Say It Ain’t So, Joe!
Joseph diGenova, the Trump loyalist and conspiracy promulgator put in charge of the sweeping DOJ investigation into an imagined grand conspiracy against the president, abruptly resigned yesterday reportedly under pressure for not having secured indictments quickly enough.
For a brief moment last night, diGenova looked like he might effectively turn whistleblower against the Trump DOJ. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he told the New York Post.
But a short time later, diGenova backtracked somewhat, telling the AP that his comments were taken out of context: “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.”
Victoria Toensing, diGenova’s wife who was also part of the prosecution team, is resigning, too.
What to make of all this?
We don’t have perfect visibility into how it all came down, but the Trump track record on retributive prosecutions is pretty clear and diGenova’s departure fits into the general pattern:
Trump just wants indictments. More than anything else, President Trump is eager to stain his foes with indictments. What about actual convictions? That would be icing, but they are almost beside the point. This approach of indict first and try to build a case later is so at odds with how legit prosecutors operate that it remains a cognitive obstacle to analyzing what is going on in the Trump retributive prosecution cases. (You’d also expect a genuine tyrant to want his foes jailed, not merely indicted, so having convictions be an afterthought is confounding on many levels.)
Trump Sends Underlings Into the Buzzsaw. Indicting first and then trying to build a case later puts the onus on Trump DOJ prosecutors on the front end and exposes them to the full wrath of the judiciary on the back end. It is a no-win situation for them. We’ve seen this again and again, with judges excoriating prosecutors for not being ready with discovery, slow-rolling cases after indictment, and generally still working to compile their case as it barrels towards trial.
Churning Through Underlings. To get around putting prosecutors in impossible positions with judges, the Trump DOJ frequently churns through junior prosecutors in the same case. It makes it hard for judges to hold prosecutors to account when they’re no longer on the case. Senior Trump DOJ officials have in some cases had to step into the breach themselves. It’s further reduced the capacity of the Justice Department, often leaving political appointees on the front lines in big cases, a nearly unheard of rarity at DOJ.
Todd Blanche Knows the Score. Blanche became attorney general because President Trump wasn’t satisfied that Pam Bondi was moving fast enough against his foes. Blanche used his time as acting attorney general to ramp up the second prosecution of James Comey over the seashells arrayed to say “86 47” and to take other aggressive steps on Trump’s behalf — including appointing diGenova to jumpstart the grand conspiracy investigation — and thus lock down the nomination to the permanent position.
Blanche Brought in diGenova. Bondi was gone by early April, and by late April Blanche has installed diGenova in a much-touted move to bolster the languishing (and bogus) grand conspiracy investigation, which is being run out of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office.
diGenova Wasn’t the First Prosecutor to Quit this Case. Before diGenova arrived on scene, career DOJ prosecutor Maria Medetis Long had withdrawn from the case, reportedly over concerns that the evidence was insufficient to charge former CIA Director John Brennan in a companion case.
diGenova is No Saint in all of This. A staple of GOP politics since he served as D.C. U.S. attorney in the 1980s, diGenova had taken an opportunistic turn toward the Trumpian right over the past decade. He was an attractive option to lead the grand conspiracy investigation because he’d been touting various MAGA conspiracy theories publicly as a Trump surrogate on TV and privately as a legal adviser to the president on matters related to the Russia probes.
diGenova Saw the Writing on the Wall. His resignation came after clashes with higher-ups at Main Justice, including reportedly being told that “he had lost the confidence of his superiors,” CNN reported.
diGenova Gives Defense Attorneys a Gift. diGenova’s comments to the NY Post will be damaging in any subsequent prosecution that arises from the grand conspiracy investigation. It is more evidence of vindictive prosecutions by the Trump DOJ, and could be used as an example in other unrelated prosecutions as an example of the pattern of DOJ misconduct.
diGenova Beats Hasty Retreat. DiGenova’s walkback to the AP of his earlier remarks is still somewhat damaging to DOJ, but it also shows diGenova hastily returning to the fold, where it’s easier to stoke conspiracy theories, gin up Trump, and overpromise results than it is to actually build a viable criminal case that can win a conviction and withstand appeal. That requires real evidence, professional prosecutors, hard work, and adherence to the standards of legal ethics.
Trump wants what he wants: the stain of indictment on his foes, the same as he was stained. He doesn’t care if he breaks the Justice Department, ruins prosecutors careers, churns through appointees, or fails to obtain a conviction. That’s it. It’s not that complicated.
One for the History Books
President Trump’s insane closing flourish at last night’s GOP midterm convention will be the kind of historical artifact that I cringe imagining trying to explain to future generations:
DHS Deletes Super Racist Post
The Department of Homeland Security has taken down a post that featured Optimus Prime of Transformers fame wearing the DHS seal on his armor and telling a Sikh man to “Self Deport or Find Out.” DHS said the post was referring to Harjinder Singh, an Indian trucker who has been demagogued by the Trump administration for his involvement in a fatal highway crash last year in Florida. Hasbro, which owns the Transformers brand, was not happy about the DHS post either.
The Post-9/11 Tools Now Used At Home
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, The Washington Post’s Warren Strobel picks up a theme that has been a key part of TPM’s coverage of Trump II: “[P]owerful agencies and vast legal authorities created to stop another terrorist catastrophe are being turned inward, with the Trump administration using many of those powers to round up immigrants, battle drug traffickers and target political dissent.”
AI-pocalypse Now
The latest developments on the AI front:
Stephen Witt: The A.I. Threat Is Real. We Need to Act Now
WaPo: For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening.
NYT: Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
Detectorist Finds Hoard of Viking Coins
I am a sucker for these kinds of stories every single time.
An amateur with a metal detector last week found the largest hoard of Viking Age coins ever unearthed in Finland.
The stash of silver coins has not been cleaned or counted yet, but it weighs about 10 pounds. That’s more than twice the weight of Finland’s previous largest Viking Age coin hoard, which was found in 1895 and contained some 1,700 coins.
The newly discovered hoard was really three discoveries in one. Kalle Lappinen, the detectorist, first found one cache, then another about 40 feet away. Each cache was buried about a foot and half below the surface inside of its own birch-bark container, an interesting find in its own right.
The NYT has reaction from professional archaeologists.
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Many writers and academics have been sounding the alarm for years about domesticating the Bush-era "GWOT" by repurposing all the tools that were put in place by Congress and by various EOs to hunt to ground foreign-based anti-American terrorists groups, but now redirecting these various laws and presidential directives against Americans and immigrants alike who are protesting vocally and in person government overreach and militarization of "law enforcement".
We now live in an entirely securitized surveillance state, whose pervasive infiltration and criminalization of private acts are even beyond the courts to check, and this by any reckoning is THE legacy of 9-11, never mind 25th anniversary remembrances.