Trump has a new avenger in chief [View all]

Trump has a new avenger in chief
Joseph diGenova will pursue charges in the Florida "grand conspiracy" case against the president's perceived foes

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published April 21, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Sometimes it feels as if Donald Trump reinvented politics in whole cloth when he descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, and the world turned upside down. Here we are, 11 years later, still living in the surreality we first experienced on that day — like a nightmare from which we can’t awaken. The truth is that the wheels were coming off our political culture long before Trump came on the scene, and every once in a while we’re reminded of it.

On Saturday the New York Times reported the Department of Justice has hired Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former U.S. attorney and political commentator, to head the “grand conspiracy” investigation targeting the president’s perceived enemies that is underway in the Southern District of Florida under the leadership of U.S. attorney — and Trump loyalist — Jason A. Reding Quiñones. DiGenova brings with him decades of experience; he’s been carrying out GOP vendetta since the days when the president was a tabloid joke and running around with Jeffrey Epstein in New York more than 30 years ago.

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A Trump loyalist, diGenova has been a GOP hit man since the 1990s when he and his wife, Victoria Toensing, made their names appearing on television to torment Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were the toast of the town, inspiring glowing profiles in the mainstream press in which they were characterized as savvy operators, a distinction that, in the words of the Washington Post’s then-media critic Howard Kurtz, “gives them access to juicy information, which gets them on television, which generates legal business.” In his 1998 profile titled “The Power Couple at Scandal’s Vortex,” Kurtz approvingly noted that diGenova and Toensing had been quoted or appeared on television more than 300 times in the month since news about Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky had broken. The media critic quoted Geraldo Rivera, who was then a host on CNBC, characterizing diGenova as “a strong, principled guy who doesn’t back down. If I played any part in making him a media star, I gloat with pleasure.”

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By the time Trump’s first impeachment came along, diGenova and Toensing were up to their old tricks. Already part of Giuliani’s back-channel foreign policy — which held that it was actually the Ukrainians who interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton — the couple hit the airwaves like it was 1998 again in what Roll Call dubbed “The Vicki and Joe Show.” DiGenova came out swinging on behalf of Trump, saying, “what you’re seeing is regicide, this is regicide, by another name, fake impeachment.” The whistleblowers who raised concerns about Trump’s conduct were “suicide bombers,” he said. Without citing any evidence, he also called the paid Democratic operatives. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/21/trump-has-a-new-avenger-in-chief/