The Justice Department's sudden loss of a pro-Trump loyalist prosecutor bodes ill for the president's recently selected attorney general, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman wrote on Monday.
Joseph diGenova has refused to explain the reasoning for his departure, but the mere fact that he chose to leave speaks volumes, Litman argued, and is a "devastating verdict" on Attorney General Todd Blanche's leadership.
"It’s important to the story that diGenova is a consummate Trump loyalist," wrote Litman. "He aligned himself with the Giuliani-Powell-Ellis effort challenging the 2020 election results, and more generally adopted the (meritless) article of faith that the 2020 campaign was stolen. And he was a prominent voice on Fox News insisting that the Russian election interference inquiry was a law-enforcement plot to frame Trump." In other words, Litman said, diGenova "is one of the president’s own."
However, said Litman, diGenova still had core ethical obligations as a federal prosecutor — and whether or not he'll admit it publicly, what Blanche asked him to do ran directly counter to those obligations.
"The investigation that diGenova stepped away from is what Trump’s allies reverently call the 'grand conspiracy,'" wrote Litman. "It’s amorphous and protean, but in essence it’s the theory that everyone who ever scrutinized Trump since 2016 was secretly part of one coordinated plot to destroy him. Barack Obama. John Brennan. James Comey. James Clapper. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. The Russia investigation, the classified-documents case, all of it, braided into a single decade-long scheme."
diGenova, wrote Litman, is in his 80s now and doesn't want his life's legacy to be overshadowed by a goose chase for Trump's enemies.
It's that fact, Litman concluded, that "makes his parting shot the more potent. He shot his arrow directly into the DOJ’s Achilles’ heel. The fact is, everyone from Blanche on down knows that the Department’s treatment of Trump’s enemies is indefensible ... The actual embrace of prosecuting innocent enemies whom Trump simply wants to immiserate is the most grotesque corruption in the history of the Department of Justice."
