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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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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…
REF 1 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/joseph-e-digenova-sworn-counselor-attorney-general APR 20
U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quinones swears in Joseph E. diGenova as Counselor to the Attorney General
MIAMI – Today, Joseph E. diGenova was sworn in as Counselor to the Attorney General, assuming a senior advisory role within the U.S. Department of Justice.
In this capacity, diGenova will advise the Attorney General on significant legal, policy, and enforcement matters, drawing on decades of experience in federal prosecution, complex investigations, and national legal practice.
“Joe diGenova brings a lifetime of experience, judgment, and proven leadership to this role,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “He understands the mission of the Department of Justice and the responsibility we carry to enforce the law fairly, protect the American people, and uphold the Constitution. I am confident he will serve with distinction.”
Counselor to the Attorney General Joseph E. diGenova with Southern District of Florida Leadership
diGenova has served in some of the most demanding legal roles in government and private practice. From 1983 to 1988, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, where he led one of the largest and most complex prosecutorial offices in the country. During his tenure, he supervised major public corruption, national security, and violent crime prosecutions, earning a reputation for disciplined, results-driven leadership.
Following his government service, diGenova built a distinguished career in private practice, representing clients in high-stakes criminal, civil, and congressional investigations. He has also been a frequent legal commentator and advisor on matters involving federal law enforcement and constitutional issues.
diGenova received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and his law degree from Georgetown University.
As Counselor to the Attorney General, diGenova will support the Department’s mission: to protect Americans, enforce the rule of law, and ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice.
Contact
Public Affairs Unit
U.S. Attorney’s Office
Southern District of Florida
USAFLS.News@usdoj.gov
Updated April 20, 2026
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U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes
A former lawyer for President Trump’s campaign, Joseph diGenova, is said to be planning to split time between Miami and Fort Pierce, where a grand jury overseen by a Trump-favored judge sits.
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Joseph 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.Credit...Tom Williams
Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer write about the Justice Department.
April 18, 2026
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.
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REF 3 POLITICO
By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein
02/23/2026 09:41 AM EST|Updated: 02/23/2026 12:51 PM EST
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report describing President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and allegations that he obstructed government efforts to reclaim them.
Cannon lit into Smith for a “brazen stratagem”: compiling the detailed report even after she ruled in July 2024 his appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and dismissed the case against Trump and two co-defendants. The Justice Department had appealed Cannon’s decision but dropped the case altogether after Trump’s election.
“Special Counsel Smith and his team went ahead for months, undeterred, preparing [the classified documents report] using discovery collected in connection with this proceeding and expending government funds in the process,” Cannon wrote in a 15-page ruling issued Monday. “To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it.”
The Trump-appointed judge said releasing the report now would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never reached a jury. It could also risk revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege and grand jury secrecy, she said.
“While it is true that former special counsels have released final reports at the conclusion of their work,” Cannon wrote, “it appears they have done so either after electing not to bring charges at all or after adjudications of guilt by plea or trial. The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt.”
Aides to Smith, who is now an attorney in private practice, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Judge Cannon’s courage and judicial resolve on these important due process issues should be recognized and taught in law school classrooms across America,” Trump’s lawyer Kendra Wharton said in response to the ruling.
Cannon has drawn scrutiny for rulings that favor Trump and cut against longstanding practice and precedent. She delayed the classified documents case for months when she installed an independent overseer to review materials seized from Mar-a-Lago — until a federal appeals court overturned her decision.
Cannon rejected the speedy schedule that Smith sought for the criminal case and threw it out on the day Trump was formally nominated at the 2024 Republican National Convention, a week after the assassination attempt that nearly took his life.
In her ruling, Cannon emphasized that “all parties” agreed that Smith’s report should not be made public. That is technically true, because after Trump was sworn in to his second term last year, the Justice Department took the position that the report should never be released. Trump’s private lawyers and Trump’s former co-defendants, Carlos de Oliveira and Walt Nauta, also opposed release of the report.
