DOJ swaps career prosecutor for Trump retribution loyalist | Opinion

President Donald Trump's approval rating is in free fall, the price of gasoline is still on the rise and his war of choice in Iran is dragging into week eight.

But Trump is laser-focused on what he knows to be important – retribution for the federal investigations into Russia's attempted interference in the 2016 presidential election, and for those who acknowledged his defeat in the 2020 election, and anyone who ever tried to hold him accountable to the law.

Enter Joseph diGenova, a longtime Trump loyalist and advocate for retribution against the president's perceived enemies. DiGenova, who runs a Washington, DC, law firm when he's not delivering pro-Trump hot takes on right-wing cable shows, was sworn in on April 20 as "counselor to the attorney general" at the Department of Justice.

His real job: Find a way to charge former CIA Director John Brennan with a crime in the so-called grand conspiracy investigation.

Republicans in the U.S. House in October referred Brennan, who was CIA director under President Barack Obama, to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution, claiming he made false statements in 2023 congressional testimony about the investigation into Russia's efforts in 2016.

Trump's DOJ investigation on 'grand conspiracy' might just find competence

The grand conspiracy investigation has been working out of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. The lead prosecutor in that case, Maria Medetis Long, was recently removed from that post after expressing concerns about the strength of the investigation against Brennan.

If that sounds familiar, it's because this follows a pattern set by the DOJ, which now serves chiefly as a tool for Trump's rage for retribution. DOJ prosecutors were forced out of their jobs after expressing doubts about criminal cases being pushed for former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Nobody fell harder than Pam Bondi, the attorney general Trump fired on April 2, in part because she had not delivered his retribution. The cases against Comey and James flopped in federal court and in front of grand juries.

And Brennan remains at large, after committing what Trump sees as a crime – competently serving his country.

Bondi did everything she could to give Trump what he wanted, but she ran headlong into problems with actual justice – professional DOJ prosecutors, grand juries and judges who would not treat the law like a political weapon.

DiGenova celebrated Bondi's firing on the day it happened, telling Newsmax that "she wasn't qualified to be attorney general." Why did diGenova feel that way? He complained that the Florida investigation had "basically come to a standstill because Bondi got in the way."

"There should have been indictments by now," diGenova continued. "And because of her, there aren't any. That's why she's gone."

DiGenova has been on the job for all of one day. But he knew nearly three weeks ago that indictments must be filed?

Actually, he's been talking like that for years. DiGenova, in a 2018 Fox News interview, called Brennan "a traitor" for investigating Russia's efforts in the 2016 election.

Trump will keep seeking retribution. Will he run out of prosecutors?

Let's pause here to recall that the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020, when Republicans controlled the Senate, issued a bipartisan report that cited "irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling" in the 2016 election. Those were the words of Marco Rubio, then the Republican chair of the committee and now Trump's secretary of State.

But that was a different time, with a very different tone.

I've spent the majority of my career in journalism writing about government and politics, which means I've also spent a considerable amount of time writing about political corruption investigations and criminal trials. There's a reserved tone that professional prosecutors use when discussing cases.

DiGenova could not muster that tone on April 2 while banging on about Bondi. Why think he can act like a professional prosecutor now?

Just listen to how bitter he sounded in that Newsmax interview, while accusing Bondi of blocking his appointment, as if it were a competition for attention and not a pursuit of justice.

"I was going to be a prosecutor in that case," diGenova told Newsmax 19 days ago. "I was all ready to be hired to be the chief lead counsel. And Pam Bondi nixed it because she didn't want anybody with a name in the case."

The president won't care about any of that. He just wants his retribution. And diGenova, who was part of the disaster-prone legal team that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, will do or say whatever Trump wants.

Remember that Trump, as part of his retribution obsession, declared in October that he wanted the DOJ to pay him $230 million because federal investigators and prosecutors had dared to investigate him. Even Trump had to admit this created an "awfully strange" decision, because he would have to approve that payout.

But nothing about it seemed strange to diGenova, who told Newsmax that a $230 million payout to Trump sounded like "a lowball estimate," and that the president had every right to approve the payment or more.

This is how Trump's DOJ operates. And we're stuck with that until his second term ends in January 2029. So we all have to hope that professional prosecutors, people sitting on grand juries, and federal judges keep following the law and rejecting retribution cases that contradict the notion of justice.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan