Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Discredited Republican lawyer Joe diGenova told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he has been advising President Donald Trump on the replacement of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

A U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration, diGenova played a partisan role in investigations into President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, including serving as the source for a later-retracted newspaper article, and he was criticized for behaving unprofessionally while working for congressional subcommittees. He also fabricated false claims against the Obama administration over the 2012 Benghazi attack.

DiGenova briefly joined Trump’s personal legal team regarding the Russia probe earlier this year after he defended the president on Fox News, but he was taken off the team for conflicts of interest within a week. DiGenova claims that he is still advising Trump, and he told Ingraham last night that he has “a couple of ideas which I have shared with the president” about who can permanently replace Sessions:

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): I have to ask you on picks for attorney general. We all have maybe a couple ideas -- what are your ideas?

JOSEPH DIGENOVA: Well, I have a couple of ideas which I have shared with the president, and I'm not going to share them with anybody else. So, if I say any of my ideas, I will be sharing a conversation with the president.

DiGenova’s latest comments came just hours after Trump fired Sessions following a nearly two-year campaign of publicly humiliating the attorney general for his recusal from the Russia investigation. After the firing, Trump named Sessions’ former chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker -- who has previously supported Trump against the Russia investigation -- acting attorney general.

In an interview with the Daily Caller's Ginni Thomas, diGenova called for “a cleansing of the FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.” DiGenova also called Russian interference “a false Russian conspiracy that never existed” that was built with “false facts.”

JOSEPH DIGENOVA: It's a big deal because I have a saying that the FBI used to spy on the Russians, this time they spied on us. What this story is about, it's about a brazen plot to again exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her private server, absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony. It's about finding out why, as the Inspector General is doing at the Department of Justice, why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton, followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce and everybody knew it was a farce. The problem was she didn't win and because she didn't win the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic opera and she was going to be the focus.

What this is about is, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of the FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.

We're going to discover that the Attorney General Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the National Security Division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr, and other senior DOJ officials and regrettably line attorneys, people who were senior career civil servants, violated the law, perhaps committed crimes and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate. But more than that they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed and they knew it and they plotted to to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him a president.

That's why this is important. That's why connecting the dots is important, because the FBI now has to be completely reconstructed from the ground up. The men and women at the bureau are great people, that's not who we're talking about, we never have been. We are talking about people like James Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Baker, Priestep, whose name nobody knows. He's the head of the counterintelligence division and he was the one who was involved in planning this entire crazy thing involving Fusion GPS, the false dossier, and creating evidence.

This is what people have to understand. What the Bureau did was, by working with Fusion GPS, and giving contractors access to highly classified information, which they had no legal right to see, they needed to create something they could give to the court, the foreign intelligence court, so that they could get wiretaps and surveillance taps and email taps and phone taps on the Trump people so that if there was anything they could find it out. Of course there was nothing. There was ... there never was anything and they created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes. Every single one of those acts constitutes a crime because it was done not for a legitimate law enforcement reason, not for national security reasons, but to create a false case against a candidate Donald Trump, a president-elect Donald Trump, and a president Donald Trump.

On Fox, diGenova has repeatedly claimed that the Russia probe is a conspiracy to “frame Donald Trump,” and that multiple people at the FBI and Department of Justice should be investigated, fired, and arrested. He has demanded Congress impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, and he has said Rosenstein should “rot in hell” for the way he has overseen the Russia investigation. He suggested then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s secret payments to two women on behalf of Trump during the presidential campaign weren’t illegal. DiGenova also claimed that the DOJ-authorized FBI search of Cohen’s office was “an act of terror” and that a prosecutor was using “terror tactics” to “coerce” former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort.

DiGenova didn’t reserve his ire only for the Russia probe and those directly overseeing it. He spent months criticizing Sessions before Trump fired him. In May, diGenova said on Fox’s Hannity that Sessions’ recusal “was an unforced betrayal of the president” -- a statement Trump loved so much he directly quoted it in a tweet that also name-checked diGenova.

“The recusal of Jeff Sessions was an unforced betrayal of the President of the United States.” JOE DIGENOVA, former U.S. Attorney.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

On Hannity in August, diGenova said Trump “is entitled to a fully engaged attorney general. He has never had that. ... Jeff Sessions has no command presence. He doesn’t understand the job that he has.” During that appearance, diGenova also said: “After the next election, Jeff should give the president the courtesy of a resignation.” In early October, diGenova said:

Look, make no mistake about it: Rod Rosenstein is a creep. He is a dishonest -- fundamentally dishonest – he cares about one thing, himself, his next job, and his future. The president, of course, will keep him through the next -- through the election cycle. Keeping him after that is an open question.

...

Where is Jeff Sessions? He is on a milk carton. This guy is so sad and so depressing to watch him twist in the breeze as an incompetent attorney general. And there behind him is Rasputin, Rod Rosenstein. This is an ugly period for the department, and it will not get better until both of them are gone.

Later in October, diGenova offered more criticism: “I would say Sessions and Rosenstein will go down in history as the two worst officials in the Department of Justice in its history.”