However, two legal groups who favor release of the report — American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute — sought to formally intervene in the dismissed criminal case to argue in support of disclosure. Cannon denied them permission to do so. The groups’ appeal of that decision remains pending at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Judge Cannon’s decision to permanently block the release of this extraordinarily significant report is impossible to square with the First Amendment and the common law,” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight Institute. “There is no legitimate basis for its continued suppression.”
Numerous individuals and organizations, including news outlets, have also sought Smith’s report under the Freedom of Information Act. Unless a higher court overrules Cannon, her order effectively blocks such requests.
The first volume of Smith’s final report addressed Trump’s actions to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election and evidence supporting Smith’s election-related criminal case against Trump. That volume of the report was made public by the Justice Department in January 2025, days before President Joe Biden left office.
Before retaking office, Trump asked Cannon to block both volumes of the report, but Cannon concluded at the time she didn’t have the power to intervene in matters stemming from the election investigation.
REF 4? CT DOC TOE 40K CS 200 PP VAUGHN INDEX?
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
REF 5? Benny Johnson
John Solomon Just Blew My Mind with His Prediction About Deep State Accountability Solomon says President Trump is about to begin declassifying documents at lightning speed in an operation he is calling “Hypersonic Clarity." He believes this massive document dump could pave the way for a grand conspiracy case against the intel agency spooks that have weaponized the government against Trump and millions of Americans for over a decade. "We’re gonna get a level of transparency in a release and declassification of documents unparalleled in American history. The president's setting up something that I think will be unbelievable." "I do think there will be some accountability. It’ll never be enough for what we went through the last 12 years... I think there’ll be a speed of disclosure and a speed of prosecution that we didn’t see in past years." Solomon says prosecutors only need to flip one top deep state actor to make the whole conspiracy case stick — just like taking down a mob boss. This is what we’ve all been waiting for.
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 journalistsreported 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.
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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.
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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.
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AN 4 26
DOJ removes prosecutor who refused to quickly indict Trump foe John Brennan - Alternet.org
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AN 12 25
Former CIA Director John Brennan is fearing that a judge who has frequently ruled in President Donald Trump's favor could be handling a case concerning him and several others. Now, he's asking the court to directly intervene.
The New York Times reported Monday that Brennan – who served in former President Barack Obama's administration – is officially petitioning the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida to prevent U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon (who Trump appointed in 2020) from handling a case in which he has been subpoenaed. Brennan's subpoena is part of a Department of Justice investigation into the role former Obama administration officials played in launching the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, who is representing Brennan, acknowledged that his client's request may be unusual, but argued it was not unwarranted. He maintained that the administration sought to "manipulate grand jury and case assignment procedures" to make sure the investigation that ensnared Brennan ended up in Cannon's hands.
"[W]ere we in a normal time, we might hesitate to question the propriety of the government's actions in the grand jury process. However, we are no longer in a normal time," he wrote. "We are now in a time when the Justice Department has surrendered much of its independence and the President is directly commanding his Attorney General and her leadership team to use their prosecutorial authorities against his perceived political adversaries."
Wainstein's letter further questioned the influence that MAGA political operative Mike Davis was having on U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who helms the DOJ's operations in the Southern District of Florida and signed off on Brennan's subpoena. Wainstein noted that Davis has previously referred to Quiñones as his "buddy" and "good friend." Quiñones has empaneled an extra grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Judge Cannon is based.
As Wainstein documented, Davis has played an outsized role in publicizing the investigation that has singled out Brennan, along with former Obama administration officials James Clapper (the former director of national intelligence) and former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page among others. In November, Davis posted a selfie to social media of him and Quiñones with the caption: "Justice is coming."
Brennan's attorney urged chief judge Cecilia M. Altonaga "to defend and reinforce the rule of law in our criminal justice system at this fragile moment in our Nation's history."
"We urge Your Honor to exercise your supervisory authority as chief judge to ensure the United States Attorney does not steer this matter to the Fort Pierce Division and to the courtroom of Judge Aileen Cannon," he wrote.
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an 11 25
Far-right influencers are looking to Miami as a venue to pursue "long-promised charges of a 'grand conspiracy'" against President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries, according to a New York Times report.
