The Right Pick for Trump’s Bogus “Grand Conspiracy” Case

Newly appointed Justice Department counselor Joe diGenova (third from the left) with Miami US attorney Jason Reding Quiñones (center) during his swearing-in ceremony on Monday. US Department of Justice

In what might be the ultimate encapsulation of Donald Trump’s disgraceful perversion of the Justice Department, the acting attorney general (Trump’s former personal defense lawyer) has selected an conspiracy theory peddler and election denier—who was part of a group that colluded with Russian intelligence to smear Joe Biden and who was deplatformed by Fox News for making an antisemitic comment—to run a baseless and biased criminal investigation that seeks to serve Trump’s revenge fantasy.

On Monday, Joe diGenova, a former US attorney, was sworn in as a counselor to acting AG Todd Blanche and handed the mission of overseeing a probe being run out of the Miami US attorney’s office that aims to prove that Trump was the victim of what right-wing influencers call the “grand conspiracy” to destroy him. This alleged Deep State uber-plot encompassed the individual investigations that targeted Trump, including the Russia investigation and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of his alleged pilfering of top-secret White House documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Under this theory, these inquiries were not separate matters but each a component of a years-long clandestine scheme pursued by a nefarious cabal of government officials to persecute Trump and deprive him of his constitutional rights.

The grand conspiracy case was first launched last year as an investigation of former CIA chief John Brennan for testimony he gave years ago to Congress about the Russia investigation. This probe was triggered by a stunt pulled by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who in July declassified and released documents that she falsely claimed showed that Obama administration officials at the end of 2016 fabricated the intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in that year’s presidential election to assist Trump.

Initially, Trump’s Justice Department focused on whether Brennan had misled Congress about one aspect of the process that led to that conclusion. But this case was so weak that US attorneys in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Eastern District of Virginia couldn’t pull together a prosecution. With Trump pressing the Justice Department to lock up his perceived enemies, the matter was shifted to Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney in Miami and an ardent Trump loyalist. He eagerly took it on.

In November Reding Quiñones zapped out subpoenas to Brennan and more than two dozen former intelligence officials who had toiled on the Russia investigation. Working with Mike Davis, a former Senate staffer and informal Trump adviser (who had publicly vowed to get even with former officials who had investigated Trump), he has sought to expand the case far beyond Brennan’s testimony to Congress to cover just about all of Trump’s grievances. The goal: show trials for Brennan and other Obama and Biden officials, such as former FBI director Jim Comey, former DNI James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and perhaps even Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

After the Justice Department’s failed attempt to prosecute Comey—which might be revived— Reding Quiñones’ investigation has become the ground zero of Trump’s crusade of vengeance. Not surprisingly, it’s been marred so far by irregularities and signs of significant bias. Reding Quiñones called for a second grand jury to be set up for this investigation in the Fort Pierce courthouse, which is 130 miles from Miami but under the supervision of federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a series of controversial and highly favorable rulings for Trump in the stolen-papers case. (Brennan’s lawyer protested this unusual move.) And earlier this month, a senior career federal prosecutor withdrew from the investigation, expressing concerns about the case’s legal viability.

Enter diGenova. In hailing his appointment, the Justice Department proclaimed that the 81-year-old former prosecutor has had a “distinguished career.” And he once boasted a decent reputation in Washington as a no-nonsense and savvy Republican. But in the Trump years, he has become a highly partisan purveyor of conspiracy theories and disinformation—a right-wing crank.

During the 2020 campaign, diGenova and his wife and fellow attorney, Victoria Toensing, were part of the small group Rudy Giuliani assembled to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and promote the false story that Biden, when he was vice president, forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to kill an investigation of Burisma Holdings, an energy firm that recruited Biden’s son Hunter for a well-compensated spot on its board of directors. (Biden had indeed pressured Kyiv to get rid of this prosecutor, but so had many European governments, as well as a bipartisan group of US senators, for he was widely reputed to be corrupt. At that time, there was no investigation of Burisma.)

