Former federal prosecutor, special counsel, and prominent Washington attorney Joe diGenova said the scandal at the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) involves a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton of felony crimes involving her mishandling of classified documents, and an ongoing "false case" to "frame" President Donald Trump with a "false Russian conspiracy that never existed."
The senior DOJ and FBI officials involved knew the Russian conspiracy story was fake, said diGenova, but they "plotted to ruin" Trump as a candidate "and then destroy him as a president." The FBI now "has to be completely reconstructed from the ground up," he said.
DiGenova, the founding partner of diGenova & Toensing, LLP, in Washington, D.C., which litiagates cases at the federal level, made his remarks in an interview with Ginni Thomas for the Daily Caller News Foundation. (Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.)
In the Jan. 20 interview, diGenova said, “The FBI used to spy on the Russians. This time they spied on us. It’s about a brazen plot to, again, exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her private server – absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony."
"It’s about finding out why -- as the Inspector General is doing at the Department of Justice – why [James] Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton -- followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant," said diGenova. "That’s not an investigation. That’s a Potemkin Village."
DiGenova, who prosecuted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard and failed presidential assassin John W. Hinckley, continued, “This is about a lavabo, a cleansing of the FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice. We’re going to discover that the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the National Security Division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr, and other senior DOJ officials and, regrettably, line attorneys – people who were senior career civil servants – [allegedly] violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, covered up crimes by a presidential candidate."
“But more than that," he said. "They tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him as a president. The FBI now has to be completely reconstructed from the ground up."
“The men and women at the Bureau are great people," said diGenova. "That’s not who we're talking about, never have been. We are talking about people like James Comey, [Andrew] McCabe, [Peter] Strzok, [Lisa] Page, [James] Baker, [Bill] Priestap – a name nobody knows, he’s the head of the counterintelligence division."
DiGenova, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, further explained, “What the Bureau did was, by working with Fusion GPS and giving contractors access to highly classified information which they had no legal right to see. They needed something to create that they could give to the court, the Foreign Intelligence court, so they could get wiretaps and surveillance taps, email taps, and phone taps on the Trump people, so that if there was anything, they could find it out."
"Of course, there was nothing," he said. "There never was anything. They created false facts so they could get surveillance warrants."
"It was done not for legitimate law enforcement reasons," said diGenova, "not for national security reasons, but to create a false case against a candidate, Donald Trump, a president-elect, Donald Trump, and a president, Donald Trump.”