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Open in TheBrain

Rudy Giu 4

tratr tag

MERRI OK

SEE NEPO SON ANDREW FIFA

prolly some neglect b/c wacko constant

SEE PARDON TRUMP MEDAL ED FUCKING MARTIN 11 25

:{bannon a fan 6 26

HANNITY BOOSTED BIG LIE BS

fail 4 on many court loss disbar, defam

lost ny apt to lady ruby?!

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spoke at MSG? ON STAGE VICTORY SP?!

Rudy Giuliani: “We've been litigating for six weeks. So we're way ahead of where we were last time.”

10/31/24

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MMA 8 26

Rudy Giuliani calls young people struggling economically "privileged little shits" and wants someone to "kick the shit out of them"

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MMA

Trump suggested that Bill Pulte at DNI may investigate “rigged elections.” Steve Bannon's War Room podcast is thrilled.

Bannon's War Room has been a longtime hub for election denial and was instrumental in stirring up the January 6 riots

Written by Sophie Lawton

Research contributions from John Knefel

Published 06/23/26

On his podcast War Room, Steve Bannon and his guests are celebrating Bill Pulte's position as acting director of National Intelligence, claiming he will “get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election." Earlier this month, discussing the appointment, President Trump himself said that Pulte “may find out some things about the rigged elections.”

Pulte started in the role last week after President Donald Trump intervened to stop the Senate confirmation hearing of his DNI nominee, Jay Clayton, despite congressional backlash to Pulte's original appointment as acting DNI. Bannon has been pushing for Pulte as DNI since Trump originally appointed him in early June, calling him “a patriot” and claiming, “It's time now for smash mouth” with members of Congress who opposed his appointment. Even Republican senators have noted objections to Pulte.

Bannon has made it clear that his focus on Pulte's role is absolutely about elections, saying, “Bill Pulte is the perfect choice, the perfect choice to run DNI right now. It also shouldn't be lost on anybody that these elections, the stolen elections, which they're now in your face of how they're going to do it with the mail-in ballots.”

Bannon's War Room has been a longtime hub for election denial and was instrumental in stirring up the January 6 riots. Bannon has already begun laying groundwork for interfering in the midterm elections or denying their legitimacy on the show. Now, he and his guests are suggesting Pulte's time in office will lead to proof that the 2020 election was stolen.

Before Pulte started as acting DNI, Bannon suggested Pulte use the position to “maybe look around the files, maybe actually check into the, you know, some of the election files of 2020.”

In a June 20 interview with former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Bannon explicitly said, “The reason Jay Clayton ain't at DNI right now and Bill Pulte is … is to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Bannon then noted that both John Solomon, an election conspiracy theorist, and Pulte are now working together and “they need to stay at DNI.” Giuliani argued Pulte's appointment was important because the California primary elections “look like it was so crooked that nobody will believe it, so either they're cheating or they're making everybody believe they cheat.”

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From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Giuliani also praised Pulte and specifically his work on elections, saying that “he knows what happened for real,” an apparent reference to the 2020 election that Giuliani has claimed was stolen. He then asked, “How do we have a republic if we don't have free elections?”

On the June 19 edition of War Room, Bannon suggested those opposing Pulte’s appointment are “afraid Pulte's going to get his hands on” proof the 2020 election was stolen and that they're “damn right” that MAGA will “use it in the midterm.” Bannon added, “Bill Pulte's in, and he and Solomon are going to get their hands on it, and you're going to have to live with it. The American people are going to see the receipts.”

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From the June 19, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Article III Project founder and regular War Room guest Mike Davis told Bannon about Pulte: “He'll go in there and he'll rip apart that place for as long as President Trump needs Bill Pulte to rip apart that place.” He said, “President Trump can keep Bill Pulte as the acting DNI for as long as he wants and I love it,” adding “There is so much that needs to be exposed at the DNI, and Bill Pulte is the perfect man to do it.”

Another frequent War Room guest and election conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec appeared on Bannon's show and suggested members of Congress were scared to confirm Pulte because they did not want to expose election fraud, saying, “Could it be that there was some kind of foreign interference or some kind of penetration of those election systems down there in Fulton County that leads to a massive, massive problem with that 2020 count?"

Now, after weeks of focusing on Pulte uncovering election fraud, Bannon and guests are questioning whether Pulte's priority in office should be prosecuting former director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci.

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  1. ### Steve Bannon calls for ICE and others to be at “every precinct” for the midterms: “If you’re armed or not, that depends upon what your state laws are”

06/18/26 12:51 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media’s response to results of LA mayoral primary race is a preview of their midterm playbook

06/18/26 6:28 PM EDT

  1. ### Trump’s moves concerning FISA, DNI, and Bill Pulte align with what Steve Bannon has been saying — and Bannon is clear it’s about elections

06/17/2

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HUFFPO 5 26

Donald Trump Blames 'Radical Left Lunatics' After Giuliani's Hospitalization | HuffPost Latest News

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MMA

  1. ### Rudy Giuliani attacks Rep. Ilhan Omar: “You can look Muslim and look more American than that”

02/25/26

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mma

  1. ### Asked by Newsmax why the Biden administration did not arrest the January 6 pipe bomber, Rudy Giuliani says “they orchestrated this”

12/05/25

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GENERAL AMNESTY FOR CRIMES

TIME MAG 11 25

President Donald Trump has ordered “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for over 70 of his political allies who backed alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.

In a social media post published in the early hours of Monday morning, Martin shared a signed proclamation of the list of names, which contains high-profile figures such as Trump’s former personal lawyer and one-time Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyers Sidney Powell and John Eastman, and more.

“Thank you, POTUS, for allowing me, as U.S. Pardon Attorney, to work with the White House, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and Solicitor General John Sauer to achieve your intent,” Martin wrote, crediting the team who worked on the pardons. “Let their healing begin.”

You can see the full list, here:

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“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 presidential election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” reads the pardon signed by Trump on Nov. 7.

The pardon applies to those “for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities in, or advocacy for or of any slate of presidential electors… in connection with the 2020 presidential election.”

In a statement to TIME on Monday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of the pardons: “These great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy.”

Read More: *Rudy Giuliani Once Fought Corruption, Now He Is Embroiled in It

Giuliani was held in contempt of court in January for failing to cooperate in the handover of $11 million of personal assets to Georgia poll workers he had falsely accused of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani later reached a settlement in the dispute.

Trump, meanwhile, said in September that he would be awarding his former lawyer with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, days after Giuliani was injured in a New Hampshire car crash.

Trump has repeatedly made false claims that he, not former President Joe Biden, won the 2020 election. Rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, amid the fraught rhetoric.

In January, Trump pardoned almost 1,600 people convicted for their involvement in the Capitol Riots on Jan. 6, 2021, including commuting the sentences of violent offenders from the riots, such as Proud Boys leader Enrique Torrio, who was serving a 22-year sentence.

Former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called the pardon “an outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol.”

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an 9 25

The Arizona Court of Appeals on Monday declined to take up Attorney General Kris Mayes’ appeal of a lower court’s decision to send the Arizona fake electors case back to a grand jury.

In the order, signed by Chief Judge Kent Cattani, the court said the decision was made based on the judges’ discretion.

In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people for their involvement in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Democrat Joe Biden won the state by around 10,000 votes.

All of the fake electors involved in the scheme were indicted, including Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA CEO.

But in May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers agreed with arguments from attorneys representing the fake electors that prosecutors had failed to disclose the full text of the Electoral Count Act to the members of the grand jury prior to the indictment. Myers ruled that Mayes would have to convene a new grand jury and share the text of the act in its entirety if she wanted to move forward with the case.

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Instead, Mayes appealed the decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Now that the appellate court has declined the case, Mayes’ next steps are either to petition the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the trial court’s decision or to take the case back to a grand jury.

In response to the Appeals Court’s decision, the Arizona Republican Party issued a statement reiterating a claim from many of the indicted that the case was politically motivated.

“Arizona families deserve an Attorney General who prosecutes criminals, not political opponents,” AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda said in the statement. “Five years later, Kris Mayes is still fixated on 2020 while violent crime, fentanyl trafficking, and border chaos threaten our communities every single day. This obsession is not justice — it’s politics.”

Also among the indicted were Kelli Ward, who led the AZGOP at the time, Gregory Safsten, who was the AZGOP’s executive director, and former Trump staffers and campaign members including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Christina Bobb.

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retaliation?

  1. mma Steve Bannon floats Rudy Giuliani to “assist” a special prosecutor in the Trump administration

11/12/24

November 9, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Is there a necessity for a special counsel since Jim Jordan looks like he’s going to be on it, a special prosecutor and if so, would you be available to assist them, sir?

RUDY GIULIANI: Well, the answer is yes to all of those, there’s certainly is a need for a special prosecutor and I certainly would be available to help, I probably know it better than anyone from the very beginning. And you have to do this, Steve.

…

BANNON: What’s your current situation? You talk about the deep state coming after somebody, they are trying to destroy one of the greatest Americans, living Americans, Rudy Giuliani, before our eyes. Tell the audience what’s going on.

GIULIANI: Well, right now, based on a judgment that is easily reversed, the $145 million judgment to two women where I’m not able to use the tape recordings or video recordings that support the truth of everything I say because they’ve been taken off the tape deceptively.

I’ve been given a tape of what they did at the center that’s missing three hours and they rejiggered the numbering so it looked like it was consistent. And I discovered that. And in my bar association proceeding the judge ignored it. It would completely prove that -- although the $145 million is absolutely ridiculous even if I did what they say I did, I can show definitively that I didn’t.

Now based on that they’ve taken everything I own.

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MMA

Eight damning new revelations about Fox’s 2020 election lies from the Smartmatic filings

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/21/25

Newly available filings in the election technology company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News provide fresh insights into the network’s egregious and irresponsible promotion of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies — four and a half years after Fox’s propaganda helped trigger a violent insurrection in which enraged Trumpists sacked the U.S. Capitol.

The documents, which support Smartmatic’s motion for summary judgment and were originally filed in April, were first reported by The Washington Post after a judicial hearing officer removed many of the redactions.

The documents feature numerous previously unseen text messages and internal communications between Fox hosts, executives, producers, and other employees as Trump attempted to use false claims about the 2020 election to subvert the results of the election he lost and remain in power.

Fox’s internal machinations during this period were previously made public through the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, another election technology company which accused the network of defamation over its post-election coverage. Fox ultimately settled that suit as it went to trial in 2023 for a record $787.5 million.

The contours of Smartmatic’s story are broadly similar to — if no less damning than — the one Dominion told: Fox hosts and executives knew that Trump lost the 2020 election and that the claims of widespread election fraud he and his supporters pushed were false, but they nonetheless pivoted in the days following the election to promote such conspiracy theories -– including falsehoods about the company — because they were taking heat from viewers overcalling Arizona for Joe Biden and feared losing market share to more aggressive competitors like Newsmax

But the Smartmatic filings provide new evidence that helps flesh out the tale of Fox’s cowardice and corruption.

Maria Bartiromo leveraged her status at Fox to try to overturn the election: “I am news”

Maria Bartiromo was once a respected business reporter, but reinvented herself as a hardcore MAGA propagandist during the first Trump administration. But even as she went further and further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, Bartiromo has retained her position on Fox’s “news” side, anchoring Fox Business’ three-hour weekday program Mornings with Maria as well as the weekend show Sunday Morning Futures,which is simulcast on Fox News.

Smartmatic’s filings show Bartiromo leveraged that position as she tried to get Sidney Powell, the MAGA attorney notorious for her far-fetched election claims, to come on her Fox Business show in mid-November 2020. (Bartiromo hosted Powell on her Fox News show earlier that month to push election lies after Powell sent her an email featuring fraud hypotheses from someone who also claimed that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”)

“Sidney we must keep you out there,” Bartiromo wrote in a November 17, 2020, Signal message.