Prior to partnering up with Giuliani for this smear crusade, diGenova was a prominent Russia denier, who excoriated the Trump-Russia investigation as a “hoax” and insisted that “people should be put in jail for this.” He claimed that a “group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.” In a speech, he called Comey a “dirty cop.” At one point, he and Toensing nearly joined Trump’s legal team, but the pair didn’t come aboard due to potential conflicts of interest.

As part of Giuliani’s squad, diGenova worked with Ukrainians who were making unsubstantiated allegations about Biden that were debunked. He and Toensing also represented right-wing journalist John Solomon, another member of Giuliani's hit team, who was promoting spurious allegations about purported Biden corruption in Ukraine. Appearing on Fox News, diGenova accused Biden and his family of engaging in “bribery and extortion”—offering no proof. He blamed Ukrainian officials for somehow triggering the Russia investigation. At times, he sounded like an extremist nutter. On Laura Ingraham’s podcast, he blasted the media and Democrats and said, “We are in a civil war in this country…It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things: I vote and I buy guns.”

While looking for dirt on Biden, diGenova and his wife ended up working for a Ukrainian oligarch who had been indicted by the Justice Department for allegedly scheming to bribe officials in India. Giuliani was hoping this Ukrainian businessman could help unearth derogatory information on Biden. A Justice Department filing in the case identified the oligarch, who denied the charges and was fighting extradition to the United States, as an “upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.” Oddly, the Ukrainian prosecutor who had been fired at Biden’s insistence filed an affidavit in the oligarch’s extradition case claiming that Biden had “manipulated” the Ukrainian government and “forced” him out of his job. Giuliani used this affidavit to hype the case against Biden.

The Giuliani group even had a direct connection to Moscow. During his frantic chase for negative information about Biden, Giuliani joined forces with Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia Ukrainian legislator who claimed to have evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine. He didn’t, and Derkach was far from a public interest–minded legislator. In the summer of 2020, Trump’s own Treasury Department sanctioned him, calling Derkach a “Russian agent for over a decade.” It noted that he had “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election”—meaning Biden. The department noted, “Derkach’s unsubstantiated narratives were pushed in Western media through coverage of press conferences and other news events, including interviews and statements.”

This meant that Giuliani’s get-Biden operation—of which diGenova was a key participant—had been in league with Russian intelligence in spreading bullshit allegations about Biden. DiGenova was a (presumably) unwitting helpmate for a Russian agent running an operation to benefit Trump.

And there’s more. In November 2019, while appearing on Fox, diGenova remarked, “There's no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department. He also controls the activities of FBI agents overseas who work for NGOs…He corrupted FBI officials, he corrupted foreign service officers. And the bottom line is this: George Soros wants to run Ukraine.” This baseless comment—reflecting longstanding right-wing conspiracy theories about Soros—was widely criticized as an antisemitic trope. It was even too much for Fox News. DiGenova’s appearances on the cable channel trailed off.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, diGenova became part of the legal team led by Giuliani that challenged the result. At one point he called for Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who pronounced the election free of significant fraud, to be “drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.”

DiGenova has demonstrated an immense bias against the targets of the Miami investigation, a tendency to recklessly spout unproven accusations, and a penchant for hawking conspiracy theories. And he was part of an endeavor that promoted Russian disinformation concocted to assist Trump. It’s absurd that he would be placed in charge of any federal investigation. But this grand conspiracy case is a bogus inquiry and a profound abuse of power. It’s not about justice; its goal is to defy the truth and obtain personal revenge for a corrupt and deceitful autocrat. That makes it the perfect case for diGenova.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

There are many reasons to be suspicious of the indictment Trump’s Justice Department filed against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel accused the civil rights group of supporting white supremacist and other extremist outfits because they paid informants in those organizations. But as many have noted, compensating informants to penetrate such secretive outfits is not a crime. And legal experts have questioned the Justice Department’s claim that SPLC committed wire and bank fraud through these undercover operations. (Here’s a good thread critiquing the indictment.)

