In a report that gleefully names the alleged Trump-Ukraine whistleblower in its headline (which is why we will not be linking to it here), the right-wing Washington Examiner cites loudmouthed Trump ally and frequent Fox News guest lawyer Joe diGenova as calling the whistleblower's report a "political assassination," the "decapitation of a president," "regicide," and comparing the whistleblower to John Wilkes Booth.
He apparently then ate a live gerbil mid-interview, or something. Hard to imagine how you'd top the claim that reporting an apparent crime by a sitting president—one that had much of his White House in a panic due to the obvious, brazen corruption of the act—is akin to the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but if you've ever stumbled upon one of diGenova's Fox News acts you'll know that he man does subtlety like a hippo does ballet.
DiGenova's extreme opinions—and the urgency with which he has been trying to spread the name of the single whistleblower, among all of Trump's officials, toadies, and legal scrubbers, who actually came forward to report an apparent crime rather than just looking bug-eyed at each other while helping to cover it up—may have less to do with his one-sided loyalty to Dear Leader than the fact that diGenova and his also-Fox-News-guest wife have been getting paid, to the tune of a million bucks or so, to defend Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, wanted on conspiracy charges by the U.S. government due to his criming ways.
And just to make it perfectly clear what his angle is in all this, diGenova and wife Victoria Toensing's work for Firtash consisted of, among other things, helping to "dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden last summer" in an effort to get Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's help in getting the Trump Department of Justice to drop its case against the Ukrainian oligarch.
Got that? DiGenova and Toensing, working for a U.S.-sought Ukrainian criminal, had been trying to dig up Joe Biden dirt in a brazen attempt to quid-pro-quo their way into Rudy Giuliani using his tight Trump connections to get Trump and Attorney General William Barr to quash the U.S. prosecution of their own Ukrainian bigshot client.
So yes, now that someone stepped forward to report on Trump and Giuliani's crackpot scheme to exchange conspiracy-invented Biden "dirt" for the release of held-up Ukrainian military aid, a lawyer for one of the criminals implicated in that very plan is VERY SURE that snitching about it to authorities is worse than assassinating Abraham Lincoln, exclamation point, loud burping noise. And he would absolutely think that even if he hadn't pocketed a fat million bucks and spent the summer implicating himself in the multi-fronted "drug deal" Giuliani was cooking up.
Forget Republican defenders of Trump's crookedness: Is there any Republican, from top officials like Attorney General William Barr and Energy Secretary Rick Perry to random "lawyer" guests on the Tucker Carlson White Nationalism Power Hour, who wasn't in on Giuliani's insane, crooked scheme as it happened? We've got every name from John Solomon to Sean Hannity popping up in this thing. Giuliani himself is almost certainly headed for indictment, based on the indictments of his own associates.
Will diGenova stand up to blubber that arresting Mr. NounVerb911 for an international extortion scheme is worse than Judas' betrayal of Jesus? Or are he and his wife too busy planning their own relocation to somewhere with not-particularly-robust extradition agreements?