Trump Hires Conspiracy Theory Lawyer

News  |  Mar 19, 2018

Trump has added a new attorney to his legal team – one who believes the Department of Justice and FBI are framing the president. 

NYT:

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. 

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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.”

Once the White House confirmed Mr. diGenova hire, reporters dug up a 1997 editorial the lawyer wrote for The Wall Street Journal in which he argued that a presidential indictment could be good for the country. 

TIME:

“Nobody should underestimate the upheaval that a prosecution of the president would cause,” he wrote in a March 6, 1997 piece published when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was only investigating financial irregularities in the Whitewater scandal and Clinton’s affair with a White House intern had not yet come to light. “But we went through it once before, in Watergate, and survived. The nation, in fact, could conceivably benefit from the indictment of a president. It would teach the valuable civics lesson that no one is above the law.”

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There’s a constitutional question about whether a sitting president can be criminally prosecuted, and there isn’t a clear answer. It has never happened before, and no court has definitively ruled on the issue. The Supreme Court heard arguments about it in 1974 about President Richard Nixon, but never resolved the question. You can read more about that issue here.

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diGenova’s Wall Street Journal piece was published during the independent counsel probe of President Bill Clinton, and he wrote at that time, “Independent counsels are not appointed by the White House, so presumably they should be free to pursue criminal charges against the president if his actions warrant it.”

NYT:

Mr. Trump’s legal team has been in tumult in recent weeks. On Saturday, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, called on the Justice Department to end the special counsel investigation. Mr. Dowd said at the time that he was speaking for the president but later backtracked. According to two people briefed on the matter, he was in fact acting at the president’s urging to call for an end to the inquiry.

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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.

 

Full story: Trump to Hire Lawyer Who Has Pushed Theory That Justice Dept. Framed the President (NYT)

Donald Trump's New Lawyer Once Argued Presidents Can Be Indicted (TIME)