President Donald Trump has added a new white-collar attorney to his personal legal team, Joseph diGenova, who is known for his harsh assessment of former FBI Director James Comey. DiGenova is seen as the latest sign of the new aggressive strategy aimed at discrediting special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Although the White House insists that there are no plans to fire Mueller, President Trump’s tweets and his decision to hire diGenova show the opposite. The president’s new stance toward Mueller’s investigation comes as the special counsel has extended the investigation to Trump’s personal business empire.
“It shows they’re taking this very seriously and recognize that it’s not going away anytime soon and that the stakes are just climbing higher,” said former U.S. Attorney John Wood.
According to The New York Times, diGenova has been a fixture in the Washington, D.C. legal community for years. He is married to Victoria Toensing, who represents an informant at the center of the Uranium One investigation, being conducted by Republicans in Congress.
DiGenova has previously called Comey “the dirtiest cop in America” and has blamed him for destroying the FBI’s reputation with his “bizarre personal behavior.” The New York Times also reported that diGenova has claimed that the Justice Department had framed Trump by “creating a false crime” of collusion.
DiGenova is the latest addition to Trump’s team of personal lawyers who since Friday has started to regularly attack the special counsel. The new strategy is much different than the White House legal team was conducting until now, where several reports said that until recently Trump was told by his lawyers not even to mention Mueller.
Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow has been a regular guest on Fox News show “Hannity,” where he has repeatedly voiced the alleged corruption at the FBI and DOJ and demanded that a second special counsel should investigate “the irregularities” in the separate investigations into Hillary Clinton and Trump.
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