The president of George Soros' Open Society Foundations demanded that Fox News ban former federal prosecutor and Trump ally Joe diGenova for claiming that the Hungarian-American billionaire "controls a very large part of the career foreign service of the United States State Department."



In response to diGenova's comments, Open Society president Eric Wemple said in a Friday letter to Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott that diGenova's comments are "beyond fiction" and "beyond ludicrous."

Last night, yet again, Fox gave air time to McCarthyism. This has to stop. My letter to @FoxNews:

cc ⁦@ErikWemple⁩ ⁦@brianstelter⁩ pic.twitter.com/qMdSfE94Xk — Patrick Gaspard (@patrickgaspard) November 14, 2019

Others, such as ADL President Jonathan Greenblatt, suggested diGenova was using an 'anti-Semitic trope' against Soros, who is Jewish.

Invoking #Soros as controlling the State Dept, FBI, and Ukraine is trafficking in some of the worst anti-Semitic tropes. @FoxNews won’t have Chris Farrell on for making similar remarks, and they should hold the same standard for @JoeDiGenova. https://t.co/IbCQCdXZfL — Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) November 14, 2019

As The Hill's John Solomon reported in March, in 2016 Obama administration officials sought to suppress a Ukrainian corruption probe into an NGO bankrolled by both the US government and Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.

When Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office tried to investigate an alleged misallocation of $4.4 million in US funds, which was supposed to go toward anti-corruption initiatives, US embassy officials came down hard to shut down the investigation altogether. “We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told The Hill.

George Kent

Notably, former State Department official George Kent (One of the Democrats' star witnesses in Wednesday's public impeachment hearings), recommended in April 2016 that Ukraine stop investigating a Soros-funded entity in Ukraine, AntAC.

"The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced," wrote Kent.

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group. -The Hill

DiGenova, an attorney for Solomon, may be included in a batch of communications that a federal judge ordered the State Department to hand over regarding Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's communications with top department officials.

The judge ruled that the department had 30 days to turn over the documents, but that both parties needed to meet to narrow the scope of American Oversight's request. The State Department is agreeing to search for records related to external communications between Giuliani, his associates Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to the status report released Wednesday. The report says that "to the extent responsive records exist" the State Department will "process and produce" the documents "with appropriate redactions" by Nov. 22. The department has also agreed to process communications between Giuliani and some of Pompeo's advisers, including including State Department counselor Ulrich Brechbuhl and former senior adviser Michael McKinley. -The Hill

The State Department search for records will include a review of emails, text messages, calendar entries and messaging platforms - as well as any correspondence regarding Giuliani, Toensing or diGenova's plans to travel to Ukraine or encourage the country's government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who have been accused of corruption.