Trump lawyer from effort to overturn 2020 election to oversee probe of ex-CIA director, DOJ official says
By: Sarah N. Lynch (CBSPolitics)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
April 18, 2026 / 4:02 PM EDT / CBS News
Joseph DiGenova, a conservative attorney who previously represented President Trump's campaign when it challenged the results of the 2020 election, is being tapped by the U.S. Justice Department to lead an ongoing criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, a Justice Department official said on Saturday.
DiGenova, who will oversee the probe from the Southern District of Florida, is joining the team just days after Maria Medetis Long was removed from the case, CBS News previously reported. He will serve as counselor to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the official added.
A source familiar with the matter told CBS News that Medetis Long was taken off the case after expressing concerns about the strength of the evidence. A Justice Department spokesperson on Friday said changing up personnel on cases was "healthy and normal" without elaborating on the reasons for the change.
The decision to add DiGenova and remove a career federal prosecutor from the probe is likely to stoke concerns about whether the case is politically motivated. The personnel switch has echoes of another case last year when Mr. Trump ousted the top federal prosecutor in Virginia's Eastern District and replaced him with a loyalist after he expressed concerns about the strength of the evidence in cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Charges against James were later dismissed, although a Trump administration official made new criminal referrals last month to federal prosecutors in Miami and Chicago for two cases of possible homeowner's insurance fraud.
DiGenova is a staunch Trump ally who repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories alleging the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, he was forced to apologize to Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency who was fired during Mr. Trump's first term, after Krebs said he felt the 2020 election was free of major fraud or interference.
Krebs later sued DiGenova after he called for Krebs to be "drawn and quartered" and "shot" during a television appearance. Those comments, Krebs later alleged, sparked death threats against him.
DiGenova, 81, previously served as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., under Republican President Ronald Reagan.
The probe into Brennan was sparked by a referral from the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee last October over allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about the CIA's role in crafting the intelligence assessment into Russia's efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.
In the referral, Chairman Jim Jordan claimed Brennan "falsely" denied the CIA relied on a dossier prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the drafting of the intelligence assessment and falsely told the committee the CIA had opposed including the Steele dossier in the assessment.
The so-called Steele dossier contained salacious allegations against then-candidate Trump that have not been verified.
The case has been heating up in recent weeks, as members of the team continue to conduct interviews with key witnesses. Chris DeLorenz, a former law clerk to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon during special counsel Jack Smith's probe into Mr. Trump's retention of classified records, is also involved in the case after he recently left his role in the deputy attorney general's office to become a prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida.
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Joseph DiGenova was on the stage with Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell when the "shoe polish" hair dye dripped down the side of Rudy's face. In other words, he is a deranged crackpot. Any investigation he does of Brennan will be spoiled before it even starts. He was on the team that tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election and along with his crackpot wife and partner Victoria Toensing were prominent birthers.
he wouldn't be linked to trmp if he wasn't
Are wide ranging federal investigations bad again? So much for innocent people have nothing to hide and should welcome being investigated by the federal government. Funny how that changed.
Funny how it was supposedly "lawfare" to investigate Trump but now it's business as usual to investigate anyone who might have dared show a smidgen of partisanship against conservatives. Conservatives expect the government to show partisanship in support of them but of course freak the fuck out if any partisanship is shown against them. It's what cowardly weak sniveling hypocrites do.
Similar to how Republican sex offenders get no punishment from their party when the Democrats run ours out of town on a rail.
Sure, sure.... Clinton Biden etc...
And you want credit for Swallwell? Lol.
Swalwell's crime was putting Democrats in position to lose the California's governor's race. If he never ran for governor he'd be free to continue molesting interns and raping women with his best friend Senator Gallego. That's the only reason the party coordinated the hit on him when it did.
LOL. The fact that you believe that is hilarious. All I did was point out the hypocrisy, I made no comment on whether I think he should or shouldn't be investigated. I'm all for transparent non-partisan investigations of anyone when there is probably cause for the investigation regardless of which party. It's just that Republicans scream about partisanship against them but think it's absolutely necessary when investigating others. They screamed about Jack Smith somehow not being non-partisan enough, even though he was squeaky fucking clean and still is while these dip shit conservatives run around losing their fucking minds, while then they pick THE MOST fucking partisan investigators to investigate their opponents. If you don't absolutely love kissing Trumps feet, you're not qualified to be an investigator looking into Democrats. It would be laughable if it wasn't so fucking obvious and dead serious for our nation. Conservatives are just fucking blind to their own hypocrisy which is shown clear here every day if not almost every minute. If even a single one of them had even a shred of decency and wasn't a massive hypocrite, they would be bitching about this obvious sycophant lawyer investigating Brennan too.
You mean like the democrats that are now coming out saying they "heard rumors" over the years, but did not do anything, especially the leading democrats, or the left wing journalists that says she had known about his actions for several years, but because politics was not her "beat" she could not report on it.
Those democrats
This article is not going to be about Eric Swalwell. Period.
DiGenova was on stage with Giuliani and Powell when they proposed their insane "stolen election" theories such as Italian satellites were changing Trump votes to Biden. He was standing right behind them as part of the team. He holds other wacko conspiracy theories as well. Do you seriously think Giuliani or Powell would be accepted as proper people to investigate Brennan?
DiGenova and his equally crackpot wife are on the right side of this photo.
Is there something wrong with their brains? It's got to be a diagnosable condition of some kind.
It would be hard to find anyone in Trumps DOJ who would do an impartial investigation of any non MAGA political figure. The entire process is tainted and will be until Trump is gone.
Your post is pure projection as none of it has happened, however, if you change a few words, ie, change Trump to Biden and MAGA to democrats, then you will find a post that ACTUALLY happened.
Well, their track record so far is practically zero, they had to dismiss both cases against Comey and James, I doubt Brennan has anything to worry about. It's obvious dumb fuck bigot brain retribution against anyone who dares challenge their rancid king. Fucking losers, literally.