The influencers have even found a federal prosecutor there— Jason A. Reding Quiñones, Trump-appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who was sworn into office in August 2025 and is currently a central figure in a high-profile investigation into a 2017 intelligence community assessment regarding Russian election interference.
As for their alleged 'grand conspiracy,' the Times explains that its theory is "still unsupported by the evidence."
"A cabal of Democrats and 'deep-state' operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office," the Times explains.
Last week, however, Reding Quiñones issued over two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter, the Times writes.
Among the recipients include familiar Trump foils: James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence; Peter Strzok, a former F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who helped run the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, a former lawyer at the bureau.
The Florida investigation currently focuses on a "January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the 2016 election, particularly the role played by John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, in drafting the document," the Times says.
The Brennan investigation started "after criminal referrals to the Justice Department by top Trump intelligence officials," the Times writes, and was assigned to David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, "who was given special authority to scrutinize and possibly prosecute Mr. Brennan, according to four people with knowledge of his actions who requested anonymity to discuss an open matter."
Metcalf held senior Justice Department positions during the first Trump administration.
The Brennan case, however, was transfered from Metcalf to Reding Quiñones, "as part of a decision to greatly expand the scope of the Brennan investigation into other, unspecified activities, according to two people with knowledge of the situation," the Times explains.
The Florida subpoenas, the Times explains, "seek documents or communications related to the intelligence community assessment from July 1, 2016, through Feb. 28, 2017, according to people familiar with them. It commands the recipients to provide them to prosecutors in Miami by Nov. 20."
Despite the dubious nature of these investigations, the Times says, they do have one thing on its side.
"Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions," notes the Times.
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AN 9 25
President Donald Trump's Justice Department may have just destroyed its own case against John Brennan who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2013 to 2017 under President Barack Obama, Axios reports.
In July, Trump responded to reports that Brennan, along with former FBI director James Comey were being investigated over allegations that they made false statements to Congress during the Russia probe, saying, "I think they're crooked as hell and maybe they have to pay a price for that."
Four Trump administration officials told Axios, however, that the investigation has hit a huge roadblock when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard "withdrew the security clearances of potential witnesses who could have testified against" Brennan.
Though Brennan has denied any wrongdoing, those witnesses, Axios reports, are the key to proving that he "inappropriately biased a bombshell 2017 intelligence assessment about Russia favoring Donald Trump, and that he allegedly lied about it to Congress in 2023."
Cancelling the security clearances of these witnesses puts holes in their strategy for several reasons, Axios explains. Among them, "Witnesses would be less willing to cooperate out of anger with the government that besmirched their names."
"Some of these people are my witnesses and this is going to make it really difficult to prosecute now," David Metcalf, the federal prosecutor in charge of the Brennan investigation, told a senior administration official, according to a source with direct knowledge.
"It's a major complication ... a self-inflicted wound," a second official said. "It's an unforced error if you want to talk baseball, an own goal if you want to use soccer," Metcalf said.
A senior intelligence official said it's no big deal, telling Axios, "If DOJ has the legal right to ask about what the interviewee knows, then the interviewee's clearance status is irrelevant."
Another said Gabbard is being hindered by other factors.
"Tulsi is the right person for the job with the wrong team," a senior administration official said. "They've treated this like a PR operation to get on Fox, and not a serious intel reform process envisioned by the president," the official told Axios.
This latest dustup ultimately could benefit Brennan in the long run, according to experts like Mark Zaid, a Trump administration critic who represents six of the intelligence professionals whose clearances were revoked.
"If I were the defense counsel [for Brennan], I would raise the revocation in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the witnesses," Zaid said.
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AN 725
On Wednesday morning, July 9, NBC News' Ken Dilanian confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has "opened criminal investigations into the conduct of former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey." Dilanian reported this development on X, formerly Twitter, and during a conversation with MSNBC's Ana Cabera.
Dilanian described Brennan and Comey as "two of Donald Trump's political foes who have long been the target of MAGA conspiracy theories."