She contrasted her own role at the network with that of then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, another avid promoter of election fraud lies, and suggested she could provide more helpful treatment, saying, “Dobbs is considered very opinionated. I am news. How about Friday?”

Bartiromo later suggested to Powell that her own goal was to reverse the election results and keep Trump in power. “I am very worried,” she wrote. “Please please please overturn this. Bring the evidence. I know you can.”

Bartiromo still has both of her “news” shows.

The filings show then-Fox host Jeanine Pirro texted Ronna McDaniel, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, the following on September 21, 2020: “I work so hard for the party across the country… I’m the # 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and the party.”

It’s not precisely news that Pirro viewed her work at the network as an extension of Trump’s campaign — it would in fact have been difficult to come away with a different conclusion after watching her commentary over the years.

Nonetheless, it’s helpful to have that confirmed explicitly in writing.

In mid-November 2020, I reported that Fox appeared to be trying to stave off its competitors by heavily promoting its prime-time “opinion” stars during its purported “news” hours. This campaign included the “news” programs running ads hyping the hosts casting doubt on the election results, airing on-screen bugs promoting their shows, and playing lengthy clips from the “opinion” shows.

The Smartmatic filings reveal that Fox CEO Suzanne Scott apparently ordered this breach of the purported wall the network maintained existed between its “news” and opinion divisions. She emailed top Fox executives on November 9, 2020, demanding that the “news” hours increase its promotion of “opinion” talent like Pirro and the prime-time hosts. She wrote (emphasis added):

On the website – its 345p and I still dont see our opinion folks being promoted on .com – I’m seeing a ton of FOX nation – need that changed asap for the next few weeks. Same for FOX News channel – not seeing nearly enough promotion of primetime talent other than the little bug. And we should get a Pirro promo in as well. This is something I called around about first thing this morning. I’m traveling next four days and expect this to be handled well.

Sean Hannity went from considering Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani an “insane” person he could not conceive of hosting to welcoming him back onto his program in 10 days.

The Fox host functioned as an extension of Trump’s White House and regularly hosted Giuliani to spin Ukraine conspiracy theories that Fox’s research team said were not credible. But the former New York City mayor turned Trump lawyer was apparently going too far for even Hannity in the early days of Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election results.

The filings show Hannity texted associates on November 10, 2020, to say of Giuliani: “He is going nuts. We canceled the guy. Read what’s wrong…. He’s insane.” He told producers the following day that Giuliani is “acting like an insane person. I’m not redpill78.” (According to the Smartmatic filing, “Hannity testified that his reference to ‘redpill78’” — a streaming program associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory — “indicated that he was skeptical” of Giuliani.)

On November 19, 2020, Hannity interviewed Giuliani about his election fraud claims.

Hannity subsequently testified that he had hosted Giuliani because he was a “top newsmaker.”

He retains his Fox prime-time show.

The Dominion filings show that a Fox executive took Pirro off the air the weekend after Election Day, preempting her November 7, 2020, broadcast because he did not “trust her to be responsible.” They also reveal that after Pirro’s show returned the following weekend, her executive producer struggled in vain to prevent her from promoting what he termed her election “conspiracy theories.”

Those filings, however, do not fully explain why Pirro returned to the air in the first place. Smartmatic’s filings fill in that gap: They show that Pirro’s removal sparked a backlash from the MAGA faithful that Fox’s CEO, at Fox prime-time star Sean Hannity’s urging, sought to quell by increasing Pirro’s profile and allowing her to comment without “being censored.”

According to the filings, Hannity told Pirro via text message on November 10, 2020, that he had already reached out to Scott to talk about issues including Pirro’s treatment by the network. When Pirro vented to her colleague, “I’M TIRED OF THE CENSORSHIP AND I’M EMBARRASSED BY HOW THEY CALLED THIS ELECTION,” he further explained that he was “looking for changes” including “to leave u alone.”

Hannity may have already been getting results: Scott’s email the previous day ordering more promotion of Fox’s opinion hosts included Pirro along with the prime-time hosts. A few days later, promos for Pirro’s upcoming show were running and being distributed through right-wing channels.

A flurry of communications about Pirro’s show followed between Scott and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch and between Scott and Fox executive vice president of primetime programming Meade Cooper the day before Pirro’s next broadcast.

“Has anyone spoken to Judge Jeanine before her show this weekend?” Murdoch asked Scott. “It would be good if she corrects the record and clears up the schedule change last week.”

Scott passed the request on to Cooper, who replied that they weren’t planning to make a statement about that and added, “David Clark is reviewing all scripts and working with her on her open. She is very into not being censored but he is working with her closely on it.”

“We don’t want to censor her,” Scott replied.

According to the filing, Scott “had a conversation with Pirro related to coverage of election fraud claims before Pirro’s November 14 show.” The same day, when Hannity texted her to crow about all the promos she was getting, Pirro replied, “I gave 3 demands. New producer. No censorship. 9 pretapes. Suzanne [Scott] promised me NOT overruled by Meade cooper.”

The newly unleashed Pirro used the opportunity the cowed Fox executive team gave her to promote election conspiracy theories that ultimately proved very expensive for Fox.

But it’s hard to get disciplined at Fox for being too supportive of Trump — she was subsequently promoted to the weekday panel show The Five and recently left Fox to become U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Scott’s handling of Pirro shows how willing Fox was to bend over backward to provide editorial independence to its conspiratorial opinion hosts. But “news-side” personalities at the network who tried to shut down such claims weren’t so lucky.

The Smartmatic filings show top Fox executives expressing dismay after anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a November 9, 2020, White House press conference featuring press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and told viewers, “She’s charging the other side is welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can't in good countenance continue showing you this."

Tom Lowell, Fox’s vice president and managing editor of news, subsequently told other top Fox executives that anchors like Cavuto should not have the authority to cut away from live events, writing: “Needs to be a chain of command here considering the environment we are in. It’s not the talents call and [t]he EP [Executive Producer] needs approval from you [Mitchell] or Jay [Wallace] in the handling of pressers.”

When GOP state legislators put on a series of sham election fraud “hearings” in late November and early December 2020, which featured Trump’s legal team and discredited “witnesses” with unverified or debunked claims, Trump praised Fox’s right-wing competitors for airing the hearings live — and criticized Fox for failing to do so.

Scott responded to the pressure by urging her network to start taking such hearings live in a December 2, 2020, email to Lowell. She suggested that the “witness testimony” at the events constituted the “evidence that the news division has been saying doesn’t exist,” and concluded, “This is BUSINESS. RIGHT NOW BAD BUSINESS.” From her email:

The entire impeachment was about one anonymous hearsay whistleblower. We ran the Schiff Nadler show wall to wall. If we wanted to send a strong message to the audience, run the witness testimony. That’s called evidence that the news division has been saying doesn’t exist. Now will the results ever change. Odds are next to zero. This is BUSINESS. RIGHT NOW BAD BUSINESS.

Lowell admitted that the network had featured witness testimony in stories about the hearings without fact-checking them but warned Scott that airing the events live was not a good news practice.

“It is one thing for us to give a platform to the Presidents Attorneys and surrogates, or people like this guy on with Sean [Hannity] right now who signed an affidavit, but we need to be skeptical of some of these supporters who just wander in to make statements about things they think they saw,” he wrote in an email to Scott.

The Smartmatic filings provide new details about what Fox’s Jesse Watters was told and what he did during this period, while he was the host of the weekend evening program Watters’ World.

Watters was explicitly warned not to promote election fraud claims immediately after the 2020 election, according to the filings.

“On November 6, Watters texted Fox host Pete Hegseth, ‘By the way, did you get the memo about not saying fraud?’” the filing states.

Watters testified that this was a reference to instructions relayed by his producer, Megan Albano. In a text message the same day, Albano told Watters, “If we call the race, you cannot, under any circumstances, cast doubt on” the election because “the powers that be are not having any of it.”

This message did not stick, the filing shows: “On November 21, 2020, an original television broadcast of Watters’ World aired at 8:00 p.m. on Fox News. Dobbs appeared as a guest, discussing a ‘cyber-attack’ using voting machines to steal the 2020 election, and Watters presented an ‘investigation’ into Dominion and Smartmatic.”

The filing further states that in a text to The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld, Watters wrote: “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.”

Fox has since given Watters two promotions — he gained his own weekday evening show in January 2022, and that program took over the network’s “pivotal” 8 p.m. timeslot in June 2023.

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11 24 busted again for hiding assests 1980 MB, sports emeorabillia

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11/22/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

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AN 11 24

Judge rips Giuliani's 'farcical' excuses for not turning over valuables in defamation case

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// msg pimp handler

Rudy Giuliani calls Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, “Fani the ho”

11/01/24 mma

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YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast

Media Matters found at least 22 right-wing channels on YouTube that pushed election misinformation from May through August, such as baselessly claiming the 2024 contest would be “rigged” against Trump

Written by Payton Armstrong, Jack Winstanley, Noah Dowe, Ben Van Bloem & Kayla Gogarty

Published 10/31/24 mma

After rolling back its election misinformation policy last year, YouTube allowed right-wing media figures to undermine confidence in the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast, with streamers asserting that “the only way this election can be won from the left is if it's stolen,” suggesting that “illegal ballots” might be “slipped in” in Pennsylvania, and claiming that Democrats are trying “to rig and steal the election” including with an “illegal alien push.”

In December 2020, after states certified their election results, YouTube began removing content with false claims that widespread fraud had changed the outcome of the election, but the platform reversed that policy in June 2023, saying that it would “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” (The decision was cheered by right-wing media.)

Over the last year, right-wing creators have exploited YouTube’s policy rollback, especially in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In July, for instance, Media Matters reported that after becoming co-chair of the Republican National Committee in March, Lara Trump repeatedly engaged in election denial on her show that streams on YouTube.

Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder even acknowledged the policy change during an August stream on the platform, saying, “Here’s another way that they try to steal this election from you. And we’re allowed to say that on YouTube now, which is great.”

New Media Matters study finds hundreds of videos on YouTube with election misinformation

According to our study, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was the most prolific election misinformer, accounting for 77 of the 286 videos, and right-wing streamer Benny Johnson had the most videos that we observed with preroll ads.

We found that in the two months after WABC canceled Giuliani’s radio shows (May 10 through July 12), he relentlessly claimed on YouTube that the 2020 election was “stolen” and Democrats were “going to cheat” in the 2024 election. More details on these findings can be found here.

We also found Johnson pushed election misinformation in dozens of monetized YouTube videos from May through August. These videos — which each included preroll ads, paid promotions, and/or Super Chats — have earned millions of views. More details on these findings can be found here.

These claims included that the election process is “rigged” against Trump, that the legal cases against him constitute “election interference,” that Democrats want and are enabling noncitizens to vote in order to win the election, and that Kamala Harris was “illegally installed” as the Democratic nominee in a “coup” against Joe Biden.

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

Share

CitationFrom the June 20, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

* Donald Trump Jr.: “Democrats to me today could show up on the evening of November 5 with five billion ballots … and with a straight face, tell us it was a landslide in the freest and fairest election in the history of the world.” In an interview conducted at the Republican National Convention, Trump Jr. argued “there’s nothing they won’t do.” YouTube, [7/18/24]

CitationFrom a July 23, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Just the News

CitationFrom a July 18, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by StevenCrowder

Trump has faced four criminal cases. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after the presentation of extensive dockets of evidence detailing many of his violations of New York law. In the federal election subversion case, special counsel Jack Smith recently released documents revealing some of the evidence against Trump. In the other cases, the evidence related to the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has been well documented, and the Georgia indictment against Trump relied at least partially on public accounts of Trump asking Gov. Brian Kemp to “find 11,780 votes.”

