Guests Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing joined host Sean Hannity in maligning the anonymous intelligence official who filed a complaint over the call for fear that Trump was abusing the power of his office.
Both diGenova and Toensing vehemently attacked the official, who has now agreed to testify to congressional leaders about his concerns. The whistleblower’s complaint was released Thursday, and details efforts by White House officials to hide evidence of the phone call with Zelensky.
DiGenova told Hannity Thursday that the whistleblower “doesn’t need to be feted, he needs to go to prison,” as reported by Media Matters.
The former attorney for the District of Columbia also claimed that the entire whistleblower report was a Democratic ploy to deflect attention away from alleged corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump and his allies have claimed that Biden abused his position as vice president in 2016 when he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire its chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Shokin was considered soft on corruption, and the U.S., its allies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all wanted him removed.
Shokin had also led an investigation into gas company Burisma, for whom Hunter worked. The investigation probed dealings that took place several years before Hunter joined the company, and was dormant by the time Biden visited Ukraine in 2016. In May, Ukraine’s top prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko told Bloomberg he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son.
But this hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers and talking heads pushing the conspiracy theory. “Joe Biden shook down the Ukrainian government,” diGenova claimed Thursday. “It’s very simple, it’s not complicated. And they lied about Viktor Shokin being corrupt.”
“This was a set-up,” he added. “And what we’re now seeing is the Democratic party trying to cover that up. And therefore you have the whistleblower in the White House come forward, who actually knows nothing.”
Toensing, who is married to diGenova, then claimed that statements made against Shokin were fabricated by an NGO funded by Soros. The Jewish philanthropist has long been a favored bogeyman and target of anti-Semitism for the hard right.
“U.S. and other people made false statements about him,” Toensing claimed. “That was George Soros-funded NGOs who were also in bed with the State Department. They were in bed with each other during that time, in the name of anti-corruption and it really means that Soros goes after his competitors.”
“Now, let me bring this full circle, this is my last point here,” she continued. “The whistle-blower sprinkles throughout his document’s footnotes referring to a publication with the initials ‘OCCRP.’ One guess, Sean, who funds OOCRP? George Soros.”
DiGenova then added: “Soros’ dirty money is all over this story from day one.”
The OCCRP—the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project—was set up in 2006 by veteran journalists Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu. It is supported by grants from the United States Agency for International Development, the International Center for Journalists, the United States Department of State, the Swiss Confederation, the Open Society Foundations (founded by Soros), Google Ideas and the Knight Foundation, among others.
The organization has been involved in multiple high-profile corruption investigations, targeting prominent individuals and institutions including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Danske Bank and the parliament of Romania.
The organization has also done extensive work in Ukraine, uncovering corruption involving senior government officials including former President Petro Poroshenko.