"Exactly what is being investigated is unclear," Dilanian reported on X, "but a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Brennan. Ratcliffe last week released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton."
READ MORE: Bloodthirsty Republicans need to stop their praying
Dilanian added, "The origin of the Comey probe is unclear. A special counsel appointed by Trump spent years investigating how the intelligence assessment on Russian election interference was put together, requiring many CIA officials to hire lawyers. That special counsel, John Durham, also used a grand jury to scrutinize the actions of Brennan, Comey and many who worked for them over how the FBI and CIA handled investigations into Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. But Durham did not charge the two former leaders or accuse them of wrongdoing."
Dilanian told Cabrera that Comey and Brennan were "exhaustively investigated" by Durham, nothing that Brennan is a "paid MSNBC contributor and has been for years."
Since returning to the White House, Trump has filled DOJ with MAGA loyalists — including U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Dilanian's reporting is drawing a lot of discussion on X.
READ MORE:Why Americans haven’t reached the Trump tipping point yet — and what it will take
Journalist Marcy Wheeler tweeted, "1) Clinesmith didn't lie on an application. He altered an email. 2) Why do we assume the Comey thing isn't about the 8647 tweet? Kash has been laying (false) foundation that Comey attracted look-alikes."
X user Kimberly Suth posted, "Being that Comey single-handedly handed Trump his first win, you'd think there'd be a commendation."
Another X user, CAC, commented, "The FBI and DOJ are accomplishing what was feared. A weaponized system to punish Trump's perceived enemies."
Trump critic Laura Karson wrote, "There's nothing there other than to make life for Brennan and Comey miserable!"
X user Kathi Domalski tweeted, "Trump’s fascism is expanding."
READ MORE:'What kind of dummies are you?' How one comedian is 'getting under' Trump press secretary’s 'skin'
*Watch the MSNBC video below or at this link.
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nbc?
:{July 9, 2025
By Ken Dilanian, Ryan J. Reilly and Dan De Luce
The Trump administration has put two repeated targets of President Donald Trump under criminal investigation, although details of what exactly they are being investigated for or how far the Justice Department intends on taking the probes are unclear.
The two targets are former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in his first term, according to a statement that a Justice Department spokesperson provided to reporters.
The statement followed a Fox News article on Tuesday evening reporting on the existence of the investigations. After referring to Comey and Brennan, the spokesperson said the Justice Department does "not comment on ongoing investigations.”
A lawyer for Comey had no comment. Brennan, who is a paid contributor to NBC News and MSNBC, said he has not been contacted by the Justice Department or the CIA about the reported investigation. The FBI declined to comment.
The Fox News article was published as both FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi are facing significant blowback from conservative media and influencers over their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and material related to it. This week, the Justice Department and the FBI put out a memo restating what prior investigations had already found: that Epstein, a convicted sex offender and financier, killed himself in his jail cell in 2019 and that there was no incriminating evidence against uncharged third parties.
Patel, before joining the government, engaged with conspiracy theories about Epstein, while a statement from Bondi that an Epstein "client list" was sitting on her desk fueled more speculation on the right. Bondi later said she was speaking about documents related to Epstein, not an actual list.
U.S. newsVirginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin says his family was rescued in Texas floods
As for Brennan, a source briefed on the matter said CIA Director John Ratcliffe had made a criminal referral of Brennan to the Justice Department. Exactly what prompted the Comey investigation is unclear.
Ratcliffe last week released an internal CIA review that criticized Brennan’s handling of a 2017 intelligence assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Any conduct that took place during that campaign or even in most of Trump’s first term is now outside the typical five-year statute of limitations for federal crimes. The Fox News article mentions testimony that Brennan gave to the House Judiciary Committee in May 2023 about the so-called Steele Dossier that was an issue during the 2016 campaign. It cites no specific conduct from Comey during the past five years.
A special counsel appointed by then-Attorney General William Barr spent years investigating how the 2017 intelligence assessment was put together, requiring many CIA officials to hire lawyers. That special counsel, John Durham, also used a grand jury to scrutinize the actions of Brennan, Comey and many who worked for them over how the FBI and CIA handled investigations into Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. But Durham did not charge the two former leaders or accuse them of wrongdoing. His sole charge against a public official came against a low-level FBI lawyer who had lied on a warrant application.
