DiGenova And Toensing On Barr's 'Hatchet Job'
Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing turned up on Lou Dobbs' show tonight and had quite a bit to say about the status of the Barr/Durham investigation. I've transcribed the important parts.
Dobbs starts it off by asking if we'll ever see the OIG FISA report, and there's a bit of kidding about dueling anonymous sources. The WaPo source says "by Thanksgiving," but another source says that's "not likely." Then they get into the substance. Two major takeaways:
1) The delay on the OIG FISA report is "partially" due to John Durham's new Grand Jury activity--which can only mean that Durham is already taking testimony from persons named in IG Horowitz's report, and
2) Durham is actively investigating the leak of the Flynn/Kislyak phone call to David Ignatius of the WaPo, which diGenova describes as "a 20 year felony." Ouch! Maybe that person--or persons--will want to go for a deal? But they'll have to have something truly major to offer. Something that Durham can't get without their cooperation.
So, the transcript in relevant part--which means, virtually all of it:
Victoria Toensing: I can tell you this, and we have darn good sources for this, it [the OIG FISA report] is going to be very bad for the people in the Obama administration. My source said to me, "It's going to be worse than you can imagine."
...
Joe diGenova: I would say explosive and I would say, for people at the highest levels of the FBI and at the highest levels of the Justice Department --more important at the Justice Department--it’s going to be devastating. It’s going to ruin careers, it’s going to make people have bar problems ...
Victoria Toensing: Bill Barr problems! [laughs]
Joe diGenova: No, no, bar association problems. What’s clear, now we know is that the senior levels of the Obama Justice Department were complicit in knowingly submitting materially false applications to the FISA Court for an illegitimate counterintelligence purpose. Not for a legitimate purpose, but to spy on Americans for political purposes. And it really will end up being the beginning of the greatest political scandal in history. And it [the OIG FISA report] is being held up partially because of John Durham’s new Grand Jury, which by the way exists for one reason and one reason only – because people are going to be indicted.
Lou Dobbs: Now, he [Durham] is in charge of both FISA abuse and the origins of Spygate, whatever you want to call it--the worst political scandal in this country's history. Is anything being held up because of simply the vast scope of his investigation?
Victoria Toensing: It's been expanded, Lou. He's now going into whole other areas. He's going back into the origins of the investigation. For those of us who know this business, if you're in counterintelligence and you get word that George Papadopoulos has said he's heard something, that the Russians have something, you know what you do? You go knock on his door within a week and ask him about it, and have him give you the information, where did he get it ... They didn't do that. They didn't do that at all. They disobeyed all the rules of a counterintelligence investigation.
Toensing is absolutely right about that.
Joe diGenova: And it's expanded because, originally, Barr wanted Durham to just look at the beginnings of Crossfire Hurricane. How did it start, how did it happen? But then what they discovered, they found out from the Devin Nunes experience at the White House, in March of 2017, that there had been massive, massive, unmaskings of Americans for political purposes and that the information was given and leaked to the press. And, by the way, the Michael Flynn - Ambassador Kislyak call, the Russian Ambassador, which was leaked to David Ignatius of the WaPo, is in fact the subject of one of the criminal investigations because that leak is a 20 year felony.
And count on it, if Durham is looking at the leak, he's looking at everything to do with the Flynn case . And that means not just Comey and his gang of jokers, but Team Mueller, too.
Victoria Toensing: And I've got another idea for Durham. That is, he oughta bring in Mark Zaid before the Grand Jury and ask him how he knew CNN was gonna be a part of it. Was he talking to James Clapper? Did he know that Clapper was gonna leak the dossier?