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

CitationFrom a May 22, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

CitationFrom a June 14, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

CitationFrom an August 19, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

John Solomon, editor-in-chief for Just the News, claimed that “the strategy and motive of the Democrats and liberals” was to “stack the decks in blue cities and blue states and, too, of course to open the door to noncitizen voting.” YouTube, [5/15/24; Media Matters, 10/17/19]|}:

CitationFrom a July 11, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Just the News

Video

CitationFrom a June 5, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Right View with Lara Trump

CitationFrom a July 25, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Tucker Carlson

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

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boosted solomon shokin BS laptop

begin the episode by discussing the attempt of Kremlin-linked oligarchs to intimidate Catherine Belton, the author of the critically acclaimed book Putin’s People, into silence through excessive litigation. We delve into the backgrounds of the shady billionaires persecuting her and talk about the broader ramifications of the world’s mafia goliaths stomping on lone journalists who are attempting to expose corruption.

see stop the steal

see sidney powell aka elite strike team

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an 10 24

'Sweet justice': Rudy Giuliani mocked as judge seizes almost all of his property

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an 10 24

On Wednesday, October 2, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a 165-page legal brief in which special counsel Jack Smith makes a detailed, comprehensive case for moving forward with his election interference indictment against former President Donald Trump.

The document is mindful of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States, which declared that a president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed as part of "core" duties but not for "unofficial" acts. And Smith, in the court filing, zeros in on acts he considers "unofficial" and therefore, subject to criminal prosecution.

In a listicle published by Politico, reporters Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein lay out 11 of the "most significant and striking details in Smith's brief."

READ MORE:'Unconstitutional!' Trump pitches social media fit after Jack Smith's latest filing

"Much of Smith's brief focused on Trump's state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021," Cheney and Gerstein explain. "Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that Trump's sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity."

The details that Cheney and Gerstein highlight are: (1) Trump "alone with his phone," (2) "Trump asked, 'So what'?," (3) Trump "disregarding the" election "results," (4) "inventing statistics," (5) "broken promises of evidence," (6) "mocking Sidney Powell," (7) "Trump's January 5 call to Steve Bannon," (8) "a view of forensic evidence," (9) "make them riot," (10) former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's "rise," and (11) "Rudy's follies."

Powell, like Giuliani, was among the Trump attorneys who promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And according to Smith's filing, Cheney and Gerstein note, the special counsel cites examples of Trump calling Powell "unhinged" and "crazy."

The Politico reporters point out that "well before" January 6, 2021, an "unidentified Trump campaign employee" described in Smith's brief "enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan."

:{:{:{READ MORE:CNN host can’t contain laughter over ex-Trump lawyer's made-up phrase}:

"The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to 'create chaos' at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to (Joe) Biden was legitimate," Cheney and Gerstein note. "'Find a reason it isn't,' the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: 'Make them riot' and 'Do it!!!'"

READ MORE:'They are not backing down': Expert reveals core of Jack Smith's now-unsealed Trump filing

*Read the full Politico article at this link.

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10 24 msg nazi rally he just lost NY apt?! // eat pets?

Rudy Giuliani: Haitian immigrants “shouldn't have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of a small-town America”

10/29/24 mma

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mma 10 24

The so-called "fake electors" plot didn't succeed after the 2020 election. And according to Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's recently unsealed dossier, one reason may have been the incompetence of former President Donald Trump's then-personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

Following his loss in the 2020 election, Trump put Giuliani in charge of his campaign's legal team. The former New York City mayor and ex-U.S. attorney then sought to have Republican officials in swing states Trump narrowly lost to President Joe Biden submit alternate slates of presidential electors in an effort to overturn election results. This included the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In a Thursday article on Smith's dossier, the Guardian reported that Giuliani's plot to subvert election results was complicated by him apparently texting the details of the plot to the wrong number. While the identity of the intended recipient is unknown, Giuliani appeared to have intended to send instructions to a Republican lawmaker in Michigan on how to disrupt the awarding of the Mitten State's Electoral College votes to Biden.

READ MORE:Trump, Giuliani and Meadows revealed as 'unindicted co-conspirators' in MI investigation

“So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the legislature that states the election is in dispute, there’s an ongoing investigation by the legislature, and the Electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official electors of the state of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline under Michigan law,” Giuliani texted.

In his recounting of the event, Smith's team of prosecutors wrote in the 165-page dossier that Giuliani ultimately never got in touch with the presumed Michigan lawmaker because "he put the wrong number into his phone." While the former New York mayor's name is redacted in the dossier, context from the document reveals that the person Smith identified as "CC1" [co-conspirator one] is Giuliani. Earlier this year, Michigan investigators confirmed that Trump, Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were all "unindicted co-conspirators" in the fake elector probe.

Giuliani's role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election resulted in him being disbarred both in New York and more recently in Washington, D.C. While his D.C. bar status had been at least temporarily revoked since 2021, the 2001 TIME Person of the Year officially lost his law license after losing his final appeal in September. The D.C. bar specifically mentioned his work attempting to overturn the election — which resulted in felony charges in Arizona — as a primary reason to strip him of the ability to practice law.

The office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) officially served Giuliani with a felony indictment while he was celebrating his 80th birthday party. According to the New York Post, "partygoers started screaming" when one of the guests — who was revealed to be a process server who had tracked down Giuliani in Palm Beach, Florida — handed the former New York City mayor the indictment paperwork shortly after guests sang "happy birthday" to him.

READ MORE:'About damn time': Experts celebrate Giuliani losing law license in DC for election denial

Giuliani — along with more than a dozen other defendants — was charged with conspiracy, fraudulent schemes and artifices and fraudulent schemes and practices. Each charge is a felony. Defendants were also charged with felony forgery for their alleged submission of fake elector paperwork. A trial date has not yet been scheduled for the Arizona case.

The details of Giuliani's involvement in the plot were revealed to the public after U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Smith's dossier on Wednesday night. Smith submitted the document in order to justify his continued prosecution of Trump despite the Supreme Court's Trump v. United States ruling in July. In that decision, the six conservative justices on the Court agreed that presidents have absolute broad immunity from criminal prosecution for "official acts."

However, the Court left it up to lower court judges like Chutkan to determine what actually constitutes an "official act." Smith is arguing that Trump acted in his personal capacity as a candidate — and not as the president — in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Click here to read the Guardian's report in full.

READ MORE:'Partygoers started screaming': Giuliani served with indictment during his birthday party

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Giuliani disbarred while facing 'mounting legal battles and financial ruin'

an 7 24

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an 9 24

About damn time': Experts celebrate Giuliani losing law license in DC for election denial

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an 8 24

Former Donald Trump attorney Jenna Ellis has been a defendant in two separate criminal cases pertaining to Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results: one being prosecuted by Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, the other by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. And in both cases, she has avoided prison by flipping and reaching an agreement with prosecutors.

Mayes' office has agreed to drop all of the charges against Ellis in exchange for her full cooperation.

In his August 6 column, MSNBC's Jordan Rubin's offers legal analysis of Ellis' Arizona agreement — which, Rubin emphasizes, could be bad news for Rudy Giuliani.

READ MORE:Ex-fundamentalist sounds alarm about presidential election and 'Christian patriarchy'

The former New York City mayor is a criminal defendant in the Georgia and Arizona cases and was, like Ellis, a major player in Trump's unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

"When Ellis pleaded guilty in Fulton County last year," Rubin explains, "I noted that one high-profile Georgia defendant implicated by that move was Rudy Giuliani…. The Arizona indictment likewise notes that Ellis 'worked closely' with Giuliani. Given the state's decision to reach a cooperation agreement, prosecutors could be satisfied that she can truthfully detail that work in a way that helps prove their case at trial, gets other defendants to plead guilty, or both…. So, it's more potentially ominous news for at least Giuliani, whose legal woes are legion."

Rubin points out that while Trump is the main defendant in Willis' case, he hasn't been indicted in Arizona.

"Whether Trump's criminal exposure has increased is a natural thing to wonder about," the MSNBC legal journalist writes. "Recall that, unlike in Georgia, Trump wasn't charged in Arizona but rather, was referenced as an unindicted alleged co-conspirator…. Ultimately, it's the Arizona prosecutors who have the best idea of how they want to use Ellis, based on their conversations with her and among themselves.

READ MORE:New rule to 'threaten' possibility of 'secure election results' in Georgia: report

*Jordan Rubin's full MSNBC column is available at this link.

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After being called a “prophet,” Rudy Giuliani says he feels “a great deal of responsibility as a result of it, and to try to fulfill it”

05/28/24

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taunted Az then got served suboiena 80th bd

===

4 24

Giuliani suggests Republicans in Congress pressure Ukraine: “Somebody should lean on Zelensky. You want another penny? Give us your Biden — give us your Biden file.”

04/30/24

==

newsmax host calls indictments over fake electors in Arizona “tyrannical” while guest Rudy Giuliani says that Christina Bobb took the lead in that state](https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-host-calls-arizonas-indictment-rudy-giuliani-and-others-scheming-overturn-2020)

04/25/24

RSS

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Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and several others were indicted in an election interference case in Arizona. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Danny HakimMaggie Haberman

By Danny Hakim and Maggie Haberman

Published April 24, 2024

Updated April 25, 2024, 9:33 a.m. ET

Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election were indicted in Arizona on Wednesday, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf there to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state.

Boris Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s top legal strategists, was also among those indicted, a complication for Mr. Trump’s defense in the criminal trial that began this week in Manhattan over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

The indictment includes conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to alleged attempts by the defendants to change the 2020 election results. Arizona is the fourth swing state to bring an elections case involving the activities of the Trump campaign in 2020, but only the second after Georgia to go beyond the fake electors whom the campaign deployed in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.

The former president, who is seeking another term, was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona case.

“I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a recorded statement. “But as I have stated before and will say here again today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined. It’s too important.”

Thumbnail of page 1

Read the Arizona Election Indictment

Arizona on Wednesday indicted Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, as well as the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state. Here is the indictment.

READ DOCUMENT 58 PAGES

Mr. Giuliani is Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Mr. Meadows was the White House chief of staff at the time of the 2020 election. They were among a number of defendants whose names were redacted from the indictment, though it was clear from the context and the descriptions who they were. For example, the passage referencing Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said among other things that he was known as “the mayor.”

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker: Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know, and what we don’t know.

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here to get the latest news and analysis on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

Some parts of the indictment did not refer to Mr. Trump by name, instead referring to the “defendants’ attempts to declare Unindicted Coconspirator 1 and Pence the winners of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Also indicted were Mike Roman, a Trump campaign operative in 2020, John Eastman, an architect of the fake electors plan, and two other lawyers who advised Mr. Trump and his 2020 campaign: Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb.

The indictment lays out a series of alleged efforts by the defendants to overturn Arizona’s election results. They are accused of pressuring “officials responsible for certifying election results to encourage them to change the election results,” including the governor, the legislature and the Maricopa Board of Supervisors.

In all, 35 people who acted as fake electors in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and now Arizona face criminal charges for signing certificates in 2020 falsely stating that Mr. Trump had won their state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Roman and Mr. Eastman now face charges in two states, Georgia and Arizona. Ms. Ellis has already pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia.

Among those charged in Arizona are some who served as top Republican Party officials there during the 2020 election, including Kelli Ward, a former state party chairwoman, and Greg Safsten, who at the time was executive director of the state party. Two state senators, Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman, now also face charges.

Some of the people who held themselves out to be Trump electors in states that he lost in 2020 have adamantly insisted that they were acting legally. After Dr. Ward and other fake electors gathered in Phoenix that December, she wrote in a social media post that “we are the electors who represent the legal voters of Arizona!” As recently as late last year, Mr. Kern said that “there’s no such thing as fake electors.”

