Conservative Former DOJ Prosecutor Joe DiGenova Sworn In as Special Consultant to Investigate the Russiagate Conspiracy

Cry moar, NYT:

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.

By Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer

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.

And what are they investigating? That's right, whether Democrat officials created a color change operation to remove a sitting president of the United States.

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.

Why did Trump have to reach outside the current DOJ corps of prosecutors?

Because Obama, and then Biden, purged every single older, experienced conservative prosecutor from the DOJ.

Bringing diGenova in for that role confirms something that I've long believed about the 2020s version of the Department of Justice -- the near complete purging of DOJ of anyone remotely resembling me between 2009 and 2025 has left the Department without a contingent of gray haired and/or balding older folks with conservative political views AND the experience and skill set needed to methodically piece together a very large jigsaw puzzle of evidence that involves dozens of primary players, hundreds of locations, and lasting over a decade in time. The exercise requires patience and a willingness to backtrack and go a different direction whenever you encounter an evidentiary dead-end. It does not lend itself to "head down bull-in-a-china-shop" youthful enthusiasm.

One thing I learned in handling 90+ cases involving January 6 defendants is that the roster of AUSAs across the country who I encountered looked nothing like me in my last 10 years with DOJ -- from age 42 to 52. The number of J6 cases prosecuted by DOJ was so large that the AUSAs working in the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office were unable to handle them all. The Biden DOJ put out a "tasking" to all U.S. Attorneys' Offices across the country to designate a certain number of AUSAs from their offices to be assigned to handle J6 cases. I personally handled cases that had AUSAs assigned to them who worked in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Chicago, New York, Boston, and Tampa -- just as a sample.

The majority were women from their late 20s to their late 30s. To the extent I was able to discern their "politics" through conversation or taking the time to learn more about them online, they were uniformly liberal progressives -- not a single exception that I can recall.

Similarly, the male AUSAs I encountered -- with only 1-2 exceptions who were well into their 40s -- were pretty obviously liberal progressives.

I do not recall a single encounter -- across 90+ cases -- where the AUSA ever let on or suggested any kind of political "alignment" with the January 6 defendants as a group. I don't mean comments that might have excused the conduct or criticized the Biden Admin. approach to the prosecutions -- I don't recall a single comment that could have been construed as suggesting the AUSA was a Republican who supported Pres. Trump during his time in office in his first term.

"Election lies," Jakey?

Remember, this guy wrote a book called The Plot to Steal the Presidency -- about Bush's theft of Al Gore's presidency -- but has since then piously instructed us that one should never, ever say a presidency was stolen.

But US intelligence warned in 2020 that our election system was wide open to foreign compromise.

Months before the 2020 presidential election, U.S. intelligence issued a secret but stark warning that foreign adversaries had the capability to "compromise" America's voting infrastructure and raised specific concerns about the vulnerability of voter registration databases that later would be penetrated by China and Iran, a newly declassified memo obtained by Just the News shows.

The National Intelligence Council's (NIC) concerns were so extensive that officials personally briefed President Donald Trump at the White House in February 2020, according to photos obtained by Just the News showing top CIA, FBI and Homeland Security officials joining with NIC analysts to inform the president.

But the American public was never fully alerted, even after evidence emerged that China had gained access to voter registration data in multiple states and had even sent fake driver's licenses to the United States in a bid to help Joe Biden win the election, officials said.

"We judge that US adversaries, including, at a minimum, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election," the NIC wrote in the memo dated Jan. 15, 2020.

"Adversaries gaining access to US election-related systems could disrupt the voting process, steal sensitive data, or undermine confidence in the election results, but we do not know whether any of them have specific plans to manipulate election-related systems," the memo added.

The document was recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who continues to expose examples of the intelligence community suppressing or misusing intelligence.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:20 PM

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