Joe diGenova never understood the assignment.
The octogenarian former federal prosecutor thought he was being recruited to run the mother of all conspiracy cases and take out every dirty, stinkin’ Democrat at once. He and his wife Victoria Toensing laid it all out in April on Rudy Giuliani’s Scotch and Dentures Variety Hour. (h/t CNN)
“She was a queen bee and she screwed President Trump to a fair thee well,” diGenova snorted about the recently fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What it is she is dumb as a post.”
Toensing agreed that it was a massive error to charge former FBI Director James Comey for making false statements to Congress in Virginia, i.e., where those statements actually took place.
“That should have been part of a conspiracy in Fort Pierce, Florida, which she did not have the sophistication to understand. I never as attorney general would have allowed the one count against Comey in Virginia. I would have saved it for the vast conspiracy,” she huffed.
“You do the same thing with You do the same thing with Letitia James,” diGenova broke in. “You don’t charge her in Virginia on mortgage fraud. you include her on a massive conspiracy account down in Miami with a bunch of people beginning in 2017, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Susan Rice.”
Creative theories of venue aside, the interview shows exactly what diGenova and Toensing expected when they joined the ongoing investigation in the Southern District of Florida. The plan was to round up all of Trump’s enemies, including Jack Smith, Tish James, Jim Comey, and even Barack Obama, and charge them with being part of a “grand conspiracy.” They could defeat the statute of limitations by saying that the crime was ongoing. Or they could call it deprivation of rights, which has no expiration date. With a grand jury supervised by Judge Aileen Cannon, the sky’s the limit!
Except that it wasn’t.
Because, when you’re tasked with using the legal system to go after one of Donald Trump’s enemies, the point is not to build a case. You’re not trying to establish probable cause and prove the elements of a crime. Conviction is more or less irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is getting an indictment so Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel can hold a press conference patting themselves on the back for their great service to the Republic and the Old Man — although you do get extra points for a perp walk that can be played endlessly on conservative media and turned into a meme.
It doesn’t matter if the case falls apart in a few months, bringing the U.S. Attorney’s office into disgrace or even contempt. Charge it, go on Fox, take the “W” — you’ve got prosecutorial immunity anyway, right?
U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, tapped to indict all the antifa protesters in Chicago, knew the deal. He didn’t care about dragging his entire office into the middle of a scandal over prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury. He indicted the “Broadview 6” and a handful of other dissidents, watched the cases fall apart, and then took his promotion.
U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle in North Carolina could care less that the Comey seashells case will wash away with the tide.
But diGenova and Toensing were never in on the joke. They’ve been mainlining stringboard-level conspiracy theories since the first Trump administration, when they were getting paid by Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and huddling up with Rudy and Devin Nunes to undermine the Mueller investigation. They thought this was finally their big moment. And according to CNN, diGenova was pissed to find that he was expected to spend a few weeks securing a piddly indictment of former CIA Director John Brennan and declare “mission accomplished.” And so on Thursday he stomped off in a huff, resigning his role as a special government employee.
DiGenova, who once had to apologize for saying that the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency should be “taken out at dawn and shot” after the 2020 election, had a moment of indiscretion when talking to the New York Post’s Josh Christenson.
“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he snapped.
Later he regained his composure, telling the AP, “There’s 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.”
Well, of course you can — and if you want to get ahead in Trumpland, you absolutely will. But every cloud has a silver lining. Before you know it, those two crazy kids will back on air with Rudy explaining how everyone but them is too stupid to understand civil procedure.
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
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