Before Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s defense attorney, he was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney.

Before Todd Blanche was Boris Epshteyn’s attorney, he represented Igor Fruman in his unlawful donation and influence-peddling prosecution, the investigation of which extended to getting Marie Yovanovitch fired, undermining the Mueller investigation, and framing Hunter Biden.

Before Todd Blanche was Igor Fruman’s attorney, he represented Paul Manafort in a successful bid to prevent New York State from prosecuting Manafort for the mortgage fraud charges that Trump had pardoned.

That’s all important background to the news that Blanche has appointed Joe DiGenova as Counsel overseeing the investigation into John Brennan and, ultimately, the grand conspiracy that, in their fevered imaginations, led everyone to be mean to Donald Trump.

The appointment was first reported by John Solomon, then matched by CBS, NYT, Bloomberg, CNN, and ABC. And while, between them, those real media outlets list a number of the reasons DiGenova is inappropriate, which (as NYT lays out) include almost representing Trump on the Russian investigation (which was scotched because Toensing had already represented Sam Clovis, Mark Corallo, and Erik Prince) and threatening several of the people targeted by DOJ, including John Brennan and Chris Krebs:

Mr. diGenova has claimed the Russia investigation was a law-enforcement plot to frame Mr. Trump and keep him out of the White House during his first presidential campaign. In 2020, as part of the legal team for the Trump campaign, Mr. diGenova said that Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity official who had contradicted false pro-Trump claims of election fraud, should be “shot.” (Mr. diGenova later apologized.)

And while Solomon notes that DiGenova and his spouse Victoria Toensing represented him on an issue years ago (I don’t think that includes championing Solomon when his calls with mobbed-up Senator Toricelli were leaked years ago), they’re all missing perhaps the most important reason DiGenova should not be anywhere near this investigation.

With Toensing, DiGenova played a central role in matters leading to Trump’s 2019 impeachment, as part of a team that included Fruman (Blanche’s eventual client, who had the alleged mob ties, including to Firtash), Lev Parnas, and John Solomon, a mess first publicly revealed when Trump attorney John Dowd sent this letter on October 3, 2019 attempting to stall the Ukraine impeachment, the same day DiGenova and Toensig’s Firtash tie became clear, and less than a week before Parnas and Fruman were arrested on their way to meet Firtash.

The effort that led up to that moment started with the efforts to get Marie Yovanovitch fired in 2019, which Lev Parnas described in his book. Here’s a description of a Fox News appearance DiGenova made the day the Mueller investigation closed up shop, at a time when Toensing was discussing getting pro-Russian Ukrainians to pay her and DiGenova to carry out this hit job.

Trump ally Laura Ingraham dedicated the March 29 [sic; this happened on March 22] episode of her show to discuss what its tagline called “Joe Biden’s Ukraine Connection,” although it was the revelations of Manafort’s activities that had put Ukraine into the news at the time. In her first sentence, Ingraham deflected any attention to Manafort and concentrated on other “bad actors” in Ukraine, then she referred to Sessions’ “urgent letter imploring” Pompeo to remove Yovanovitch. She characterized the ambassador as “part of Obama’s orbit” and pointed out that Greg Craig — a lawyer for Obama and Bill Clinton and an adviser to Democrats Ted Kennedy and Madeleine Albright — lied about his work for Yanukovych, although she failed to mention that he did so while working directly for Manafort. And, to sweeten the pot, she pointed out that Biden had visited Ukraine just 10 days before Trump was inaugurated.

[snip]

Instantly, diGenova joined in, also reporting speculation that supported a pro-Trump narrative as fact. “There’s no question about it, that this has all the markings of bribery and extortion, and it’s something that deserves a full-blown investigation into the conduct of the Biden family in Ukraine,” he said. “There’s some very disturbing details about it that are about to come out in reporting by John Solomon, and I think once those details come out, I think there’s going to have to be a full-fledged criminal investigation.” This is exactly how our plan worked. [Viktor] Shokin had admitted the Bidens hadn’t broken the law, but we made it sound like they did — or something bad, at least. It’s a blueprint Trump and his people used over and over again. Accuse someone of being underhanded, but keep it vague, not even the slightest amount of detail. Then hold your supposed evidence away from anyone’s examination. The evidence could be blank sheets of paper, it doesn’t matter. It’s like a street-corner card game — the suckers are the only one who don’t know it’s rigged.

[Laura] Ingraham, sounding a touch less than impartial, egged them on, asking if such an investigation would be aimed at “revealing, perhaps, deep connections to how the Mueller probe started?”

Then diGenova made a paper-thin attempt at defending Manafort, while accusing Yovanovitch and unnamed others in being part of the reason behind the Mueller Probe, with no evidence to back it up. “Oh, absolutely, because what happened was, the ambassador there, who has been removed, was involved in generating false information about Manafort, other information that went into the so-called black, black binders,” he said, referring to the Black Ledger, Manafort’s list of accounts received. On it were $12.7 million from the Party of Regions (which, of course, he helped create and included Yanukovych, Manafort’s personal project).

