is Blind, Not Deaf

Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2002

A National Need for Preventive Justice

Washington Post, September 23, 2002

NRO Symposium on September 11

National Review Online, September 11, 2002

Barbara Olson

Washington Times, September 11, 2002

Detainees Names Should Be Protected

National Review Online, August 12, 2002

Citizenship Doesn't Matter

USA Today, June 14, 2002.

In What Court?Policy and Precedent in the Abdullah al Mujahir Case.National Review Online, June 11, 2002

Charge Lindh with Treason

National Review Online, February 12, 2002

Policy Reasons for a Military Tribunal

Washington Times, December 16, 2001.

Subpoena to AP Reporter

Washington Post Outlook, September 6, 2001

Robert Ray's Decision

(Written for Washington Post Outlook but not published because of Clinton/Ray "plea bargain")

January 2001

Hoist by His Own…

National Review Online, December 1, 2000

To Get to the Truth, Senate Must Call Witnesses

San Diego Union Tribune, January 17, 1999

Actors & Their Roles

Washington Times, September 9, 1998

The Truth and Nothing But LiesWashington Times, February 8, 1998

Dick Morris, Moral Philosopher

New York Times, March 22, 1997

Paula Jones and Busy President Clinton

Washington Times, January 10, 1997

License to Lawyer

Washington Post Outlook, June 18, 1995

How the CIA Abuses its Code of Silence

Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1995

**Cross-Examining Smith: What’s Wrong With This Picture?**

American Lawyer, April 1992

Under Guidelines, Judges Become Corporate CEOs

Legal Times, February 12,1990

No Obstacles to a Fair Trail for Noriega

Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1990

Put a Price on Caving In to Terrorists

Newsday, May 29, 1989

**Germany Needs Fortitude to Keep Hamadi**

The Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1989

JOSEPH diGENOVA, Op-Ed Pieces

Federalist Society Speech

March 21, 2014

Benghazi Attack was About 400 SAM Missiles

FreeBeacon.com, August 13, 2013

Legends in the Law

DCBar.org, February 2013

Power and Corruption

Baltimore Sun, July 22, 2004

Indictments in the Executive BranchWall Street Journal, March 6, 1997

No Attorney-Client Privilege for Clinton

Wall Street Journal, December 20, 1995

Investigated to Death

New York Times, December 5, 1995

Yes, Noriega Can Be Successfully Prosecuted...

Washington Post, January 7, 1990

The Scope of Federal Criminal Law and the McNally CaseAmerican Criminal Law Review, Spring 1989

How to Stop the Murder

Washington Post, March 6, 1988

Victoria Toensing

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Victoria Toensing, a founding partner with her husband, Joseph E. diGenova, in the law firm of diGenova & Toensing.

Toensing served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General during the Ronald Reagan (R) administration, Chief Counsel for Senator Barry Goldwater (R), and an Assistant U.S. Attorney during the Gerald R. Ford (R) and Jimmy Carter (D) administrations.

Contents[hide]

Observations on Toensing

Republican partisan

"Toensing is, of course, not only a pricey DC defense lawyer. She's also a professional Republican, one tightly connected with the DC GOP power structure, and someone you could find at pretty much any point in the late nineties as an anti-Clinton 'legal expert' on every chat show under the sun," Joshua Micah Marshall wrote January 1, 2004, at Talking Points Memo.

"Joe DiGenova (as well as his wife and law partner Victoria Toensing) is a part of the DC Republican establishment who is routinely put forward when legal opinions are needed which exculpate Republicans or inculpate Democrats.

"There's no other way to put it. Look at their public statements in the various Clinton 'scandals', the Fitzgerald investigation and now this case. In their voluminous public pronouncements they are both, in the clearest sense of the word, advocates. And their 'client' is the Republican party establishment in Washington, DC. That's fine, as far as it goes. But they should be identified as such, albeit perhaps in gentler terms, when they provide quotes in papers like the [Washington] Times," Marshall wrote November 25, 2005, at Talking Points Memo.

trial of Scooter Libby

"Just days before the perjury/obstruction trial of former White House aide I. Lewis Scooter Libby goes to the jury, the Washington Post's 'Outlook' section published a bizarre front-page article by right-wing legal expert Victoria Toensing suggesting that the prosecutor and one of the chief victims in the case should be put on trial," Robert Parry wrote February 19, 2007, at Consortiumnews.