Late Wednesday, Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said: “The phenomenon of partisan lawfare grows more troubling by the day. Professor Eastman is innocent of criminal conduct in Arizona or any other place and will fight these charges as he has all the other unjust accusations leveled against him.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said: “The continued weaponization of our justice system should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”

Mr. Hoffman said in a social media post that he was “innocent of any crime,” adding that “I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution.”

Mr. Epshteyn was a constant presence during Mr. Trump’s civil trial in January on charges that he had defamed the New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He joined Mr. Trump at the defense table when Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case went to the bench for sidebars.

But Mr. Epshteyn has not been in New York for the current criminal case. He has described himself as an “in-house counsel” to Mr. Trump and has been something of a quarterback for the various legal teams working on the former president’s defenses in four criminal cases. He usually speaks with Mr. Trump several times a day.

Mr. Epshteyn has been arrested twice in Arizona over the last 10 years, once in 2014 for assault after a bar fight, in which he pleaded guilty and the conviction was set aside, and again in 2021, after he was accused of inappropriately touching two women. In that case, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, received probation and a fine, and the conviction again was set aside.

Mr. Epshteyn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Election deniers have not fared well at the polls in Arizona, but they maintain a grip on the state’s Republican Party. In January, the party installed a hard-right Trump supporter, Gina Swoboda, as its new leader; Ms. Swoboda runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states. Kari Lake, a fervent backer of Mr. Trump and his false election claims, was the party’s candidate for governor in 2022 (she lost) and is the leading Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat this year.

The Arizona Republican Party, in a statement, called the indictment “a blatant and unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial power, aimed solely at distracting the public” ahead of the 2024 election.

The United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Monday that challenged the state’s electronic voting machines. The case was brought by Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, who lost a 2022 race for Arizona secretary of state.

Having slates of people claiming to be electors for Mr. Trump was an integral part of the effort to keep him in office after his loss at the polls in 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies sought to block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, hoping that Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and Senate might then consider a challenge to the validity of the results in a number of battleground states like Arizona and Michigan — and then accept the pro-Trump electors from those states as valid.

In addition to the state cases, Mr. Trump is facing election interference charges himself in the Georgia case and in a federal case brought by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice.

Mr. Trump has long made a strategy of falsely claiming election fraud. After he was defeated in the 2016 Iowa caucus, he said that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the winner of that contest, “illegally stole it.” And after Mr. Trump received fewer votes nationwide in 2016 than Hillary Clinton did, he said that he had actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Faced with criminal charges in the state elections inquiries, some of Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers have backtracked from his 2020 claims.

“Biden was elected, the process was followed,” Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake elector plan, told investigators in Michigan last year. Mr. Chesebro has emerged as a key witness in the state prosecutions.

James Renner, a former Michigan state trooper who was a last-minute substitution as a fake elector in that state, expressed regret last year to investigators, saying that he “had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.” Charges against him were dropped as part of a cooperation agreement with the office of Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, a Democrat.

Richard Fausset, Alan Feuer, Jonathan Swan and Benjamin Protess contributed reporting.

Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics. More about Danny Hakim

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition

===

facing disbar in NY and DC? 7 23

Rudy Giuliani’s legal 'humiliations' threaten his knighthood in the UK: report - Alternet.org

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Embattled Giuliani files for bankruptcy after being order to pay $148M judgement - Alternet.org

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'Frightening prospect': Analyst explains why Giuliani’s 'about-face' on testifying was 'human' decision - Alternet.org

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148M $ DEFAMATION, THEN LIED AGAIN (EXHOR EVID ALWAYS ON THE WAY, THO HE BACKED OUT ON TESTIFYING; SO THEY SUED AGAIN

wtf? Judge: Giuliani doubling down on election worker attacks 'could support another defamation claim' - Alternet.org

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GA TRUMP INDICTMENT

1 VIOLATION OF THE GEORGIA RICO

(RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) ACT O.C.G.A. 16144(c)

2 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1640-1

3 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

4 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 1610-20

5 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

6 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 1610-1

7 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16102'0

8 IMPERSONATING PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. 16-1023

9 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT INIPERSONATIN PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-8 16-10-23

10 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 169-1(b)

11 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT FORGERY 1N THE FIRST DEGREE

12 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

13 CONSPIRACY TO COMmIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§

14 CRiminAL ATTEMPT To COMMIT filing FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. §§ 1641 16102o.1(b)(1)

15 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FALSE DOCUMENTS

16 FORGERY IN THE FIRST DEGREE O.C.G.A. 16-9-1(b)

17 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT FORGERY THE FIRST DEGREE

18 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS

19 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-10-20

20 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCING WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161093(b)(1)(A)

21 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT INFLUENCUYG WITNESSES O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-1& 16-10-93(b)(1)(A)

22 CRIMINAL ATTEMPT TO COMMIT FALSE STATEMENTS AND writings  O.C.G.A. §§ 16-41 161020

23 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16-10-1

24 FALSE STATENIENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

25 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 161020

26 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

27 FILING FALSE DOCUMENTS O.C.G.A. 16-1020.1(b)(1)

28 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 164-7 16-10-1

29 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-10-20

30 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT SOLICITATION OF FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8, 16-4-7 16-10-20

31 INFLUENcing WITNESSES O.C.G.A. 161093(b)(1)(A)

32 CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2603 21-2-566

33 CONSPIRACY TO CONIMIT ELECTION FRAUD

O.C.G.A. §§ 21-2-603 21-2-574

34 CONSPIRACY To COMMIT COMPUTER THEFT O.C.G.A. §§ 1648 16993(a)

35 CONSPIRACY TO COMlVIIT COMPUTER TRESPASS O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 16-9-93(b)

36 CONSPIRACY TO COMIVIIT COMPUTER INVASION OF PRIVACY O.C.G.A. §§ 16-4-8 169-93(c)

37 CONSPIRACY TO DEFRAUD TIE STATE O.C.G.A. 16-1021

39 SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH

BY PUBLIC OFFICER O.C.G.A. §§ 16-47 16101

39 FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS O.C.G.A. 16-1020

40 FALSE STATEMENTS and writings

41 perjury

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/08/15/here-are-19-people-named-sweeping-indictments-against-donald-trump/

no lnx

Here are the 19 people named in the sweeping indictment against Donald Trump

Here is a list of who is named in Fani Willis’ sweeping indictment of the nation’s 45th president and his allies.

By Tim Darnell, Atlanta News First staff and The Associated Press

Published: Aug. 14, 2023

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ sweeping indictment from her investigation into alleged attempts by former President Donald Trump to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election includes some of the most prominent figures in the Republican Party.

It comes just two weeks after the Justice Department special counsel charged him in a vast conspiracy to overturn the election, underscoring how prosecutors after lengthy investigations that followed the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol have now, two-and-a-half years later, taken steps to hold Trump to account for an assault on the underpinnings of American democracy.

Though the indictment is centered on Trump’s efforts to subvert election results in just one state, its sprawling web of defendants stands apart from the more tightly-targeted case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, which so far only names Trump as a defendant. The Georgia case also stands out because, unlike the two federal prosecutions he faces, Trump would not have the opportunity to try to pardon himself if elected president.

FULL COVERAGE: Timeline, history and key players of historic indictment in Georgia

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” says the indictment issued Monday night by the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

The indictment charges Trump with making false statements and writings for a series of claims he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other state election officials on Jan. 2, 2021, including that up to 300,000 ballots “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in the 2020 election, that more than 4,500 people voted who weren’t on registration lists and that a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “professional vote scammer.”

Here are the 19 people named in the indictment:

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- RUDY GIULIANI: During several legislative hearings at the Georgia Capitol in December 2020, the former New York mayor and Trump attorney promoted unsupported allegations of widespread election fraud in Georgia. Prosecutors have said Rudy Giuliani was also involved a plan to have 16 Georgia Republicans serve as fake electors, falsely swearing that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.

- JENNA ELLIS: The lawyer appeared with Rudy Giuliani at a Dec. 3, 2020, hearing hosted by state Republican lawmakers at the Georgia Capitol during which false allegations of election fraud were made. Jenna Ellis also wrote at least two legal memos to Trump and his attorneys advising that Pence should “disregard certified electoral college votes from Georgia and other purportedly ‘contested’ states” when Congress met to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutors have said.

Willis’ indictments come after months of speculation into whether the first-term Fulton County district attorney would bring charges against the nation’s 45th president. Among the former president’s mounting legal troubles, Willis’ indictments mark the second time Trump has been linked to any alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Those charges include allegedly pressuring Georgia election officials to change the election’s results, including his now-famous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021.

In February 2021, Willis opened a criminal investigation “into attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election,” a contest that saw Joe Biden become the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992 by less than one percent of the state’s overall vote.

A special grand jury with subpoena power was seated later that May at her request. In court filings, she alleged “a multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Willis’ investigation also examined an alleged plot involving 16 Republicans who served as fake electors, one of whom was allegedly then-state Sen. Burt Jones, now Georgia’s lieutenant governor.

Willis’ special grand jury investigation heard from 75 witnesses. Some of the more notable figures were Gov. Brian Kemp; Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr; Raffensperger; Duncan; former White House official Mark Meadows; former U.S. House speaker and Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich; and Republican South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Last year, Raffensperger told a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump’s claims of 2020 election fraud “were false.”

Raffensperger, along with Gabriel Sterling, the office’s chief operating officer, appeared before the Democrat-led House Select Committee’s nationally televised public hearings. Raffensperger told the committee that the 2020 election went “remarkably smooth,” with average ballot-casting wait times between two to three minutes statewide. “I felt we had a successful election,” he said.

Trump has accused Willis of conducting a “strictly political witch hunt.” In a September 2022 statement, he also took aim at Atlanta as “number 1 in the country in murders and heinous crimes, especially on a per capita basis - even worse than now-fabled Chicago.”

“Yet the District Attorney there is spending almost all of her waking hours, which aren’t many, on attempting to prosecute a very popular president, Donald J. Trump, who got more votes in 2020 than any sitting president in the history of the United States,” Trump said at that time.

Timeline of Donald Trump/Georgia investigation

Trump timeline

Trump announced his 2024 White House candidacy last November.

Earlier this year, Willis notified Fulton County deputies she would announce charges from her investigation sometime between July 11 and Sept. 1. She also notified Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville her office planned to work remotely during the first three weeks of August and asked no trials be scheduled during that time.

Willis’ indictments are the latest in a series of legal troubles for the nation’s 45th president. Back in April, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. With Bragg’s indictment, Trump became the first former president in history to be criminally indicted at any level.

In early May, Trump lost a civil battery and defamation case against him in New York in a case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll. The writer claimed Trump assaulted her in a New York department store back in the 1990s. A Manhattan federal jury has ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million, which the former president is appealing.

Then, on June 13, Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Miami on a single federal indictment that included more than 30 charges of mishandling classified documents after he left the White House in January 2021. Trump became the first ex-president ever to face criminal charges from the federal government he once oversaw.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing that federal investigation, was also responsible for overseeing the criminal investigation involving Trump’s alleged role in the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, an investigation that yielded, earlier this month, the four-count felony indictment.

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office sent deputies to both New York and Miami to observe how local law enforcement prepared for any demonstrations or possible unrest in the wake of Trump’s indictments.

In late July, security barriers were seen being set up around the Fulton County courthouse. Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat said in early August his department would be ready for any demonstrations or civil unrest that may result from Willis’ indictments.

FULL COVERAGE OF DONALD TRUMP/GEORGIA INVESTIGATION

Trump Investigation

He also said the former president, if indicted, would be booked, photographed and processed at the county jail on Rice Street, a facility that has come under intense scrutiny over the last several months because of its allegedly deplorable conditions, and which is also the target of a U.S. Department of Justice civil investigation.

link

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/08/15/10-indictments-approved-fulton-countys-2020-georgia-election-interference-investigation/

...The charges include:

...In total, there are 41 counts listed in the indictment. Trump is named in 13 of the counts.

