Joseph diGenova, a lawyer in the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, appears on Newsmax and calls for the execution of Christopher Krebs.
Krebs was recently fired from his role as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after refusing to back Trump’s election fraud conspiracy.
DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.
“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.
The Bulwark
DiGenova is at least the second person connected to Trump who has advocated for executions this month. In early November, Steve Bannon said the Trump Administration should behead Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Posts / files for the events in this backstory will be added at a later time:
Joseph diGenova Before Trump
Joseph diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing are partners at the diGenova and Toensing law firm. DiGenova served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1983-1988. In the mid-1990s, he led a three-year investigation on behalf of the Justice Department into the George H. W. Bush administration’s search for Bill Clinton’s passport. Afterwards, he called the investigation “stupid, dumb, and partisan” against the Bush officials, or what Donald Trump might call “a witch hunt.”
Victoria Toensing became special counsel to Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1981, the same year she married diGenova. Toensing helped draft the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made it illegal to expose (or attempt to expose) the identities of any U.S. intelligence agents. Under the Reagan administration, she served as deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ.
In the late 1990s while serving as Special Counsel in an unrelated investigation, the couple made many TV appearances claiming that they were being targeted by the Clinton administration.
“It’s a payoff from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to both Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova…. They have been on television over 200 times and not once have they been talking about an issue we’re paying them $25,000 a month to handle for the Congress. It’s a hell of a part-time job.”
Rep. Bill Clay
Toensing spent the early 2000s defending Scooter Libby, a Bush administration official who leaked the identity of a CIA agent — breaking a law that Toensing herself had a hand in creating.
Trump & Mueller (2018)
In March 2018, Trump added diGenova and Toensing to his legal team against the Mueller investigation but quickly let them go. DiGenova was a frequent guest on Fox News claiming that the FBI concocted the Russia hoax to frame Trump, and he would have been an asset to Trump’s legal agenda. But Toensing had a conflict of interest; she was already representing a 2017 Trump official (Mark Corallo) who had accused Trump aide Hope Hicks of a federal crime related to the Mueller probe.
A couple weeks later in April, diGenova and Toensing called on Trump to pardon Scooter Libby, who they represented at the time. Trump pardoned Libby days later. That same month, he called for the firing of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and said that Mueller and his investigators are “legal terrorists.”
Firtash, Ukraine, & Russia (2019)
Brady Toensing, Victoria’s son from a previous marriage, became an attorney for the Justice Department in June 2019.
A month later, in July 2019, diGenova and Toensing took on a new client: Dmytro / Dmitry Firtash. Their goal for Firtash was to get the DOJ, where their son now works, to overturn corruption charges against him.
The relationship was initiated by Rudy Giuliani and arranged by Lev Parnas — who’d been meeting with Giuliani, Trump, and Don Jr. for over a year and had helped raise over $1 million for Trump’s re-election campaign. Parnas was hired as an interpreter between Firtash and the couple. Giuliani’s objective was to obtain compromising material on Joe Biden from Firtash or his associates. (DiGenova and Toensing were also representing columnist John Solomon who’d pushed the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy with no evidence.)
Firtash is best known in the U.S. for helping Russia infiltrate Ukraine’s government and influence the country’s political landscape. He plays the role of funneling Russian money to politicians in other countries. In 2017, the DOJ identified him as working in the “upper-echelon” of Russia’s transnational organized crime syndicates.
In late 2008, Firtash told Ukraine’s prime minister that organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich is the “real power” behind his work. You might not know of Mogilevich, but you should. In a speech in 2011, Robert Mueller identified him as the greatest threat to American democracy as we know it, adding that transnational organized crime may have already infiltrated our industries and government. Anyone working for Firtash is also benefitting Russia and Mogilevich.
It’s a lot to take in, but like Trump’s own crimes, these criminals are hiding in plain sight.
These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.
Robert Mueller, 2011
Other people tied to Trump and Mogilevich include:
- David Bogatin, used Trump Tower for money laundering
- Vyacheslav Ivankov, living in Trump Tower and doing business at Trump casino
- Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father
- Michael Caputo, worked for the company (Gazprom) that Vladimir Putin, Mogilevich, and Firtash used for money laundering and to funnel Russian money to Ukraine
- Carter Page, worked with Gazprom
- Felix Sater, Trump SoHo, father was associated with Mogilevich
- Rep. Pete Sessions, son of Mogilevich attorney
- Rudy Giuliani, not just in relation to Firtash
- Vladimir Putin, (2)
The list above is incomplete and only based on connections already available on Trump File.
Sources
https://thebulwark.com/trump-lawyer-dhs-whistleblower-should-be-executed/
https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/digenova-toensing-impeachment-scandals
Bush investigation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/01/independent-counsel-calls-92-clinton-passport-search-stupid-but-not-illegal/2bc072aa-1f49-49c8-b497-f77faea502d7/
Barry Goldwater / Libby: http://www.slate.com/id/2177688/pagenum/all/
Reagan DOJ: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/21/magazine/capture-of-a-terrorist.html
Clinton: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/couple022798.htm
Mueller probe: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/us/politics/trump-digenova-toensing.html
DiGenova’s FBI conspiracy: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-trump-staff-fox-news-20180325-story.html
Libby pardon: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/383044-trump-issues-pardon-for-scooter-libby
Mueller probe (2): http://uk.businessinsider.com/joseph-digenova-trump-fox-news-sessions-should-fire-rosenstein-2018-4?r=US&IR=T
Brady Toensing: https://vtdigger.org/2019/06/10/toensing-tapped-u-s-department-justice-resigns-gop-vice-chair/
Columnist: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/giuliani-was-not-working-alone-in-biden-ukraine-probe
Firtash / DOJ: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-ex-manafort-associate-firtash-top-tier-comrade-russian-mobsters-n786806
DOJ / Giuliani & Parnas: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/us/giuliani-ukraine-oligarchs.html
Parnas & Trump: Proof of Corruption by Seth Abramson; p. 35-42 // Source links added at a later time.
Photo: C-Span
