I think you're a bit confused, Cap'n.
M'Benga did not "genocide" anyone. Dak'rah, as a general and leader of the Klingon forces on J'Gal, ordered his men to kill anyone who wasn't a Klingon soldier. This meant the indiscriminate killing of civilian colonists.
The story he told everyone was that he killed the next level of Klingon leadership below him—General Gra'val, Captain Ruh'lis and Commander Kiff—because they disobeyed orders to stop the killing of civilians. He's known by the nickname "The Butcher of J'Gal" by both sides: by Federation forces for the original order to kill anyone and everyone, and by the Klingons for having been a turncoat who 'butchered' his own senior leadership and defected to the other side.
M'Benga was the real "Butcher of J'Gal" from the Klingon perspective, insofar as he is the one who actually killed Gra'val, Ruh'lis and Kiff. In reality, Dak'rah simply fled while Gra'val, Ruh'lis and Kiff fought off a Federation special ops soldier on a mission to kill them all: M'Benga.
Dak'rah's story was entirely untrue. From the Klingon perspective, he wasn't just a turncoat who killed his subordinates: he was a coward who fled from the battlefield as those very same subordinates fought off a Starfleet soldier. That's why he said he was ashamed of his cowardice.
However, what's even more damning is that from the Federation perspective he isn't really a Klingon general who saw the errors of his ways and killed his own men when they wouldn't follow his order to stop killing civvies: he never gave the order to stop. The only reason the killing stopped is because Dak'rah fled while M'Benga succeeded in killing the senior Klingon leadership.
There would be no Klingon witnesses to dispute Dak'rah's story: M'Benga killed them all. And it was most certainly not a war crime: he targetted only Klingon forces.
Chapel did not tamper with the knife: the d'k tahg had blood from Gra'val, Ruh'lis and Kiff on it because it was the knife used to kill them all. The only lie Chapel perpetuated is she let Chin-Riley and Pike believe the knife belonged to Dak'rah, when it reality we the viewers know it it belonged to M'Benga, because it still fits the commonly-believed narrative that Dak'rah killed his own men.
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