Trump has a new avenger in chief

Sometimes it feels as if Donald Trump reinvented politics in whole cloth when he descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, and the world turned upside down. Here we are, 11 years later, still living in the surreality we first experienced on that day — like a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. The truth is that the wheels were coming off our political culture long before Trump came on the scene, and every once in a while we’re reminded of it. 

On Saturday the New York Times reported the Department of Justice has hired Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former U.S. attorney and political commentator, to head the “grand conspiracy” investigation targeting the president’s perceived enemies that is underway in the Southern District of Florida under the leadership of U.S. attorney — and Trump loyalist — Jason A. Reding Quiñones. DiGenova brings with him decades of experience; he’s been carrying out GOP vendetta since the days when the president was a tabloid joke and running around with Jeffrey Epstein in New York more than 30 years ago. 

News of diGenova’s appointment comes on the heels of a prosecutor withdrawing from the case, apparently due to doubts she had about prosecuting former CIA director John O. Brennan. Maria Medetis Long reportedly expressed concern that the evidence in the matter didn’t merit moving forward with an indictment, and as a career prosecutor, she should know. But diGenova does not have such lengthy experience. Although he was once a federal prosecutor during the Reagan administration, he has since made a career as a conservative commentator and operative whose most recent political activity came as a member of the so-called “elite strike force team” assembled by Rudy Giuliani to contest the 2020 election. (DiGenova appeared alongside the former New York City mayor at the infamous press conference held at the Four Seasons Landscaping Company where Giuliani spoke with black rivulets dripping down his face like a Real Housewife on a crying jag.)

A Trump loyalist, diGenova has been a GOP hit man since the 1990s when he and his wife, Victoria Toensing, made their names appearing on television to torment Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were the toast of the town, inspiring glowing profiles in the mainstream press in which they were characterized as savvy operators, a distinction that, in the words of the Washington Post’s then-media critic Howard Kurtz, “gives them access to juicy information, which gets them on television, which generates legal business.” In his 1998 profile titled “The Power Couple at Scandal’s Vortex,” Kurtz approvingly noted that diGenova and Toensing had been quoted or appeared on television more than 300 times in the month since news about Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky had broken. The media critic quoted Geraldo Rivera, who was then a host on CNBC, characterizing diGenova as “a strong, principled guy who doesn’t back down. If I played any part in making him a media star, I gloat with pleasure.”

Such was the relationship between right-wing character assassins and the mainstream media during that period — and nobody was more adept at it than diGenova. Although he and Toensing were not the only lawyer pundits on television at the time, they nonetheless pioneered the practice of representing clients involved in the cases on television in an effort to push the scandals into the mainstream, something that remains commonplace today. 

The couple kept a lower profile during the Bush years, raising their heads to defend Dick Cheney’s right-hand man, Scooter Libby. The Obama administration didn’t offer much red meat in the scandal department. But from the moment in April 2015 that Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president, they were off and running again. 

Toensing defended a number of clients who were involved in peripheral cases such as Uranium One, the absurd charge that Clinton had sold enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. But it was diGenova who came up with the initial right-wing broadside against one of the first people who would land on Trump’s enemies list in the weeks after he assumed office in 2017: James Comey. Even before the 2016 election, Trump was out there with a talking point that persists to this day, telling Laura Ingraham that “Comey’s a dirty cop. And if there’s one thing a prosecutor hates worse than a criminal, it’s a dirty cop… He threw this case. He did it for political reasons.” 

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By the time Trump’s first impeachment came along, diGenova and Toensing were up to their old tricks. Already part of Giuliani’s back-channel foreign policy — which held that it was actually the Ukrainians who interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton — the couple hit the airwaves like it was 1998 again in what Roll Call dubbed “The Vicki and Joe Show.” DiGenova came out swinging on behalf of Trump, saying, “what you’re seeing is regicide, this is regicide, by another name, fake impeachment.” The whistleblowers who raised concerns about Trump’s conduct were “suicide bombers,” he said. Without citing any evidence, he also called the paid Democratic operatives.

Trump noticed, and he tapped diGenova and Toensing to join the team defending him in the Russia probe. But reports claimed the “chemistry” just wasn’t there, and the couple was not hired after all. Still, the president must have liked what he had heard. DiGenova was the one who had insisted from the very beginning that “a group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime… they were going to exonerate Hillary and they were going to frame Donald Trump.” That has formed the basis of Trump’s ongoing attacks against the Russia investigation. 

This was diGenova’s beat during the president’s first term. When Attorney General Bill Barr tasked Special Prosecutor John Durham with investigating the Russia investigation, diGenova was on it. “This is now big time, telling Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “This is now big time. This is where Brennan needs five lawyers. Comey needs five lawyers.” The whole Obama administration, he declared, was on the hook for framing Donald Trump in the Russia probe. 

And the one person who counted was apparently listening.

Durham, of course, failed to turn up anything. Now Trump’s Justice Department is pursuing another full-fledged investigation using the same case theory diGenova has been pushing for years. Quiñones is a hard-core Trump supporter, and the grand jury involved in the probe is being overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon, who tanked the Mar-a-Lago documents case. With diGenova, the man who created the case’s very origin story, they have their dream team in place.

DiGenova has been given the title of “counselor to the attorney general,” along with free rein to turn his narrative into reality. 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? Stay tuned.