The Trump administration has been taking action against people involved in investigations of the president and his supporters. The Justice Department has a "Weaponization Working Group" that is examining those investigations, and many who worked on them and were still in the department have been fired. And on his first day in office, Trump pardoned his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
ED FUCKING MARTIN JARED WISE EX FBI
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TRUMP RETALIATION
AN 1 25
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has denied the Department of Justice’s request to share Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents with Congress. Her order came just hours after now-President Trump signed an executive order to hold former government officials accountable for “unauthorized disclosure” of “sensitive” information, and “for election interference.”
Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee whose rulings have been highly criticized, refused to allow members of Congress to review Smith’s final report. Trump was investigated for alleged unlawful removal, retention, and refusal to return sensitive, classified, and top secret documents, reportedly including nuclear and defense secrets. The FBI executed a lawful search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence to retrieve some of the documents.
Part of her reasoning, Politico’s Kyle Cheney reports, is that Congress “hasn’t asked for it and it’s not clear they need it, she says.”
“The ruling will make it easier for Trump to bury the report on the special counsel’s criminal probe,” Politico adds.
Late Monday night, one of the reportedly dozens of executive orders President Trump signed also addressed sensitive and classified information.
READ MORE: Skipping Hand on Bible, Trump Declares ‘We Will Not Forget Our God’ at Inauguration
In it, he revoked the security clearances of dozens of former federal government officials, including some who had worked in his first administration, like former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, whom he criticized.
The list includes the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who signed a letter reportedly stating that the disclosure of emails purportedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“Many of the former officials are long retired and no longer hold active clearances — meaning that the move may have limited practical impact on their careers — but the order nevertheless suggests that Trump intends to act on threats he’s made to penalize national security and intelligence professionals whom he deems to be his enemies,” CNN reported.
“They should be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump had said.
“National security is … damaged by the publication of classified information,” the executive order reads. “Former National Security Advisor John R. Bolton published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position in 2019. The book was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government. The memoir’s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff. Publication also created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed.”
In 2023, Bolton commented on the classified documents criminal case against Trump, at the time 37 felony charges, most of which were under the Espionage Act.
“Trump appeared to have a ‘pattern’ of wanting to collect materials ‘of interest to him,’ including classified documents,” Bolton said, as The Hill reported. He also “knocked Trump’s behavior as ‘very disturbing.'”
Bolton told MSNBC, “there were some [documents] that we did get back. Others, the most famous, to me, it demonstrates why I don’t need to read the indictment or believe its allegations are true, although I’m pretty confident they are — was the famous tweet that he did after getting an overhead picture of a failed Iranian missile launch, which he was shown during an intelligence briefing. [He] didn’t give [it] back, and it was tweeted before the intelligence officials got back to their office.”
Bolton was “referring to a 2019 tweet from the then-president.”
READ MORE: Trump Expected to Target Citizenship of Children With Undocumented Parents
Trump’s order on Monday also stated: “It is the policy of the United States that individuals who hold government-issued security clearances should not use their clearance status to influence U.S. elections.”
Among the intelligence professionals the order revokes security clearance from are well-known cable news commentators, and political and national security experts.
In addition to Bolton, some on the list include: James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Jeremy Bash, and Nada Bakos.
Margaret Brennan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and “Face the Nation” moderator noted that Trump revoking “the security clearances of a long list of former intelligence officials … makes it hard for his own team to seek informed counsel from them.”
Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security issues, including security clearances, noted, “no President has ever done this before.”
Watch video of Trump below or at this link.
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an 220
...“What we’re seeing now is an anomaly, such an aberration from what we’ve seen in the past, about the importance, the independence of the intelligence community,” Brennan said. “Two non-partisan national security officials have been removed at the helm of the intelligence community. [Ex-acting DNI] Joe Maguire and then Andrew Hallman, a senior CIA officer who was Joe Maguire’s deputy. That is a virtual decapitation of the intelligence
...