The indictment has the stench of a vendetta. There are many conservatives who have long complained about the SPLC designating right-wing entities—especially anti-immigration groups and organizations that support discrimination against the LGBT community—“hate groups.” So the list of administration officials who had it in for the SLPC and wanted to engineer a strike against it is likely long.

I tend to stay away from speculation. But in this instance, let me suggest that White House aide Stephen Miller might have had a hand in this. Why? In 2019, the SPLC gained access to 900 emails that Miller sent to the right-wing Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, and it published a five-part series based on this material. The summation for one of these pieces: “In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage.”

The following year it released what it called an “Extremist File” on Miller.

When the email stories were published, the Trump White House bizarrely tried to depict them as an antisemitic attack on Miller. In a statement, it said, “SPLC is engaged in a vile smear campaign against a Jewish staffer. While Mr. Miller condemns racism and bigotry in all forms, those defaming him are trying to deny his Jewish identity which is a pernicious form of anti-Semitism." It did not deny the authenticity of the emails.

If you’re looking for a Trumpist with a strong motive to kneecap the SPLC, Miller is a suspect. 

A lot of dumb remarks Donald Trump utters are important, for they have terrible policy implications and awful consequences. Then there are his stupid comments that are just stupid. To wit, his claim, “I would've won Vietnam very quickly."

If a guy sitting next to you in a bar said this, you would change your seat.

At a Turning Point USA conference, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a far-right conspiracy theorist who has hobnobbed with Holocaust deniers and extremist militant groups and who in 2021 posted an anime video showing a character with his face superimposed on it killing a character meant to be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), offered a major suck-up to Trump: "We've got a president who reminds me of Atlas. He carries this country on his back."

Actually, in the original Greek myth, Atlas was condemned to carry the sky on his back. (The image of him with the planet came much later during the Renaissance.) And Atlas did so not out of any benevolence or sense of commitment. That was his punishment for losing a war against the Olympian gods led by Zeus. Gosar should try the internet.

One of Trump’s idiocies is his claim he has lowered prescription drug prices by 600 percent. Which is not possible. A 100 percent reduction would mean the medicine was free. If the decrease were greater, the drugstore would pay you for accepting the medication. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was testifying to the Senate this week, Sen. Elizbeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled him on Trump’s prescription drug program, noting that better deals can be had at Costco. When she took a poke at Trump’s 600 percent claim, RFK Jr. shot back: “President Trump has a different way of calculating it. There are two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 truck and you reduce it to 10, that’s a 600 percent reduction.”

I asked the Claude AI chatbot to evaluate Kennedy’s math, and it replied, “This statement is mathematically incorrect…The person making this statement likely confused the ratio between the two numbers with the percentage reduction. The original price is 60 times the new price (600 ÷ 10 = 60), which you could express as the original being 6,000% of the new price. But that's a completely different calculation from a percentage reduction. In short: going from $600 to $10 is roughly a 98% reduction, not a 600% one.”

To serve Trump, Kennedy will go so far as to deny basic math. And on Thursday, during a photo op in the Oval Office with Trump and other Cabinet members, Kennedy doubled down:

It’s not a good sign that the guy in charge of the public health system can’t do middle-school arithmetic.

The winner triumphed this week not for uttering a comment that was false or particularly idiotic but for a profound lack of self-awareness. Jenna Ellis, best known for having been part of the Trump legal team that tried to overturn the 2020 election, now wants us to know that it’s wrong to let the Republican Party and MAGA be controlled by Trump’s impulses:

Nobody is willing to stand up and say we need to be a party led by principle and objective honest, truth, not a personality, because personalities change. And Trump today could post something at whim, and the party would be expected to follow it, including Congress. And anybody who criticizes him, to the contrary, will then—you’re a traitor, you’re no longer MAGA, you’re not conservative anymore. The definition of conservatism now, apparently, is whatever Donald Trump says that it is at any given moment.

The judges got whiplash listening to Ellis. She dares to say a party and a movement should adhere to “objective, honest truth” after promoting lies as part of an underhanded effort to blow up American democracy? Ellis was censured by the Colorado Supreme Court for claiming Trump won the 2020 election, and her law license was suspended for three years. She was indicted in Georgia for being part of Trump’s crusade to steal the election and pleaded guilty to abetting false statements. And in Arizona she had to cut a deal with prosecutors mounting a case against Trump’s fake electors to avoid a potential jail sentence.

