NYT has a story about how the grand conspiracy is falling apart. It has weird gaps, as stories involving Glenn Thrush generally do (he wrote it with Alan Feuer, who had great sources among defense attorneys during the January 6 investigation).
The story doesn’t name John Yoo in either the body or the correction, noting he works at Berkley, not Stanford.
An earlier version of this article misstated the school affiliation of the law professor known for memos on torture in the war on terrorism who joined the “grand conspiracy” prosecution team. He is at the University of California, Berkeley, not Stanford.
Its backstory on Joe DiGenova skips the most important bit — his role in the the Russian-linked influence operation that framed Hunter Biden in 2019, which seems like worthy background to the fight over a SCIF (this story describes that Jason Reding Quiñones approved DiGenova’s request for his own SCIF, but Todd Blanche overrode it). Nor does it describe Jack Eckenrode’s background on another Russian-linked attempt to frame Hillary Clinton. While it describes Mike Davis’ role in dreaming up the Grand Conspiracy, it doesn’t describe Davis’ ties to Aakash Singh (or to other cases that have fallen apart), though it does confirm that Singh is now overseeing the investigation.
What the story does do is capture a key conflict between DiGenova and Todd Blanche. The story starts by describing how DiGenova quit before Blanche could fire him. It ends by claiming Blanche wasn’t intending to fire him. Along the way it describes that Blanche is approaching the Grand Conspiracy in a way to avoid getting fired, not in a way to prosecute anyone.
Under the clash of personalities was a deeper divide on how best to move forward.
Mr. diGenova, who wanted to take aim at big-name targets, told one associate he believed that Mr. Blanche was less interested in proving the conspiracy to destroy the president than in securing rapid box-checking indictments of low-level players to keep Mr. Trump happy.
Mr. Blanche, he told that person, was so anxious to maintain his position that he did not want to tell Mr. Trump the truth: A successful investigation needed time.
The attorney general acknowledged the inquiry’s complexities on a podcast earlier this year. “I’m not suggesting that we don’t have that evidence,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I’m saying when you talk about the challenges, that’s the challenge.”
Mr. Blanche had his own complaints. His team thought Mr. diGenova was too scattered, too combative and too slow, according to three current and former officials. It did not help that around this time Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing left for a long-planned vacation to France.
By early September, Mr. Blanche dispatched two prosecutors from Washington to Florida to move things forward. During a heated meeting, they peppered Mr. diGenova’s staff with questions about its work before the grand jury.
The coda came when members of Mr. diGenova’s team offered him a readout of their closed-door meeting with the two prosecutors: Washington would now be running things.
Mr. diGenova, infuriated, said he would instruct U.S. marshals to remove the prosecutors from the grand jury room if they showed up there to interfere, the officials said.
Mr. Blanche responded with a profanity-laced phone call and summoned Mr. diGenova to Washington. The attorney general wanted to recount his grievances in person, but never actually planned to fire Mr. diGenova, according to a person close to Mr. Blanche. [my emphasis]
The closest it gets to describing that the entire grand conspiracy is makebelieve is when it describes, “Mr. diGenova and others involved in the case have found it difficult, and time-consuming, to meet the standards of evidence and jurisdiction needed to prove anything close to a conspiracy in a court of law.”
Meanwhile, it describes Blanche losing confidence in David Metcalf, who first oversaw the case in Philadelphia, then Maria Medetis Long, the national security prosecutor once in charge of the case, then US Attorney Reding Quiñones who fired Medetiz, then DiGenova, one after another lawyer who failed Blanche.
Except for Singh. In spite of Singh’s role in all the failed politicized cases Blanche has overseen, Blanche still has confidence in him.
It’s a funny progression given the complaints Blanche made on boy-troll show RuthLess this week (which Raw Story reported). He said the biggest challenge he faces is all the former prosecutors calling out his corruption. He claimed he’s perfectly happy with the people who’ll work for him — the JAG officers forced into service, the conspiracy theorists who can’t get clearance, even Reding Quiñones, though the story describes “a growing lack of confidence” in him.
I think the most challenging is not changing the culture–most of our prosecutors are great. Agents are great. But changing the perception of the culture. The prosecutors that left over the past year and a half, they hate us. And so any time — they formed a, basically they unionized, formed an organization whose sole mission is to go after the current Department of Justice. So pushing back on that perception is a constant challenge. I go to US Attorneys Offices multiple times a month and the prosecutors in those offices are great. They love what we’re doing. They love their jobs. It’s the best job they’re ever going to have. But the perception on LinkedIn or on Instagram or the newspaper, New York Times, is just “my god, DOJ is in a bad place,” which it’s not.
It’s just the former prosecutors impugning DOJ’s reputation, not the judges serially describing how DOJ’s presumption of regularity has collapsed.
What I increasingly wonder, though, is what is so compelling about this job that motivates Blanche’s flopsweat efforts to deliver on Trump’s demands for revenge? What is so attractive about this job that he’s willing to spin out pointless indictments that will only do what this story curiously describes, with no direct attribution, as a big win for Trump,
Even if charges are never filed, Mr. Trump has already instilled fear in — and imposed steep financial costs on — potential targets, in his view giving them a taste of what he experienced when he was under investigation.
Why is Singh the one in whom Blanche retains confidence, when he is the architect of so much Blanche failure?
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