The Grand Conspiracy’s New Prosecutor May Be the Case’s Biggest Liability

Who better to lead the Grand Conspiracy investigation than one of the country’s grandest conspiracy theorists—or, really, who worse?

The 81-year-old lawyer who represented President Trump’s campaign in challenging the results of the 2020 election was recently dispatched to Southern Florida as counselor to the attorney general. He is entrusted with helming an inquiry into a supposed deep-state plot that encompasses many of his onetime client’s longtime woes: from impeachments to prosecutions to the lost 2020 election, all purportedly a unified effort on the part of Trump’s enemies to violate his constitutional rights and the rights of legions of voters to elect him.

The Grand Conspiracy probe has ramped up in recent days, following the departure of Assistant U.S. Attorney Maria Medetis Long, a respected career prosecutor who, CNN reports, “resisted pressure to quickly bring charges against” former CIA Director John Brennan for lying to Congress. This perjury probe—initially regarded as part of the broader Grand Conspiracy investigation—now appears to have moved to Washington, D.C., presumably because of the lack of jurisdictional hook in Southern Florida. Meanwhile, the rest of the case continues to develop down the coast, including in Ft. Pierce, Florida, where a special grand jury has been empaneled and where the eminently administration-friendly Judge Aileen Cannon presides.

Joseph DiGenova will work on all of the above. The Reagan-era U.S. attorney has become a MAGA media fixture in this century. As part of the gig, he has trumpeted the very narrative he is tasked with turning into a criminal case—and demonized the very people at the center of the investigation in the process.

DiGenova has also been willing to pull back the curtain on the palace intrigue surrounding his recent hiring: Just this month, in an interview with Rudy Giuliani, diGenova claimed that former Attorney General Pam Bondi was “singularly responsible for the delay and investigations into the lawfare against Donald Trump that’s being run out of the…U.S. attorney’s office in Miami and Ft. Pierce.” Saying she had previously nixed his appointment to run the probe, diGenova insisted, “If she had not done that, we would have had indictments brought in the last two months.”

DiGenova further suggested that Bondi had been fired over the president’s frustration with the slow pace of the Miami probe. ”The president’s conversation with her yesterday coming back from the Supreme Court was not pleasant,” he said, referring to the conversation in which Trump reportedly fired Bondi. “The president was ripping mad about the fact that there was no progress on the lawfare investigation in Miami.”

On April 20, the same day he was sworn in, diGenova appeared on WBAL Radio and said the president “personally asked” him to accept the role running what he called “the Russia hoax investigation.” Later—sketching out the Grand Conspiracy in full—he noted “the historical significance of what happened in 2016, 2020 and 2024, where it’s very evident…that there was a very brazen plot against a private citizen, and then a president, and then a post-president, and then a sitting president again, Donald Trump, to deny him his civil rights.”

These statements are only the latest in a litany of accusations diGenova has lodged against the president’s perceived enemies over the years. The volume and, indeed, the vitriol of his grievances cast real doubt on his ability to act as an independent or impartial prosecutor in the Grand Conspiracy case or any related matter.

The Grand Conspiracy Gospel According to Joseph diGenova

For the better part of a decade, diGenova has been among the most vocal proponents of the conspiracy theory that he is now in charge of investigating. A review of dozens of hours of audio and video footage of his media appearances reveals how he has spent years constructing a detailed narrative of criminality around a specific group of individuals—repeatedly accusing them of crimes, attacking their character and even demanding their imprisonment.

The precise contours of the Grand Conspiracy can be difficult to distinguish, as one of us recently explained. Exactly who conducted what malign activity and which law it ostensibly violated depends on whom you ask. If you ask diGenova, however, the theory goes something like this: Senior Obama-era officials, led by then-FBI Director James Comey, deliberately bungled the Clinton email investigation out of a desire to clear her path to the presidency. As an “insurance policy” in the event that plan failed, the officials also concocted the tale of Trump-Russia collusion—laundering the salacious Steele Dossier through the U.S. intelligence community to give their story credibility, then using it as a predicate to spy on the Trump campaign and later launch a special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller “unfettered by rules or law.”

DiGenova laid out this view in a 2018 speech at Hillsdale College that reads as a veritable Sermon on the Mount for the MAGA faithful. Over the following years, he has added new chapters to his gospel: insisting, for instance, that the Ukraine impeachment was the real “Big Lie” designed to “nullify” the 2016 election; that the 2020 election was stolen and former cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” (these words, diGenova later insisted, were “in jest”); that Jack Smith’s indictment over the Mar-a-Lago search was a sham representing “unleashed retributive justice by a Democratic administration that is…on fentanyl with power.”