For daring to self-righteously complain that Trump controls the GOP and MAGA with lies and whims, Ellis wins—not for being dumb but for stupidly believing she can get away with this chutzpah.

Responding to the recent issue on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s politicization and weaponization of intelligence, several subscribers noted that Trump’s appointees deserved more coverage. 

Larry Roth wrote:

I’m glad you’re giving Gabbard some needed attention. I expect the professionals in the intelligence community must be tearing their hair out—and watching their backs. There’s enough paranoia as an occupational hazard as it is without having to worry about a dangerous fool for a boss. 

The big problem with trying to cover the Trump regime is that there’s not enough bandwidth to give all of them the scrutiny they deserve. The real challenge would be to spotlight anyone among them who actually is capable of doing their job with competence and integrity. (Which would get them fired.) 

The corrosive effects go further. How many in government are not slavish worshippers of Trump who are trying to survive by keeping their heads down and doing as little as possible to avoid drawing attention? Anyone who is not a devout Trump loyalist is automatically suspicious for working for the government in the first place.

Duane DeBruler emailed:

I live in Fulton County, Georgia. I was lucky enough to be able to buy a townhouse in North Fulton 20 years ago before everything became unaffordable. That’s the part that is represented by a recent Dumbass Comment of the Week nominee, Rep. Rich McCormick. Here's the paragraph from your most recent article that jumps out at me:

“Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?”

I absolutely agree this is a far greater deal than most have made of it. (Note that it was one of the last paragraphs in your article.) I can't help but think that Trump and his MAGA Republicans are setting the foundation for undermining the credibility of the Georgia elections and creating a basis for declaring one of his routine national emergencies to set aside the election results. The fact that he’s picking on Georgia, which is entirely controlled by the Republican party, is also an interesting story in and of itself. 

Duane, they definitely are up to something. Otherwise, why would they be bothering with ballots from six years ago? Fortunately, there are plenty of lawyers and activists keeping a close watch on this.

Susan Myerson sent in a prediction about Trump:

Now that Trump has insulted all the Christians in the country, my husband and I joked that maybe his next posting will be of him as Moses parting the Red Sea, so he can offend all the Jews in the country. 

Trump has already offended most American Jews. He has said more than once that Jews who vote Democratic “hate Israel” and hate “their religion.”

Caroline Poplin shared an observation about the Iran war:

It’s not just a war of choice. It’s a vanity project. Call it that. And recommend what should have been the proposed Aiken Solution to the Vietnam War: Declare victory and go home. So give him his victory. Heck, give him a parade. Anything to prevent this stupid vanity project from turning into another deadly quagmire.

For a malignant narcissist, everything is vanity. But Trump himself is trying to do what Sen. George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, proposed in the mid-1960s. He has repeatedly declared he has defeated Iran. The problem is that the Iranians don’t believe that.

Ruth Lezotte reacted to the issue in which the Republicans were compared to lemmings:

Not only are they lemmings; they're lazy fools. May 1 will see another paid vacation for the poor, overworked members of Congress who currently work an exhausting three day week .I am surprised that I see not one peep from either the legacy media or the voracious social media about this. I suspect that if there were more attention paid to this the American people would pitch a major fit. Maybe you should lead the charge.

There’s nothing new about the schedule for Congress. And this coming break may not be good for the Republicans, especially those House members in tight races in swing districts. They will be roasted at townhall meetings (if they hold them). Moreover, the Republicans face tremendous headwinds in the coming midterms. Democrats don’t want them passing any legislation that they can try to tout as accomplishments. The less the GOP does between now and November, the better, most likely, for the Ds.

“Moxie, why are you walking so slowly.”
“I’m savoring.”
“What are you savoring?”
“That I don’t have to rush through life.”
“But you never have to rush through life.”
“Yes, and that’s worth savoring.”