Breaking: Trump To Hire Attorney Who Holds Deep State Conspiracy Theory

Ken AshfordBreaking News, L'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

Oh, this is getting good.  New York Times:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — President Trump has decided to hire the longtime Washington lawyer Joseph E. diGenova, who has pushed the theory on television that Mr. Trump was framed by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials, to bolster his legal team, according to three people told of the decision.

As seen on TV…. of course.

Mr. diGenova is not expected to take a lead role but will instead serve as a more aggressive player on the president’s legal team. Mr. Trump broke over the weekend from the longstanding advice of some of his lawyers that he refrain from directly attacking the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, a sign of his growing unease with the investigation.

I wonder what role he will take. He certainly will butt heads with other counsel, making Trump’s round table of legal counsel as chaotic as his White House.

The hire has not been announced, and Mr. Trump frequently changes his mind and sometimes adjusts his plans based on media coverage. It was not clear whether Mr. Trump planned to hire other lawyers.

Mr. diGenova has endorsed the notion that a secretive group of F.B.I. agents concocted the Russia investigation as a way to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president. “There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,” he said on Fox News in January. He added, “Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.”

That’s an easy thing to say, but there clearly was a crime. The Russian hacked. The Russian manipulated social media. Those things happened, unless of course, you want to bring in the CIA and military intelligence into the conspiracy.  I’ll be the first to say that Trump personally may not have known or colluded with the crime, but let’s not say that there is merely a “falsely created crime” to begin with.

Little evidence has emerged to support that theory.

No shit.

Mr. diGenova is law partners with his wife, Victoria Toensing. Ms. Toensing has also represented Sam Clovis, the former Trump campaign co-chairman, and Erik Prince, the founder of the security contractor Blackwater and an informal adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Prince attended a meeting in January 2017 with a Russian investor in the Seychelles that the special counsel is investigating.

This could be a conflict of interest.

Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing have spent decades pushing smears of Democrats in the press. They played a key role in pushing debunked claims that the Obama administration was threatening Benghazi “whistleblowers.”  So, their addition to the team means this is another made-for-TV reality show.

Also….

UPDATE:

In 1997, diGenova wrote an article advocating that a sitting president could be indicted — no need to wait for impeachment. I wonder if his views have changed since then….