AN cody f
When President Donald Trump broke with precedent and unilaterally revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, many observers criticized the move as petty and an assault on the freedom of speech of Trump's critics. But MSNBC's Rachel Maddow argued Thursday night that something much more sinister may be going on.
She noted that Brennan himself has said that he hasn't used his security clearance since leaving government except to review his old notes when needing to testify before Congress or in other circumstances.
And Brennan, she noted, is one of the key figures involved in briefing then-President-elect Trump on the Russia investigation during the 2016-2017 transition. Since any potential obstruction of justice charges Trump may eventually face could relate to the information he received then, Brennan may eventually be called to testify about these events. This also applies to many of the other people the White House has said it is reviewing for the potential revocation of security clearances. And that puts Trump's new targeting of Brennan and the others in a much darker light.
"He said explicitly that he did it because these people had a role back in the day leading the Russia investigation — what he called the 'rigged witch hunt,'" Maddow said. "He's not after his critics — he's after the witnesses!"
She also played a clip of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggesting that the precedent Trump has now established could be destructive in other ways: "The other question I have is: Where does this end? What is to stop President Trump from say, suspending the eligibility for access to classified information of Bob Mueller and his entire team? And they can't operate without access to classified information."
Watch the clip below:
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-admits-real-reason-hes-targeting-former-intel-officials-and-it-all-comes
Trump Admits the Real Reason He's Targeting Former Intel Officials — and It All Comes Back to Russia
The White House announced Wednesday that it would take the unprecedented step of revoking the former CIA director's security clearance for ad hoc reasons.
By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet August 15, 2018, 5:45 PM GMT
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When the White House announced that it has revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan — and is considering doing so for a list of former officials who have been critical of President Donald Trump — press secretary Sarah Sanders struggled to give a clear and decisive reason for the unprecedented move.
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But in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump himself made it clear why he is targeting these people: It's all about the Russia investigation.
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“I call it the rigged witch hunt, [it] is a sham,” Trump told the paper “And these people led it!”
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He continued: "So I think it’s something that had to be done.”
Of course, if there were any actual wrongdoing in the execution of the Russia investigation, the government could take serious legal action against those people. So far, there's no evidence that anyone acted improperly in conducting the probe, so Trump is resorting to revoking and threatening to revoke security clearance as the only way he can lash out.
On Twitter Wednesday night, Trump quoted his friend and Fox News host Sean Hannity: “I’d strip the whole bunch of them. They’re all corrupt. They’ve all abused their power. They’ve all betrayed the American people with a political agenda. They tried to steal and influence an election in the United States.”
But again, there's little reason to believe these claims are true. The intelligence community, in fact, clearly hurt Hillary Clinton's chances during the 2016 campaign while it kept the ongoing counterintelligence investigation into Trump's associates under wraps.
Rather, it looks like Trump is trying to go after the people who tried to uncover Russia's work to interfere with the 2016 election and any potential conspiracy to work in concert with the Trump campaign. This is all a part of his continuing effort to undermine the probe.
To say the least, these do not seem like the actions of someone who expects the investigation to exonerate him.
Cody Fenwick is a reporter and editor.
no lnx
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~ trump bk reminds us that when brennan? security clearance stripped in early retaliation, admiral head spec ops on bin laden raid said take mine too
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Admiral who oversaw Bin Laden raid to Trump: 'Revoke my ...
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Missing: early retaliation, spec ops mine
Commander who oversaw bin Laden raid: It'd be 'an honor' for ...
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Rep. Cummings Demands Explanation For Stripping Ex-CIA ...
www.npr.org › 2018/08/16 › revocation-of-ex-cia-directors-clearance-d...
Aug 16, 2018 - Former CIA Director John Brennan arrives at a May 2018 Senate hearing. President Trump revoked Brennan's security clearance Wednesday, claiming ... Trump said that's why he wanted to strip Brennan of his security clearance. ... Navy admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden during his ...
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https://www.alternet.org/trump-launches-attack-former-cia-director-brennan-after-he-calls-out-president-lacking-integrity-and