Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his “prissy” deputy are not up to their jobs, a former federal prosecutor said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
Conservatives have grown increasingly frustrated with Sessions amid cascading revelations about highly questionable conduct within the FBI during and after the 2016 presidential campaign concerning the two major candidates, President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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Joseph diGenova, who served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia while Sessions held the same post in Mobile, Alabama, under President Ronald Reagan, blistered his former colleague. He also blasted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
“These two guys are in their jobs at a very important time in history, and they’re not up to it,” diGenova told Ingraham’s radio audience.
The outspoken diGenova spared no one in the brewing scandal that has featured investigators with pronounced bias against Trump and lost text messages. The former prosecutor said the White House’s “horrible, horrible personnel department” erred in following the recommendation of former President George W. Bush veterans in hiring Christopher Wray as FBI director.
DiGenova said it is mystifying Wray has not cleaned house at the bureau, refusing even to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom conservatives view with increasing skepticism because he participated in the investigation of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.
McCabe’s wife was running as a Democrat for the Virginia state legislature while accepting large donations from a political action committee connected to longtime Clinton family friend Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
“They made a big mistake, and there’s nothing they can do about it, except the next time he offers his resignation, take it.”
“Christopher Wray, we are told in a report today, threatened to resign if Sessions kept putting pressure on him to fire McCabe,” diGenova said. “I would have accepted Mr. Wray’s resignation immediately, because it is quite apparent that Christopher Wray is not up to the job of being FBI director, that he is undermining its credibility, not strengthening it.”
What’s more, diGenova added, Wray is “completely, completely controlled by the upper bureaucracy at the FBI.” It is a “compliment to their incompetence” at the White House that Wray got the job in the first place, diGenova said.
“They made a big mistake, and there’s nothing they can do about it, except the next time he offers his resignation, take it,” he said.
Text messages between FBI investigator Peter Strzok and bureau lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he had a romantic relationship, indicate an intense dislike for Trump — and give the appearance the Clinton probe was rigged in her favor to help defeat her GOP presidential rival.
Earlier this week, it was reported that additional text messages exchanged by Strzok and Page during the five months prior to May 17 are missing because of a supposed technical glitch in the FBI’s servers.
“This is ridiculous,” diGenova said. “It is unbelievable. It is not believable. It should not be believed. The FBI is neurotic, nothing if not neurotic, about record keeping.”
Related: Seven Ways Comey’s FBI Let Hillary Go Scot-Free on Email Crimes
DiGenova said Rosenstein is too close to former FBI Director James Comey and the top leadership at the FBI. Unwilling to take the “hot potato” of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he buckled under pressure and appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel, he said.
“Nothing but bad judgment from Rod Rosenstein from day one. He has become an albatross around the neck of the president,” he said.
The shame of it all, diGenova said, is that Democrats are exploiting leadership failures in the Justice Department to undermine Trump.
“The one thing they fear is a strong Trump, and he’s getting stronger every day,” he said.
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
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