Hans Mahncke writes for the Federalist about a significant US Justice Department appointment.
Joe diGenova has been appointed counselor to the attorney general, effectively as a Russiagate czar. The reaction has been entirely predictable and follows a familiar pattern. The legacy media is already raining down a steady stream of hostile stories, dismissing diGenova as an aging partisan chasing President Donald Trump’s so-called conspiracy theories.
And it is true that diGenova, an 81-year-old veteran of the Reagan era, where he served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, is not the most conventional pick for the role. But that misses the more important point. For the first time in nearly a decade, there is actually a Russiagate czar. That alone changes the dynamic entirely. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche deserves credit for finally doing what his predecessors would not or could not do.
Since the start of Russiagate ten years ago, every supposed effort at accountability has been either half-hearted, stop-start, or a last-minute scramble. In some cases, it has amounted to outright cover-up, with former Attorney General Bill Barr, himself a CIA alumnus, insisting that the CIA “stayed in its lane.” The current investigation diGenova is set to oversee, a conspiracy investigation in the Southern District of Florida focused on former CIA Director John Brennan, suggests the opposite: that the CIA did not, in fact, stay in its lane.
The removal earlier this month of the attorney who had been running that investigation, Maria Medetis Long, followed by diGenova’s appointment, underscores a broader pattern of stop-start handling. Once again, an effort has been disrupted midstream, leaving diGenova to pick up the pieces.
But while this pattern has been frustrating, the positive development is that there is now finally someone in charge of the effort who does not require on-the-job training, and whose wife, Victoria Toensing, was herself targeted by an FBI raid in connection with the couple’s friendship with Rudy Giuliani.
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