The clip and transcript is here.

According to warrants from the investigation liberated by NYT, Parnas and Toensing were discussing this appearance in conjunction with getting paid by the Ukrainians.

One object of the investigation (on which Rebekah Donaleski, who represented Jim Comey in the EDVA case, played a lead role) was to learn whether the opinions DiGenova expressed on Fox News were funded by pro-Russian Ukrainian entities.

But the Parnas-related effort extended to efforts to get the indictment against Dmitry Firtash thrown out. Some cockamamie part of that involved claiming it was inappropriate for Andrew Weissmann to attempt to flip Firtash to learn of Trump’s Putin ties.

We came back and assembled the BLT Team. We told them all that we were arranging a meeting with Firtash. Solomon’s jaw dropped and his eyes lit up. Firtash was kind of like a White Whale for him. Not only was he one of the most well-connected people in Ukraine, he was also involved with the Mueller investigation. If we could talk to him, he told us, we might be able to discredit Mueller and his people as well as the Bidens. But all attempts to get to him had been blocked by his American lawyers, Lanny Davis and Dan Webb. We considered Davis to be part of the Democrat machine.

At a meeting of the BLT Team, John Solomon told me that we were not the first Americans trying to get Firtash to agree to a deal. Andrew Weissman had already secretly offered him a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to his U.S. extradition, but only if he would agree to testify about the relationship between Trump and Putin, as part of the Mueller investigation. In fact, he told us that Weissmann had offered a deal before Mueller had added him to his team (he was working for Mueller in the FBI at the time).

We knew that we had to get rid of, or sideline, Webb and especially Davis, offer Firtash a better offer than the one from Weissmann that he turned down. And we also had to get testimony, or at least some evidence of the Weissmann deal, to further discredit the Mueller investigation.

Months later, when Toensing and diGenova were working for Firtash, she confronted Webb about the Weissmann deal. He reluctantly admitted that it was true.

As Parnas testified to Congress, it also allegedly involved a quid pro quo trading help with that indictment for information framing Hunter and Joe Biden.

Ro Khanna: Did Bill Barr know that you were involved in getting this dirt?

Parnas: Absolutely. Bill, Bill Barr was informed of our investigation from the day he took office.

Khanna: Did you ever have a conversation with Bill Barr being lenient towards Dmitry, in Bill Barr’s role as Attorney General?

Parnas: I personally did not but I was witness to Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova, having a conversation with Bill Barr about Dmitry Firtash.

Khanna: What did they say to Bill Barr?

Parnas: Basically, they were telling him that the charges were false, and that he needs to drop the charges and, basically, end the case.

Khanna: And why did they tell him to drop the charges on this Russian [sic] oligarch?

Parnas: Because Dmitry Firtash was going to help us getting dirt on the Bidens, or whatever else the Trump campaign needed.

Khanna: So my understanding is you have the Trump campaign telling you to talk to a Russian [sic] oligarch to get dirt, on the President of the United States for political reasons, and then someone from the Trump campaign is talking to the Attorney General to drop the charges because this foreign national is helping get dirt on a political candidate?

Parnas: Absolutely.

During the Special Master Process, Toensing made efforts to protect both her communications with Firtash (on attorney-client grounds) and DiGenova (on spousal privilege grounds), and Firtash eventually entered an appearance to invoke his own privilege. There’s no evidence that the Firtash representation was pierced. Austria finally refused the extradition case against Firtash last year, citing new evidence.

In the end, SDNY did not charge anyone for the key influence peddling here. Most of Rudy’s phones were found to be corrupted (and Jack Smith later learned he had had more that weren’t seized), and SDNY expected to find multiple Toensing phones but found just one.

But some of the very same opinions that Joe DIGenova expressed in an effort to discredit the Russian investigation were expressed with the hope, at least, that Russian-backed Ukrainians would pay for those opinions. Plus, he was in the thick of efforts to work with an allegedly mobbed up Ukrainian to frame Joe Biden as part of an effort to undercut the Russian investigation.

Todd Blanche knows that.

He would have read these warrant affidavits and the underlying evidence behind them while representing Fruman.

And this appointment comes just weeks after Tulsi Gabbard’s wildly suspect criminal referral of the whistleblower in the Ukraine impeachment.

To make things still worse, at a time when the DiGenova appointment must have been in the works on Friday, DiGenova’s buddy Solomon told Russian useful idiot Benny Johnson Friday that Trump would declassify a load of documents in part to avoid the CIPA proceedings that delayed Trump’s own prosecution and have delayed John Bolton’s.

So Todd Blanche is appointing a lawyer formerly paid by Russian allies to discredit the Russian investigation to declassify and release a load of intelligence — things like cybersecurity collection, more intelligence shared by Dutch spooks, and human intelligence — in the guise of criminalizing counterintelligence investigations.

This was never a real criminal investigation. But it just moved into something far more ominous.