Affiliations

American Center for Democracy, Advisory Countil
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Senior Fellow
Republican National Lawyers Association, Member [1]

Employment History

Private Practice, 1988-Present
Special Counsel to U.S. House of Representatives Teamsters Investigation, 1997-1998
Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 1984-1988
Chief Counsel, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington, D.C., 1981-1984
Assistant U.S. Attorney, 1976 - 1981
Law Clerk, Michigan Court of Appeals, 1975-1976
Admitted to bar, 1975, Michigan; 1980, District of Columbia.
Prior to law school, teacher of high school English.

Education

University of Detroit (J.D., cum laude, 1975)
Indiana University (B.S.Ed., 1962)

Contact Information

diGenova & Toensing

Suite 430

901 15th Street NW

Washington, DC 20005-2327

Related SourceWatch Resources

Valerie Plame

External links

Profiles

Bio: Victoria Toensing, diGenova & Toensing.
Victoria Toensing in the Wikipedia.
Profile: Victoria Toensing, NNDB.com.
Victoria Toensing, NameBase.org.

Litigation Record

The Litigation Record for Victoria Toensing, Thompson Legal Record / West Law / FindLaw.com.

Testimony by / Interviews with Toensing

Testimony of Ms. Victoria Toensing, Attorney diGenova & Toensing, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, "DOJ Oversight: Preserving Our Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism", December 4, 2001.
Transcript: "Law Protects Confidential CIA Agents," American Morning/CNN, October 3, 2003.

Articles by Toensing

"Dick Morris, Moral Philosopher," New York Times (diGenovaToensing.com), March 22, 1997.
"In What Court? Policy and precedent in the Abdullah al Mujahir case," National Review Online, June 11, 2002.
Opinion: "Citizenship doesn't matter," USA TODAY, June 13, 2002.
"Justice is Blind, Not Deaf," FrontPageMag.com, November 24, 2002.
"ACLU Misleads. We are not all suspects," National Review Online, October 19, 2004.
With Bruce W. Sanford, "The Plame Game: Was This a Crime?" Washington Post, January 12, 2005.
"The White House’s Legal Katrina," Human Events Online, October 18, 2005.
"Investigate the CIA. An 'outing' was the result of either incompetence or an effort to undermine the White House," WSJ OpinionJournal, November 6, 2005.
"Terrorists on Tap. Do Al Gore and other Democrats really want to keep the government from finding al Qaeda agents in the U.S.?" WSJ OpinionJournal, January 22, 2006.
"What a Load of Armitage! What did Patrick Fitzgerald know, and when did he know it?" WSJ OpinionJournal, September 15, 2006.
"Hubris. Responding to David Corn responding to me," National Review Online, September 17, 2006.
"Trial in Error. If You're Going to Charge Scooter, Then What About These Guys?" Washington Post, February 18, 2007.
"Does the Libby Verdict Have Appeal? Making sense of legal nonsense," National Review Online, March 6, 2007.