Everyone named in the indictment is facing a violation of the Georgia RICO Act charge.

Willis said at a Monday night press conference that those named in the indictment are alleged to have engaged in a “criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results.”

Willis said as is “the normal process in Georgia law,” the grand jury has also issued arrest warrants for those charged in the indictment. Willis said she is giving them until noon on Friday, Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender.

==

THE STATE OF GEORGIA

V. DONALD JOHN TRUMP

Counts 1,5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 2729, 38-39

RUDOLPH WILLIAM LOUIS GIULIANI

Counts 1-3, 6-7, 9,11,13,15,17,19, 23-24

JOHN ChaRLES EASTMAN

Counts 1-2, 9, 11,13, 15, 17, 19, 27

MARK RANDALL MEADOWS

Counts 1, 28

KENNETH JOHN CHESEBRO

Counts 1, 9,11,13,15,17,19

JEFFREY BOSSERT CLARK

Counts 1, 22

JENNA LYNN ELLIS

Counts 12 RAY STALLINGS SNIITH III Counts 1-2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13,15, 17,19, 23, 25

ROBERT DAVID CHEELEY

Counts 1, 9,11,13, 15, 17,19, 23, 26, 41

MICHAEL A. ROMAN

Counts 1, 9, 11,13,15,17, 19

:{:{}:

}:

 DAVID JAMES SHAFER

Counts 1, 8,10,12,14,16,18, 40

:{:{}:

}:

:{:{}:

SHAWN MCAH TRESHER STILL

Counts 1, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18

STEPHEN CLIFFGARD LEE

Counts 1, 20-21, 30-31

HARRISON WILLIAM PRESCOTT

FLOYD

Counts 1,

3031 Emma

TREVIAN C. KUTTI Counts 1,

SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL  Counts 1, 32-37

CATHLEEN ALSTON LATHAM

Counts 1, 8, 10, 12, 14, 32-37

SCOTT GRAHAM HALL

Counts 1, 32-37

misty hampton aka

Counts 1, 32-37

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timeline:  https://www.alternet.org/timeline-the-georgia-investigation-into-2020-election-interference/

}:

12/20 GA HEARING, ELECTOS RIGHT AFTER

GIULIANI ADMITS LYING ABOUT ELECTIONS WORKERS

JULY 25, 2023

Giuliani, Trump's attorney, admits to making false statements against two Fulton County poll workers who came under the dogged attack of election deniers in the aftermath of Georgia’s 2020 election. Giuliani acknowledged in a U.S. District Court filing that he wouldn't object to a judge finding his statements caused emotional distress to former workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea Moss. They were accused of illegal ballot counting in a controversial State Farm Arena video after the 2020 election.

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baaack?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-viktor-shokin-interview-misses-basics-ignores-what-fox-already-knows

no lnx many

Fox’s Viktor Shokin interview misses the basics, ignores what Fox already knows

Viktor Shokin was pushed out for corruption, regardless of what Fox News tries to manufacture

WRITTEN BY JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES & JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JOHN WHITEHOUSE & JULIE MILLICAN

PUBLISHED 08/25/23

On August 25, Fox News previewed an interview of former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by network host Brian Kilmeade that is set to air in full on August 26. In the preview segment, Shokin accused President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden of “corruption” and “being bribed” to push for the prosecutor’s removal from office in 2016. In fact, there was widespread agreement at the time across the political spectrum in the United States and the European Union that Shokin should be fired for being soft on corruption, including State Department allegations that Shokin himself was corrupt. Additionally, at the time of his removal, Shokin wasn’t actively investigating Hunter Biden or Burisma, an energy company that had hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board of directors. Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer recently testified that it would have been better for Burisma if the Ukrainian government had kept Shokin because he was unlikely to move against the company.

Shokin’s claims are part of a longstanding smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani on behalf of former President Donald Trump, which ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Fox News knew Shokin’s claims were baseless then and continues to know it now, but the network is airing Shokin’s baseless allegations regardless.

Pushing for Shokin to be fired was the policy of not only the United States, where it was supported by leading Republicans, but also the international community

European nations, the United States, and over 100 members of Ukrainian parliament had pressured the Ukrainian government for months to fire Shokin. The international community concluded that Shokin was “turning a blind eye to corrupt practices” and “defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite.” [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2/11/16; The New York Times, 3/29/16]

In 2015, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt called Shokin “an obstacle” to anti-corruption efforts. Ukraine’s refusal to act on anti-corruption measures, including keeping Shokin, resulted in the International Monetary Fund threatening to withhold $40 billion in aid. The European Union applauded his removal. [The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/19]

Protests in Ukraine demanded Shokin’s removal after he launched an investigation into an anti-corruption watchdog group and had fired various anti-corruption prosecutors. The group, Anti-Corruption Action Center, had publicly criticized Shokin. [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 3/28/16; Kyiv Post, 3/25/16]

In 2016, Republican Sens. Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson and Democratic colleagues addressed a letter to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, calling for him to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.” The bipartisan letter was also signed by five Senate Democrats, underlining that removing Shokin was the consensus view in Washington, D.C. — not a pet project of the Biden family. [CNN, 10/3/2019]

Johnson would later lead a committee that investigated Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma and failed to uncover any evidence of wrongdoing. The New York Times noted, “In fact, investigators heard witness testimony that rebutted those charges,” and Johnson acknowledged there were no “massive smoking guns” in the report. [The New York Times, 9/23/20]

George Kent, the State Department’s expert on Ukraine, testified during Trump’s first impeachment trial that Shokin’s corruption led to his removal. Shokin was fired over corruption allegations and was not actively investigating Burisma when he was removed. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that Kent confirmed that Joe Biden called for the removal of “a corrupt prosecutor general … who had undermined a system of criminal investigation” into Ukrainian corruption cases, and “destroyed the entire ecosystem that we were trying to create.” Kent, who was the No. 2 official in the embassy at the time, explained that Biden was following the official U.S. government position that Shokin must be removed because he was “an impediment to the reform of the prosecutorial system, and he had directly undermined in repeated fashion U.S. efforts and U. S. assistance programs.” In fact, Kent testified that the idea to fire Shokin originated in the State Department before being pitched to others, including then-Vice President Biden. [The Washington Post, 11/19/19; Media Matters, 11/12/19]

At the time of his removal, Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of an investigation into the company

Former Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaliy Kasko said in May 2019 that the investigation into Burisma had been “shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.” Shokin had stalled investigations into Burisma and its co-founder Mykola Zlochevsky. In 2014, he undermined an attempt by British authorities to freeze $23 million worth of Zlochevsky’s assets. [Bloomberg, 5/7/19]

Devon Archer testified that he was not aware of any Shokin-led investigation into Burisma. He also testified that he had no reason to believe that then-Vice President Biden called for Shokin’s removal “was driven by anything other than the U.S. Government’s anticorruption policy in Ukraine,” and confirmed that firing Shokin “was bad for Burisma because he was under control.” [Media Matters, 8/3/23]

Investigations involving Burisma targeted Zlochevsky, who had been accused of “abuse of power, illegal enrichment and money laundering,” rather than the company itself. Shokin had allegedly “dragged his feet” on these investigations, and Hunter Biden, as a board member, was not a target. [The Wall Street Journal, 9/22/19]

Fox News knew its sourcing on the Ukraine conspiracy theory was unreliable

Conservative writer John Solomon was a key distributor of Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories regarding Shokin’s firing.From March 20, 2019 — when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory — through October 2, 2019, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times, including 51 appearances on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show [Media Matters, 10/17/19]

During that period, Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S. Murphy produced an internal “research briefing book” that “openly question[ed] Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an ‘indispensable role’ in a Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign,’” according to The Daily Beast. Murphy’s research came from what was known as Fox’s “Brain Room,” which the network later disbanded, and described Solomon as having “played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign.” [The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]

Murphy’s research book also advised that Giuliani had a “high susceptibility to disinformation” that was being fed to him by unreliable Ukrainian sources. [The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]

Fox News continues to accuse Joe Biden of taking bribes regarding Shokin’s firing even when confronted with contradictory evidence. On August 9, a panel discussion on The Five descended into chaos after co-host Jessica Tarlov attempted to get her co-panelists to acknowledge recent testimony from Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer. Archer “was asked, if someone concluded … that Joe Biden was bribed, would you disagree with that? ‘Yeah, I would.’ Devon Archer said that,” Tarlov said to the panel. [Fox News, The Five, 8/9/23]

Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who would later be arrested for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was the lynchpin to the entire scheme

Solomon’s reporting laid the groundwork for Giuliani’s investigations in Ukraine, which ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. Some of Solomon’s key sources were “disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and the allies of Dmytro Firtash, an indicted Ukrainian oligarch and accused high-level Russian mafia associate,” who “have been seen as forces driving Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump’s political enemies.” [Media Matters, 10/17/19; The Daily Beast, 2/6/20]

Giuliani ultimately sent his findings to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, complete with “unproven allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden” with the goal of undermining a future Biden presidential run. Giuliani used his documents “to bolster unproven allegations that Biden pressured Ukraine in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who has been involved with a business interest there, and that the Obama administration was using Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” [NBC News, 10/3/19]

After Trump’s phone call attempting to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was revealed, Giuliani engaged in a press strategy to redirect the focus back to the Bidens. Some mainstream outlets took the bait, with headlines like “Scrutiny over Trump’s Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden’s campaign” and “Why Trump’s Ukraine scandal could backfire on Biden.” [Media Matters, 9/23/19]

https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/rudy-giuliani-and-oans-chanel-rion-say-fox-news-shokin-claims-are-same-what-they-did

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no lnx

Rudy Giuliani and OAN's Chanel Rion say that Fox News' Shokin claims are the same as what they did in Ukraine in 2019

The trip by Giuliani to Ukraine led to Trump's first impeachment trial

WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 08/28/23

As Matt Gertz pointed out earlier today, Fox News is indeed running with Rudy Giuliani's propaganda operation from 2019, as laid out in the first impeachment trial of then-president, Donald Trump. You can find more information debunking the claims about Shokin by Giuliani, Rion, and Fox News here.

Chanel Rion on WABC's Chat with the Mayor, "Fox taking credit for all of this, trying to say that this is all breaking news. It's not breaking news."

AUGUST 28, 2023

Audio

SHARE

CitationFrom the August 28, 2023, edition of WABC's Chat with the Mayor

RUDY GIULIANI (HOST) Chanel accompanied me – and I accompanied her – when we made our somewhat secret trip to Ukraine. And then she did a four-part documentary.

...

GIULIANI: So here's why I wanted to put you on. I mean, our friend, [Viktor] Shokin, is getting a lot of attention, but I'm feeling a little neglected, and you should too. We told his whole story three years ago, Chanel. 

CHANEL RION (GUEST): We absolutely did. When I called you up and you started telling me about Shokin. And I said, you know what? Let's go find him. So we did. We hopped on a plane. We went overseas. I was the only American journalist and OAN is the only news outlet that actually took the trouble to try and find –

GIULIANI: You’re damn right. Nobody cared. Nobody cared.

RION:  And here's the thing. Fox taking credit for all of this, trying to say that this is all breaking news. It's not breaking news. We did in fact break this story four years ago in 2019. And It's fine. It's not about getting the credit. It's about doing what's right with the information as we receive it. And we had this information four years ago when Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, told the world that he was wrongfully terminated from his job because he was getting too close to Hunter Biden, and Devon Archer, and Joe Biden's money source. He told us that.

And the lesson that we should learn here is the fact that the establishment is trying to step up here, trying to take credit for it. Keep in mind that it’s the establishment, no matter what category we're talking about, the establishment is never on the front lines of the battlefield, ever.

It's always the little guy who's taking the slings and arrows and the bullets at the front line.