These allegations line up almost perfectly with the Grand Conspiracy that prosecutors are now understood to be pursuing in Southern Florida as a criminal case. Indeed, diGenova explicitly called for the empanelment of a grand jury in that division last summer on Real America’s Voice, saying, “John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, everybody. Lisa Monaco. They'll all be going to Florida. That's where this grand jury is going to be…This conspiracy against President Trump deserves punishment, not just a lecture. People need to go to prison.” On the WBAL Radio episode on which he appeared on the day of his swearing-in, he even cited the Substack of a retired DEA agent that lays out the fantasy in footnoted detail—supplemented by the specific statutes under which the purported perpetrators of the plan could be prosecuted.

Lawyers frequently express opinions and legal analysis in public forums, and doing so is not, in itself, disqualifying from later representing the government in related matters. What sets diGenova apart is not that he commented publicly—it is the nature, specificity, and sustained period of time during which he made those comments. Rather than the careful, conditional language of a legal analyst who understands that facts remain uncertain and that investigation might reveal something other than criminal conduct, diGenova's statements consistently treat the guilt of his now-subjects as already established.

That pattern is troubling enough. But diGenova’s comments have also frequently crossed the line from legal argument into personal attacks on the people he is now tasked with investigating. He has, for example, called former FBI Director James Comey a “dirty cop” who is “committed to himself above all else,” mockingly dubbing him “James ‘Cardinal’ Comey.”  Brennan has fared no better, cast variously as an “evil man,” a “very troubled man,” a “traitor,” or simply “nuts.” In one memorable clip, diGenova attributed Brennan's composure in a 2018 media appearance to his having been put “on meds”—his baseline, diGenova explained, being that of a man "flailing away, looking like a madman."

DiGenova’s history of public statements have already raised questions about his ability to seek justice in a fair and disinterested manner. Asked about diGenova’s past comments at a recent press conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche pushed back. “I’m not sure what the conflict of interest would be,” he said. “Because somebody has said something in the past about a particular matter, that doesn’t create a conflict, necessarily.”

To some extent, Blanche may be right, given that a disqualifying conflict of interest typically involves conflicting loyalties between clients or financial conflicts of interest. But if the grand conspiracy case ultimately results in criminal charges, diGenova’s appointment is bound to be a boon for the defense. That’s because diGenova’s statements are useful evidence of unconstitutional prosecutorial animus in the context of a motion to dismiss for selective or vindictive prosecution. Rooted in the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause, both claims require some showing that the prosecution was motivated by an impermissible purpose—and both are notoriously difficult to prove, given that courts tend to afford a presumption of regularity to prosecutorial decision-making.

DiGenova’s public record goes a long way to helping the defense meet that burden. Not only has he spent years calling for the now-subjects of his investigation to be jailed, but he has suggested that his animus is rooted in those individuals' exercise of First Amendment-protected conduct—namely, their public criticism of Trump, their participation in investigations and impeachment proceedings, and their performance of official duties diGenova that has characterized as “partisan.” That is precisely the kind of impermissible purpose that the selective or vindictive prosecution doctrines are designed to prevent. That his appointment came at Trump's personal request—from a president who has spent years publicly demanding retribution against the very individuals now under investigation—and that diGenova himself complained that the previous attorney general had wrongly delayed indictments he was champing to bring, strips away any pretense that the relevant question was ever whether the evidence supported charges.

DiGenova's public statements may also create problems well before any charges are ever filed. Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a court may quash or modify a subpoena “if compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive.” Courts have shown willingness to exercise that power when a subpoena appears to serve an improper purpose, such as harassment or retribution, rather than legitimate investigative ends. Judge James Boasberg made exactly that point in quashing a recent subpoena to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, writing that it would not be “kosher” for a prosecutor to “single[] out an opponent of the President ‘out of malice’ or ‘to harass’ him, including by fishing around for some crime to pin on him.” Any target who receives a subpoena need only point to the record diGenova spent years building—in which he calls for the investigation and imprisonment of specific individuals as vindication for a president who then personally handed him the job following the departure of a career prosecutor and the attorney general—to make exactly that argument.

The Ukrainian Connection

There’s another reason diGenova is uniquely ill-suited to lead this case—or, perhaps in the president’s eyes, uniquely well-suited. The snarled web of the Grand Conspiracy includes the impeachment inquiry over Trump’s incriminating phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

On this call, remember, Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” and commit to investigating Hunter and Joe Biden in a possible quid pro quo for military aid from the United States. The conversation was the culmination of a monthslong endeavor engineered by Rudy Giuliani to precipitate the Biden-Bursima investigation that Trump ultimately took it upon himself to request directly from Zelensky (as well as to discredit the Mueller probe as a “Witch Hunt”).