Articles about Toensing

Howard Kurtz, "The Power Couple at Scandal's Vortex," Washington Post, February 17, 1998.
Jacob Weisberg, "Worse Than Drudge. What game is Joe diGenova playing?" Slate, February 28, 1998.
Howard Kurtz, "DiGenova & Toensing, Partners At Jaw," Washington Post, April 20, 1998.
Joshua Micah Marshall, "Mike, Mike, Mike ... just when you were doing so well!" Talking Points Memo, January 1, 2004.
John W. Dean, "Why Did Attorney General Ashcroft Remove Himself From The Valerie Plame Wilson Leak Investigation? Signs that a Key Witness May Have Come Forward," FindLaw's Writ, January 6, 2004.
Mary Jacoby, "The operative," Salon, October 1, 2004: "White House water-carrier Robert Novak, infamous for exposing Valerie Plame, has been flacking for the Swift Boat Veterans book -- not bothering to disclose his close personal ties with the publisher." Free preview or subscription required.
Richard W. Stevenson, Carl Hulse, and David Johnston, "At White House, A Day of Silence on Role of Rove," New York Times (Abstract), January 12, 2005. re Karl Rove See "NYT: 'At White House, a Day of Silence on Rove's Role in C.I.A. Leak' (Richard W. Stevenson)," The Common Ills Blogspot, January 12, 2005.
"Victoria Toensing failed to disclose friendship with 'No Disclosure' Novak in *Wash. Post* op-ed," Media Matters for America, January 14, 2005.
Jack Shafer, "Memo to Cooper and Miller. Fire Floyd Abrams. Hire Bruce Sanford," Slate, February 15, 2005. re Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller
Mark Schmitt, "More diGenova/Toensing Nonsense," The Decembrist, July 22, 2005.
Joshua Micah Marshall, "Joe deGenova, on the case," Talking Points Memo, November 25, 2005.
David Corn, "Rove Scandal: Distractions and Disinformation," The Nation, July 19, 2005.
Brad DeLong, "The Nine... Well, the Four...," Grasping Reality with Both Hands, October 18, 2005.
David Fiderer, "Whom Should I Believe? Victoria Toensing or My Own Lying Eyes?" The Huffington Post, October 25, 2005.
ReddHedd, "Libby Masking Cheney's Role?" Firedoglake, November 13, 2005. re Dick Cheney
Ellen, "Why Sean Hannity And GOP Attorney Have No Problem With Bush Ordering Illegal Spying On Americans: What If Osama Bin Laden Is Calling?" News Hounds, December 19, 2005. See Transcript: "Spies Like Us?" Hannity & Colmes/Fox News, December 19, 2005.
Jon Ponder, "Clinton-Hater Toensing Laughs - Literally - at Idea of Investigating Bush’s Allegedly Illegal Spying on U.S. Citizens," Pensito Review, December 20, 2005. re George W. Bush's domestic spying
GOP Hypocrite of the Week: Victoria Toensing, BuzzFlash, December 23, 2005.
Jim Montague, Letters: "Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing set the standard for Republican criminal behavior," Salon, March 6, 2006.
Jeralyn Merritt, "Pardon Talk for Scooter Libby Begins," Talk Left, June 17, 2006. re trial of Scooter Libby
Ellen, "Former DOJ Official Victoria Toensing Can't Give A Straight Answer About How New York Times Compromised National Security," News Hounds, June 29, 2006.
Jeralyn Merritt, "David Corn Denies Outing Valerie Plame Wilson," Talk Left, September 16, 2006.
"James Bamford Punks Victoria Toensing," Crooks and Liars, December 20, 2006.
Larry Johnson, "Washington Post Enables Toensing's Delusions," Booman Tribune, February 18, 2007.
Jeralyn Merritt, "The Worst Argument for Libby's Acquittal," Talk Left, February 18, 2007.
Brent Budowsky, "Dear Editor, Washington Post," No Quarter, February 18, 2007.
Robert Parry, "Shame on the Washington Post, Again," Consortiumnews, February 19, 2007.
"Just Learn to Read Your Talking Points: How to be a Washington Expert," I can't believe it's not a democracy! Blog, February 20, 2007; *CounterPunch*, February 20, 2007.
"We'll Have Priest's People Call Toensing's People," PostWatch Blog, February 22, 2007.
Jeff Lomonaco, "WaPo Good, Bad, and Funny," TAPPED/The American Prospect, February 22, 2007.
GOP Hypocrite of the Week: Victoria Toensing, BuzzFlash, February 23, 2007.
"Deb Howell's Victoria Toensing Defense," Big Head DC, February 25, 2007.
"Assclowns of the Week #60: Iraq and Ruin Edition," Welcome to Pottersville Blogspot, February 25, 2007. Scroll down to #7: Victoria Toensing.
Jim Marcinkowski, "Victoria's Secret," No Quarter, February 27, 2007.
"CNN's Blitzer interviewed Toensing after Libby verdict, did not disclose her legal work for CNN during probe," Media Matters for America, March 6, 2007.
Wandering mind, "The Victoria Toensing Misdirection Game," Daily Kos, March 15, 2007.
John Amato, "Waxman v Toensing," Crooks and Liars, March 16, 2007.
David Corn, "Did GOP Lawyer Mislead Congress About Plame Case?" The Nation, March 19, 2007.

Cliff Schecter, "Where Lies, Neo-Cons, Scandals and Crime Intersect... You always find Vickie," Cliff Schecter Blogspot, April 17, 2007.

Unusual trip to Iraq in '03 for Wolfowitz** companion

By Steven R. Weisman and David E. Sanger Published: April 17, 2007

WASHINGTON: The Defense Department directed a private contractor in 2003 to hire Shaha Ali Riza, a World Bank employee and the companion of Paul Wolfowitz**, then the deputy secretary of defense, to spend a month studying issues related to setting up a new government in Iraq, the contractor said Monday.

The contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, said that it had been directed to hire Riza by the office of the under secretary for policy. The head of that office at the time was Douglas Feith, who reported to Wolfowitz.