GIULIANI: Absolutely right.

RION: The establishment is never to be found on the front lines of the battle. Now who is going to be the first to claim victory when there is victory to be claimed? The establishment. So, of course, you have Fox coming in here, you know, four years late saying they're breaking the story and they're claiming this big hurrah. It’s ridiculous.

Fox News radio host cheers on ranger plowing into climate activist blockade

08/29/23 11:16 AM EDT

Pagination

Related

Rudy Giuliani says Fox News “wouldn't let” Sean Hannity interview Viktor Shokin

08/28/23 4:59 PM EDT

Fox spent nearly 3 hours on its Viktor Shokin interview in rerun of its Ukraine disinformation campaign

08/28/23 2:00 PM EDT

Fox’s Viktor Shokin interview misses the basics, ignores what Fox already knows

08/25/23 6:10 PM EDT

---

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/:{co-conspirator-rudy-giuliani-suggests-trumps-prosecutors-should-be-indicted}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/mark-levin/fox-news-mark-levin-says-jack-smith-has-started-war-against-country

https://www.mediamatters.org/greg-gutfeld/fox-news-gutfeld-says-indictments-donald-trump-are-payback-being-outsider

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-laura-ingraham-says-donald-trump-was-indicted-january-6-protect-joe-biden-and

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-jonathan-turley-claims-donald-trump-protected-first-amendment-charges-january-6th

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/monica-crowley-they-are-basically-indicting-donald-trump-joe-bidens-crimes

NOT FOX?  https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-trump-was-doing-his-duty-make-sure-2020-election-had-been-fairly-decided

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-knowles/michael-knowles-trumps-third-indictment-they-want-kill-him

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no lnx an 723

Trump’s post-election 'elite strike force' has been facing a 'legal reckoning': ex-federal prosecutor

Alex HendersonJuly 26, 2023

In late 2020 and early 2021, Donald Trump had an entire team of attorneys who enthusiastically promoted his false and repeatedly debunked claim that the presidential election was stolen from him. Among them were Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The lawyers were not successful. On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden — the legitimate winner of the election — was sworn in as president. But the Big Lie and the January 6, 2021 insurrection raised troubling questions about the fragility of U.S. democracy.

In an article published by Politico on July 26, attorney and former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori examines the repercussions that some of Trump's 2020 lawyers have been facing.

READ MORE: 'Shot down in court': Report details the legal headaches dogging Trump’s allies

Giuliani, Ellis and Powell, according to Khardori, described themselves as Trump's "elite strike force team" after the 2020 election but are now experiencing "modest signs of a reckoning within the legal profession."

:{:{}:

}:

"Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York, and early this month, a disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., recommended that he be disbarred for 'frivolous' and 'destructive' conduct," the attorney observes. "A federal appeals court recently upheld court sanctions against Powell for making 'entirely baseless' claims and 'frivolous allegations of widespread voter fraud.' And in March, Ellis was censured by a judge in Colorado for making false claims 'on Twitter and to nationally televised audiences' that 'undermined the American public's confidence in the presidential election.'"

Khardori adds that another pro-Trump lawyer, Georgia residentLin Woods, "formally retired from" his practice in Georgia "in an apparent bid to avoid being disbarred." And former law professor John C. Eastman, who wrote an outline for overturning the election results, is facing possible disbarment in California.

"This is to say nothing of the fact that most — if not all — of these lawyers appear to be under scrutiny by federal prosecutors at the Justice Department, as well as by local prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia," Khardori explains. "Against this backdrop stands the65 Project, a legal advocacy group that was created to pursue accountability for the lawyers who sought to subvert American democracy in the 2020 election."

READ MORE: DC legal committee calls for Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment over election interference: report

The 65 Project was co-founded by Media Matters' David Brock.According to Khardori, the group "secured" the "disciplinary action" against Ellis.

The former federal prosecutor notes, "The group was watching closely during the 2022 midterms, and it's now gearing up for plenty of fights in the courts ahead of another potentially chaotic national election as Trump, the current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, desperately fights for both his political and corporal lives."

READ MORE: 'Brutal': Rudy Giuliani mocked after blistering takedown from the D.C. Bar Association

Ankush Khardori's full article for Politico is available at this link.

A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Here’s why the ‘tortured logic’ of Sidney Powell’s defamation lawsuit defense is so weak: conservative law professor ›

Giuliani said he was 'selling pardons for $2 million, which he and Trump would split': ex-associate complaint ›

Rudy Giuliani is still an honored man at these five colleges despite a tsunami of legal scandals ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Sidney Powell's legal defense: 'Reasonable people' wouldn't ... ›

Disciplinary panel calls for Rudy Giuliani's disbarment - POLITICO ›

Rudy Giuliani concedes he made defamatory statements about ... ›

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aha uniquely vulnerable to grift  b/c not soc med savvy, ppl get more conserv as age, easy to scare /hype thus con

note no left equiv

https://www.alternet.org/gold-ira-right-wing-media/

no ln 7 23

How 'gold IRA' industry ads became a 'mainstay of right-wing media': report

Fox News' Laura Ingraham In July 2022 (Gage Skidmore).

Alex Henderson July 25, 2023

For many years, right-wing media outlets have been aggressively promoting gold as a safe haven for retirees. Anyone who has spent a lot of time consuming right-wing media, be it Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV or AM talk radio, has likely come across gold commercials.

:{:{}:

}:

In a report published by the Washington Post on July 25, journalists Jeremy B. Merrill and Hanna Kozlowska stress that the "gold retirement investment industry" has "become a mainstay of right-wing media."

"An analysis by The Post of political newsletters, social media, podcasts and a national database of television ads collected by the company AdImpact found that pitches to invest in gold coins are a daily presence in media that caters to a right-wing audience and often echo conservative talking points about looming economic and societal collapse," Merrill and Kozlowska explain. "The Post found no similar ads for gold retirement investments in mainstream or left-wing media sources in the databases."

READ MORE: Fox News' relationship with Turning Point USA is 'basically over': report

Lawsuits against "gold IRA" companies, according to Merrill and Kozlowska, are not uncommon. One of the companies that has been sued is Lear Capital, a Fox News advertiser that sells gold and silver coins.

The Washington Post reporters note that "over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies."

Terry White, a disabled retiree, told the Post he invested $174,000 in gold coins with Lear and found out the company charges a 33 percent commission. White said he lost almost $80,000.

"For years," Merrill and Kozlowska report, "gold IRA industry advertising has echoed accusations against Democratic politicians commonly found in news segments on conservative outlets. The ads tout the coins as a safe haven from economic uncertainty and social upheaval. Most of the coins are manufactured by the Royal Canadian Mint, which says they're bullion — a kind of coin whose value is determined by the underlying metal. As such, they meet IRS rules for retirement investments."

READ MORE: 'They must comply': Newsmax employees subpoenaed in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit

According to Merrill and Kozlowska, an "analysis of ad data and financial records" shows that the"gold IRA" industry "spends millions of dollars a year to reach viewers of Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets."

:{:{}:

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"Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have promoted the coins," the Post reporters observe, "while ads for Lear's competitors have appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Newsmax broadcasts of former President Donald Trump's political rallies."

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report

Find the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Sean Hannity — under oath — admits he 'didn’t believe' election lies 'for one second': deposition ›

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Smartmatic sues One America News over 2020 election claims ... ›

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Dominion's 2020 election lawsuit against Newsmax to move forward ... ›

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an 6 23

former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Sunday compared President Joe Biden's alleged scandals to what he claimed was "deviancy" of LGBTQ+ people.

During Sunday's Uncovering the Truth on WABC, Giuliani noted that Republicans planned to meet with the FBI over documents they believe will show evidence of corruption.

"But to sit by and watch a guy get elected president who's been a thirty-year bribe taker," Giuliani said.

"Well, it's that defining deviancy down," co-host Maria Ryan agreed. "Once you do that and you start getting used to certain things."

"It's almost like gays, right?" she added. "At one time in this population, it was really frowned upon. It was misunderstood whatever, and now it's accepted, and they have equal rights. So you just get used to certain things."

Ryan said she had probably not used the "best example" by comparing gay people to Biden.

"No, no, I think it's not the best example, but it is a good example in this sense," Giuliani remarked. "You take anything to an extreme, and you can get into the area of deviancy. Look, heterosexuals can be deviants. Nothing wrong with gay, nothing wrong with lesbian except if it morphs into pedophilia."

Ryan interrupted to suggest same-sex attraction was unnatural....

---

mma 3 23

https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/rudy-giuliani-tells-his-audience-not-trust-fox-news-i-happen-find-what-fox-doing

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j6 ch 5 snippet

:

...But Vice President Pence would not be bullied. The Vice President, who was at his residence at the time, had been meeting with Greg Jacob to finalize the statement he would be releasing later that day. When the President called, Pence stepped away to answer the phone. According to Jacob, when Pence returned, he did not say anything about the call—but he looked “steely, determined, [and] grim,” as he reentered the room.246

c. January 6, 2021: Trump, Eastman and Giuliani Continue to Pressure Vice President Pence at the Ellipse Rally.

Despite the Vice President’s unwavering stance, the President and his outside counsel continued to turn up the heat of public pressure.

At President Trump’s urging, thousands had gathered on the morning of January 6th to hear the President and others speak at a rally held at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. Before President Trump spoke, Eastman took the stage alongside Giuliani. Both would further amplify the President’s public pressure on the Vice President, but when Giuliani spoke on the Ellipse, he already knew that what Eastman had outlined would never practically happen.

:{:{}:

At 9:31 a.m. that morning, Giuliani called Eric Herschmann “out of the blue” to ask him for his view and analysis of the practical implications of Eastman’s theory.247 According to Herschmann, after an “intellectual discussion about . . . the VP’s role,” Giuliani agreed that the “practical implication of [what Eastman had proposed] would be almost impossible.” 248 Immediately after this 5½ minute conversation with Herschmann, Giuliani had two calls with the White House, at 9:41 a.m. and 9:53 a.m.249

Giuliani recognized Eastman who joined him on stage, claiming that he was “one of the preeminent constitutional scholars in the United States.” 250}:

Giuliani said Vice President Pence could either “decide on the validity of these crooked ballots, or he can send it back to the legislat[ures], give them five to 10 days to finally finish the work.” 251 He added that that they had “letters from five legislat[ures] begging us to do that.” 252 This was not true. At most, what Giuliani, Eastman and other allies of President Trump had managed to procure were letters from individual State legislators or groups of State legislators. None of the letters came from a majority of any State’s legislative chamber, let alone a majority of an entire State legislature.253

...

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philly inq

https://www.mcall.com/news/pennsylvania/mc-nws-pa-republicans-jan-6-help-trump-20221222-ccq7ly5w2rfergjbcnwdatya3a-story.html

hundreds of pages of deposition transcripts released Wednesday by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack offered new insights into the roles Pennsylvania Republicans played in aiding President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee is expected to issue the full report on its investigation on Thursday. But the newly released transcripts were filled with new details including that Mike Roman, a Philadelphia native and one of Trump’s top election advisers, helped spearhead the effort to send pro-Trump electors to Washington as Congress met to certify the election results that day.

They also revealed a previously undisclosed attempt by state Sen. Doug Mastriano to access certain voting machines days before Jan. 6 as well as references to a plan floated by the White House to sue Pennsylvania directly in the U.S. Supreme Court over its administration of the 2020 vote. The documents also shed new light on the role a congressional staffer for U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly played behind the scenes.

Here are some of the highlights from the committee’s interviews:

Mike Roman: A key Trump campaign operative’s role in the false electors scheme

Roman, a longtime Philadelphia Republican political operative, appeared to play a key role in organizing false electors in swing states such as Pennsylvania as part of a plot to overturn the election.