DiGenova was part of that operation. Indeed, at one point, amid the Southern District of New York’s investigation of Giuliani for ties to Ukraine, the FBI seized some of diGenova’s wife Victoria Toensing’s data and devices—a move for which diGenova, perhaps providing more fodder for a vindictiveness motion, insisted Christopher Wray would “find himself in front of a federal grand jury.”

The details of these events boggle the brain similarly to how the Grand Conspiracy itself does—except this time, the events actually took place: A company co-founded by Ukrainian-American businessman Lev Parnas hired Giuliani Partners for $500,000 “to consult on…technologies and provide legal advice on regulatory issues.” (The name of the firm, by the way? “Fraud Guarantee.”) This brief, in practice, meant pushing for the ouster of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich—whom Parnas and his partner, the Belarusian-American Igor Fruman, painted as “unfriendly to the president and his interests.”

Eventually, in spring 2019, these efforts came to encompass regular meetings at the BLT Prime restaurant at the Trump International Hotel, attended by Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman, the conservative reporter John Solomon, and—crucially—diGenova and Toensing. Discussions revolved around how to advance the dirt-digging operation in Ukraine. DiGenova and Toensing were already regulars on the MAGA media circuit at the time; concurrent with these conversations, diGenova made appearances on Fox News smearing Yovanovich.

“This woman needs to be called home to the United States for consultation to answer a slew of questions about her conduct and her assault on the president of the United States,” he said to Sean Hannity on March 20. Two days later, on March 22, he told Laura Ingraham that “the president of the United States deserves an ambassador in Kiev who supports his policies, not someone who bad-mouths him.”

“This has all the markings of bribery and extortion,” he continued, launching into the fabricated narrative in full. “It’s something that deserves a full-blown investigation into the conduct of the Biden family in Ukraine.” DiGenova also mentioned the generation of “false information about [Paul] Manafort, other information that went into the so-called black, black binders.” (The reference to Manafort ties into an involved attempt by Giuliani and his allies to suggest the Mueller report was a frame-up.)

Precisely what diGenova was getting out of this arrangement is unclear. But, as Marcy Wheeler has reported, Toensing was at least discussing the possibility of related payment with Parnas. “I love you and your husband you are the best,” warrants from an eventual Southern District of New York investigation indicate that Parnas texted Toensing after the interview. “We can be really great if we have a retainer signed,” she replied, apparently referencing her attempts to convince Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko—whom Giulini et al were diligently working—to agree to compensate the husband and wife duo for advancing his interests with the administration. Such a document appears to have been drafted, but never signed.

What is certain is that diGenova and Toensing did represent the fugitive Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, after Parnas and Fruman suggested that they could aid him in the case brought against him by the Justice Department. Firtash told the New York Times he paid diGenova and Toensing $1.2 million for their services, with a finders fee also awarded to Parnas.

Somewhere along the way, another Ukrainian prosecutor for whom diGenova and Toensing also prepared a draft retainer—this time, Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin——produced at the duo’s request an affidavit in support for Firtash for an Austrian court in which he swore he was “forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors.” This document mysteriously made it, as so much other privileged information from diGenova and Toensing had a tendency to do, into a column by John Solomon for “The Hill.”

DiGenova and Toensing delivered for Firtash in another essential way: Parnas testified to Congress in 2024 that the two met with then-Attorney General Bill Barr urging him to drop the charges “because Dmitry Firtash was going to help us getting dirt on the Bidens.”

“Someone from the Trump campaign is talking to the Attorney General to drop the charges because this foreign national is helping get dirt on a political candidate?” asked Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “Absolutely,” Parnas replied.

Weeks later, when the existence of the whistleblower complaint about the Trump-Zelensky phone call became public, diGenova and Toensing appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show touting the Shokin affidavit without any mention that it was she and her husband who had obtained it. DiGenova also spoke of the whistleblower: “This whistleblower needs to go to prison. He doesn’t need to be feted, he needs to go to prison.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just this month issued a criminal referral—apparently unaccompanied by evidence of any crime—for that very whistleblower that, along with the rest of drama surrounding Russia, Ukraine and the president, may well make its way down to Southern Florida as part of the Grand Conspiracy investigation.

All of which is to say: DiGenova has been appointed to investigate a made-up deep-state plot that supposedly involves the wrongful impeachment of President Trump over a phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump demanded an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma. This was the very investigation that diGenova not only repeatedly clamored for on conservative television programs—but was paid to help bring about. Now, charged with prosecuting the case, the Grand Conspiracy’s most enthusiastic promoter may turn out to be its most consequential liability.