A former Philadelphia ward leader and senior adviser to the Trump campaign, Roman was designated by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as “the lead for executing the voting” by the fake electors Dec. 14, 2020, according to an email the committee cited in an interview transcript released Wednesday.

The interview transcript suggests the pro-Trump electors in Pennsylvania were concerned about possible legal exposure if they signed official certificates purporting to be the legitimate electors.

In the interview, investigators referenced a Dec. 12, 2020, email sent to Roman from Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.

“Mike, here is my suggested language for dealing with the concern raised in the PA conference call about electors possibly facing legal exposure, parenthesis, at the hands of a partisan AG, close parenthesis, if they seem to certify that they are currently the valid electors,” the transcript says.

Investigators also asked Roman whether he knew if Mastriano, the state senator who ran as the GOP’s candidate for Pennsylvania governor this year, had expressed concerns about the elector plan. Roman pleaded the Fifth.

The transcript suggests Roman also played a role in organizing the delivery of Wisconsin Republicans’ fake elector certificate to Congress on Jan. 6. A person investigators identified as Michael Brown texted associates that he “should probably buy Roman a tie for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 ... ”

That’s an apparent reference to the disputed presidential election that year.

Roman refused to say whether he’d instructed Brown to deliver the document, the transcript says.

The interview transcript also references a briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers in November 2020 about purported election fraud. On Nov. 8, 2020, Roman shared with an associate a screenshot of a message he’d obtained that said: “Maybe the Trump campaign should get some actual evidence of fraud and file in court. They’ve been horrible in their court filings. We just got a report from their legal team. They told us on caucus they have zero evidence.”

Roman declined to tell investigators who sent him the message or to discuss the briefing of Pennsylvania lawmakers, apparently delivered by Kentucky’s secretary of state.

U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly: Staffer’s behind-the-scenes involvement in false electors effort

Committee investigators repeatedly asked Roman during his deposition what he knew about behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine the election by a longtime top aide to U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Butler County Republican and a top Trump ally in the House.

Between Nov. 21 and Dec. 4, 2020, Roman exchanged 25 messages with Kelly’s then-chief-of-staff, Matt Stroia, according to questioning in the deposition transcripts. Those included exchanges that suggested Stroia may have played a more active and earlier role in the efforts by Trump and his allies than was previously known.

His name had previously surfaced in the committee’s work in connection with efforts to deliver the slates of pro-Trump electors to Pence on Jan. 6.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has said his office passed along the lists to Pence but that it was Kelly’s office that provided it to him. And while Kelly initially denied Johnson’s claims as “patently false,” the congressman’s office later acknowledged an “internal investigation” found Stroia had been in contact with Johnson’s staff.

But Roman’s deposition before the Jan. 6 Committee suggests Stroia may also have played a role in organizing a raucous Nov. 25 state Senate hearing in Gettysburg, during which Mastrianoand Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis pushed unfounded claims of fraud in the Pennsylvania election. Trump called in from Washington to voice his support.

“I hope it turns out like we envisioned,” Stroia wrote to Roman three days before the hearing in a message quoted in the deposition transcripts.

During his interview with the Jan. 6 Committee, Roman pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer questions about it or discuss whether he or Stroia had any involvement in organizing the Gettysburg hearing.

But other messages cited in Roman’s deposition show Stroia was in direct contact with Giuliani, who spearheaded Trump’s election challenges in the state. In one exchange with Roman, Stroia said he’d directed the president’s lawyer to talk to Roman instead.

“Do you know why Mr. Giuliani would have been calling Mike Kelly’s chief of staff ... about presidential election issues rather than you, who was acting as director of election day operations for the campaign?” committee staffers asked. He added: “I told him that you will know everything I do.”

Asked to explain, Roman again pleaded the Fifth.

Doug Mastriano and Jenna Ellis: The state senator and Trump lawyer sought access to Pennsylvania voting machines

The committee’s interview with Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis also shed light on Mastriano’s postelection activities.

“We made good headway convincing [hopefully] two counties with Dominion machines in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano wrote in a Dec. 28 email to Ellis, according to the transcript.

In another email, Mastriano makes reference to efforts to gain access to “ballot images.” Ellis declined to tell investigators why Mastriano was interested in that.

In a Dec. 29 email, Mastriano told Ellis that he’d emailed Trump himself with a letter related to “securing voluntary access for Dominion forensics.”

Fulton County later gave a third-party firm access to its Dominion voting machines, facilitated by Mastriano and state Sen. Judy Ward, R-Blair, for a supposed “audit” of the votes. That prompted the state to decertify those voting machines and force the county to obtain new ones. It wasn’t immediately clear which other counties Mastriano and other Trump allies sought to hand over access to voting machines.

Elliswas also questioned about her contacts with Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutlerand Jake Corman and Kim Ward, the GOP leaders of the State Senate. She declined to answer questions, however, on any efforts she and Giuliani had made to pressure them to set aside the state’s election results.

Cutler previously told the committee that Giuliani and Ellis called him daily during the run-up to Congress’ certification of the election, looking to push a baseless theory that state legislatures could set aside election results based on unsupported suspicions of fraud and appoint a new slate of Electoral College delegates instead.

Cutler said he largely avoided those calls, thinking they were inappropriate and had his attorneys respond, asking Giuliani and Ellis to stop contacting him.

Jeffrey Clark: A White House plan to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court

In December 2020, Trump had White House lawyers draft a complaint to sue Pennsylvania in the U.S. Supreme Court over the administration of its election, according to committee questioning in the deposition of former Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark.

Clark, a Philadelphia native, has emerged as a central focus for the committee due to his role in a drama in which Trump briefly considered appointing him attorney general in the waning days of his administration.

Clark had been introduced to the president by U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a York County Republican and key ally of the president in Congress. And according to earlier testimony before the committee, Clark expressed a willingness to use the Justice Department to pressure state legislatures in battleground states to overturn their election results despite no evidence of significant fraud.

On Monday, the Jan. 6 Committee referred him to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.

During two contentious deposition interviews with the committee in November 2021 and February 2022, Clark refused to answer almost any questions about his relationship to Perry, his conversations with Trump, or the ideas he floated on how the Justice Department could help contest the election. He repeatedly invoked executive privilege — the doctrine that allows presidents and their staff to resist some legislative oversight — as well as his Fifth Amendmentright against self-incrimination.

He also balked at answering questions about the draft complaint that a White House assistant sent to top officials at the Justice Department on Dec. 29, 2020, for a suit against Pennsylvania. Correspondence referenced in the deposition of Ellis, the Trump lawyer, also referenced a Trump campaign plan to ask the Supreme Court to order new elections in as many as eight states to “ensure electoral integrity.” Those suits were never filed.

Instead, the Trump campaign filed a brief in support of a long-shot lawsuit filed at the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s election. The justices declined to hear the case.

For his part, Clark during his deposition — in one of his only substantive exchanges with committee members — lamented the current partisan state of politics in Washington, recalling his own upbringing in a primarily white, working-class neighborhood near the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.

“My dad was a truck driver who never graduated from high school,” he said. “He was a lifelong Democrat and a Catholic. My mom was a lifelong Republican and a Protestant. I wound up as a blend of the two, a Catholic conservative Republican.”

His lawyer Harry MacDougald was more acerbic. He called the Jan. 6 committee’s questioning “railroading” and accused members of indulging in a “paranoid fantasy.”

“It is not enough in Washington to merely disagree with someone about policy questions,” he said. “Instead, they must be destroyed. Those who disagree with Mr. Clark seek his destruction by any means available.”

The QAnon Hummer Duo: Coordination among right-wing extremist groups

Deposition transcripts were also released Wednesday for two Virginia men who made headlines in Philadelphia when they showed up outside the 2020 vote count at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in a Hummer filled with guns and emblazoned with QAnon stickers.

But the transcripts show neither Joshua Macias, president of the organization Veterans for Trump, nor his bodyguard, Antonio LaMotta, were forthcoming in their interviews with committee investigators. Both men asserted their Fifth Amendmentrights again and again, citing their ongoing prosecution in Philadelphia for weapons violations and attempted election interference.

(They were both later convicted on the weapons counts in October, but acquitted on the election related charges. LaMotta has since been federally charged with illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.)

The committee’s investigators attempted to quiz both men on their contacts with other right-wing extremist groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — the leaders of which Macias and LaMotta were shown in videos to have interacted with Jan. 5.

One video played during an earlier committee hearing showed Macias meeting with Enrique Tarrio, then-president of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers, in a Washington parking garage the day before the Capitol attack. Committee members have previously cited the video to suggest some coordination among extremist groups in the run-up to Jan. 6.

But when asked in his deposition how he came to be in the garage, Macias remained tight lipped.

“I walked,” he responded.

Investigators asked him why. “I was asked to,” he said.

By whom? “Someone said, ‘Hey come here,” Macias replied.

He refused to say what they discussed in that meeting.

As for whether he considered himself a QAnon adherent, Macias responded: “I do not ascribe to people’s beliefs. I have my own belief system.”

Philadelphia Inquirer staff writers Jonathan Lai and Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.

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after the January 6 Select Committee delivered its 845-page final report in December, countless articles by legal analysts focused on the possible repercussions for former President Donald Trump. The committee gave four criminal referrals to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which has the option of either following those recommendations or not following them.

During the months it spent conducting its in-depth investigation, the January 6 Committee not only examined Trump’s actions during the late 2020/early 2021 lame duck period, but also, the actions of Trump’s allies and associates — including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John C. Eastman, both of whom were major promoters of Trump’s false, thoroughly debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, in his January 5 column, lays out some reasons why Giuliani and Eastman may face “accountability” in 2023.

“You are probably familiar with the term ‘mob lawyer,’” Sargent explains. “It might now be time to inaugurate another, similar term: ‘coup lawyer.’ John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani were instrumental to the plotting and execution of President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow his reelection loss, and they corruptly abused their knowledge of the law to that end. Will they ever face real accountability?”

READ MORE:Law professor’s Jan. 6 takeaway: the 'threat of political violence' is 'far from over'

The columnist continues, “Eastman and Giuliani are facing disciplinary proceedings and might even get disbarred. But if they are disciplined on overly narrow grounds — say, for making false statements — it would be a highly insufficient outcome. They should also face professional discipline that declares in some way that their efforts to undermine our constitutional order were central features of their unscrupulous professional misconduct.”

Giuliani has practiced law in New York State and the District of Columbia, while Eastman is licensed to practice law in California. But Sargent argues that in light of their efforts to help Trump overturn perfectly legitimate presidential election results in 2020, neither of them should be practicing law anywhere.

“In Giuliani’s case,” Sargent notes, “a New York court temporarily suspended him from practicing law for making false statements in court — his lies about the 2020 election — and the D.C. bar appears focused on that charge as well. In Eastman’s case, it is unclear what misconduct the California bar is weighing. But the option exists for disbarment on a broader basis, according to advocates urging this course of action. In California, New York and D.C., ethics rules provide for sanctions on the grounds of fundamental unfitness for the legal profession and deep contempt for the rule of law. Disbarment decisions should cite both lawyers’ efforts to help Trump subvert democracy as the basis for those violations.”

Giuliani wasn’t always the far-right MAGA Republican he is now. When he was serving as mayor of New York City during the 1990s and early 2000s, Giuliani (an ex-Democrat) had a reputation for being a moderate Republican who was pro-choice on the abortion issue, was favorable to gay rights, believed that the evangelical Christian Right was harmful to his party in swing states, and had no problem working out bipartisan deals with Democrats. In fact, Giuliani was featured as a speaker at the2004 Republican National Convention in order to make then-President George W. Bush appear more moderate.

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no vid twt

Hours before it disbanded forever, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol released a final slate of depositions of witnesses that it interviewed during its probe of former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election and remain in power.

CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane tweeted video clips of key Trump allies – including coup memo author John Eastman, ex-Trump defense attorney Rudy Giuliani, Ivanka Trump, and then-Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee – recalling what they saw and heard leading up to and during the Trump-inspired insurrection.

Eastman is shown repeatedly invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-crimination.

READ MORE: Donald Trump runs away from questions about January 6th at Mar-a-Lago New Year's Eve party

Giuliani, however, was far more forthcoming, admitting that he remembers "saying to people that somebody should be put in charge of the Justice Department who isn't frightened of what's gonna be done to their reputation." Trump wanted to replace Attorney General Bill Barr with Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division Jeffrey Clark but abandoned the effort when faced with the prospect of mass resignations.

Giuliani added that while he "didn't know him that well," he was confident that "others" viewed Clark as a "good alternative" to Barr due to his willingness to do Trump's bidding and because "he's not intimidated by the press."

Trump's eldest daughter Ivanka, who at the time worked in the Oval Office, said that Trump's call with Vice President Mike Pence "was heated." Another Trump aide, Nicholas Luna, told the Committee that “I remember hearing the word wimp.”

McEntee testified that Trump appeared "shocked" over the demonstrations "getting a little out of control."

READ MORE: Highlights from the latest batch of January 6th Select Committee transcripts

The Select Committee also provided footage of a rioter threatening Republican lawmakers who refused to cooperate with Trump's scheme.

"If you voted for treason, we're going to drag your ass through the streets," the man exclaimed while marching toward the Capitol. "We're nice people, but when you treason our country, we'll drag your ass."

Watch below or at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/americas-seditious-mayor-rudy-giuliani/

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https://www.alternet.org/unequal-justice-crime-and-punishment/

j6 comm good at narr]

...

Trump’s prosecution, at least at the federal level (he’s also under serious investigation in the states of Georgia and New York), now rests in the hands of the Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ has received criminal referrals from the committee for four overlapping federal felonies committed by the former President:

  1. Obstruction of an official proceeding, referring to the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, 2021, to confirm the election of Joe Biden, and the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Biden’s victory;
  2. Conspiracy to defraud the United States, referring to the former president’s multi-phase scheme to overturn the election;
  3. Conspiracy to make a false statement, referring to the plan to submit false slates of electors to Congress and the National Archives; and
  4. Inciting, assisting, or giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, referring to Trump’s incendiary speech immediately prior to the riot at the Capitol and his behavior during the riot.

The committee has also referred five of Trump’s former aides and associates to the Justice Department: John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Cheseboro and Jeffrey Clark. Trump, however, is the only member of the crew who has been referred for insurrection. The report singles out the ex-commander-in-chief on the insurrection charge, stating “the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump.”

Although the referrals are non-binding, Smith is already in the thick of investigating the insurrection and the plot to overturn the 2020 election, presenting evidence to at least two grand juries. The special counsel is also leading the investigation into Trump’s removal of top-secret government documents to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Convicting Trump will not be easy, especially on charges related to January 6. Each of the felonies referred to the Department of Justice requires proof of criminal intent. The government will have to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump knew he had lost the election and was acting with a “corrupt purpose” to obstruct the work of the joint session of Congress or, on the conspiracy referral, that he had an intent to defraud the nation with the submission of fake slates of electors.

It will be particularly challenging to prove that Trump incited or assisted the insurrection as Trump would likely mount a First Amendment defense. In its landmark 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court articulated a two-part test for punishing incendiary speech, holding that the First Amendment protects advocating the use of force or lawbreaking “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (emphasis added).

Still, it’s easy to understand why the committee chose to cite Trump for insurrection. Trump knew that members of the crowd who had gathered to hear him talk were armed when he urged them to march to the Capitol to “fight like hell.” And amid the ensuing melee, he accused Pence of cowardice for not using his authority as Vice President to change the outcome of the election, seething in a Tweet, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…USA demands the truth!” Almost immediately after the Tweet was posted, the report notes, “the crowd around the Capitol surged, and more individuals joined the effort to confront police and break further into the building.”

Should Trump be tried and convicted of insurrection, he would face a prison sentence of up to ten years. He would also be barred from holding federal office for life.

So, what are the odds that Trump is finally held to account? Will Jack Smith prove to be Trump’s Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator who brought Raskolnikov to justice, or will he turn out to be another Robert Mueller? We may have the answer in a matter of months.

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No one can accuse the January 6 Select Committee’s final report of not being comprehensive; the report, which National Public Radio (NPR) has published in its entirety on its website, is 845 pages long. One of the many things the Committee covers in the report is the fake electors plot of late 2020, which found MAGA Republicans in swing states circulating bogus Electoral College documents in an effort to give electoral votes that now-President Joe Biden legitimately won to Donald Trump.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark the morning after Christmas 2022, attorney/columnist Philip Rotner examines what the January 6 Committee’s final report has to say about that plot and lays out some reasons why it makes a strong argument for criminally prosecuting Trump.

“On December 14, 2020,” Rotner explains, “Republican operatives in at least five states — each of which had already officially certified Joe Biden as the winner — forged and submitted to Congress and the National Archives fake Electoral College certificates purporting to certify Donald Trump, not Biden, as the ‘duly elected’ winner. The left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight first blew the whistle on the fake elector scheme in March 2021, but it wasn’t until Rachel Maddow devoted a series of shows to it in January 2022 that it really captured public attention.”

READ MORE: 'You were on board': Fox News host confronts GOP Senator Mike Lee for role in fake electors plot

The attorney/columnist continues, “The fake electors were hardly the worst of what Trump visited on us. For sheer journalistic sex appeal, a scheme by a bunch of unknown, bumbling state functionaries to phony up some documents just can’t compete with a president siccing an armed mob on the Capitol. But the fake elector scandal, while not the most shocking of Trump’s predations, has long looked like the straightest route to cracking open the entire 2020 election scheme, and to getting Donald Trump indicted and convicted of a crime — at least until the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents scandal was revealed, but that’s another story.”

Rotner stresses that if Trump was a “knowing participant” in the “fake elector scheme,” that would be damning whether or not he honestly believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“Even if he really, truly believed the election was stolen, it would not be a defense to criminal charges for participating in a fraudulent scheme to submit forged documents as the official results of state presidential elections,” Rotner argues. “To the contrary, his belief that he was stealing back a stolen election would be highly incriminating proof of his motive, not a defense…. If it can be proved that Trump intentionally participated in the scheme to try to pass off forged documents as official state documents, and then use the phony documents to overturn an election, it wouldn’t make any difference why he did so. The act of participating in the scheme, in and of itself, regardless of his purported reasons for doing so, would still run afoul of all kinds of state and federal criminal laws.”

Rotner continues, “The path to prosecuting Trump for the fake elector scheme — either as a standalone crime or as a crucial element of a larger conspiracy to overturn the results of a presidential election —became much clearer last week with the publication of the final report of the House January 6 Committee.”

READ MORE:January 6 Panel suggests Newt Gingrich was 'involved the in fake elector scheme'

The January 6 Committee’s final report, according to Rotner, shows that “the scheme went all the way to the top, right up to Trump himself” and that “while some of the lower-level participants in the scheme — most likely some of the state-level GOP operatives who actually signed the phony certificates — may have been duped into believing that that it was acontingencyplan, the higher ups who created and executed the scheme knew better."

“According to the report, by December 8, 2020 — less than three weeks after (attorney Kenneth) Chesebro first laid the groundwork for the scheme in a November 18 memo — ‘President Trump had decided to pursue the fake elector plan and was driving it,’” Rotner notes. “By mid-December, Trump had enlisted the assistance of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in the scheme,worked with Rudy Giuliani on its implementation,and been informed that litigation would be filed in four states ‘to create a pretext to claim that it was still possible for the fake electors to be authorized retroactively.’ So, it appears that the previously missing link — the link between the fake elector scheme and Trump himself — is no longer missing. Trump not only ‘participated’ in the fake elector scheme, he orchestrated it.”

READ MORE: Liz Cheney schools Fox News host after he goes to bat for 'indefensible' fake Trump electors scheme

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rudy

https://www.alternet.org/giuliani-2658974089/

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// col day BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/rudy-giuliani-indigenous-populations-deserved/

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cassidy says he knew violence before jan 6, mentioned proud boys and OK

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an raw 12 22

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday said that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was wrong to accuse him of covering up data from Hunter Biden's laptop.

In arecent interview with Newsmax, Giuliani claimed that Pompeo had "buried" the laptop's hard drive.

“I gave it to Hannity in early 2019, then to John Solomon, then to Mike Pompeo, who also buried it," Giuliani said. "And you should know that now that he’s running for president — and I will tell you the whole story about that at some point. I’ll write it out."

On Tuesday, Pompeo told Real America's Voice host David Brody that he could not "make sense" out of Giuliani's claims.

"Not much to say," Pompeo told Brody. "I feel bad for Rudy. You know, Sean Hannity, John Solomon, Mike Pompeo: noted leftists. Right? I feel bad. I'll leave it there."

The former secretary of state encouraged Giuliani to write out his grievances.

"I can't — I don't know," Pompeo said. "I have no idea. First, he said I gave them everything and then he kind of said, well, I gave them half. I don't know how to respond other than to say that we never covered up anything that was important to American national security."

"I was the secretary of state," he pointed out. "I'm not sure why Hunter Biden's laptop would have been particularly relevant to my particular role at that time. But if he wants to write it out, I'm happy to respond to something once I can make sense of it."

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.

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Last week, Chief Twit Elon Musk enlisted Substacker Matt Taibbi to recap Twitter’s handling of the “Hunter Biden laptop” story based on archived corporate emails that Musk now owns.

It already seems like a lifetime ago, but in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published a story about a disk image allegedly taken from a laptop that Hunter Biden had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.

Twitter temporarily blocked the story because it included personally identifiable information that they suspected had been hacked. Republicans said it was horribly partisan to the Donald Trump campaign of colluding with the Russians, even though the disk image came from Rudy Giuliani who had been very publicly pumping Russian agents for dirt on Hunter Biden for months.

READ MORE: Is Twitter a lost cause?

Musk played the hype man and teased Taibbi’s tweetstorm as the scandal of the century. This was to be the second – hell, the third – coming of Watergate, Iran Contra, and Deflategate all rolled into one. Musk claimed these emails showed that Twitter had colluded with the government to help Joe Biden.

As usual, Musk’s pitch was crowd-pleasing vaporware. Taibbi actually described how Twitter executives blocked the New York Post story all by themselves, adding that he’d seen “no evidence of any government involvement.”

Taibbi shared emails that confirmed what we already knew: Twitter execs froze access to the story because they were worried it was part of a Russian attack on the election. Twitter had been repeatedly warned by Trump’s FBI to be on the alert for hack and leak operations associated with a political campaign and possibly starring Hunter Biden. The New York Poststory checked all those boxes.

In 2016, Russian state hackers leaked emails they’d stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The attack weakened Clinton and may even have cost her the election. In early 2020, Donald Trump was impeached for trying to force Ukraine to announce a fake investigation into none other than Hunter Biden. To make matters worse, the New York Post story was based on a disk image supplied by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s main point of contact with Russian agents in Ukraine.

READ MORE: Twitter employees respond to new owner Elon Musk’s annihilation of top execs — on Twitter

Far from showing a Borg determined to help Joe Biden at all costs, Taibbi’s cache of emails shows a lively debate in the Twitter C-suite as execs tried to balance freedom of the press against election integrity and national security. They blocked the story for violating Twitter’s ban on “hacked materials” bearing personally identifying information because the New York Post story included images with unredacted emails and phone numbers. The trouble was, there was no proof the data was hacked. There still isn’t. But the whole thing stank worse than an illegal Twitter flophouse.

Twitter was in a tough spot because Giuliani claimed that Hunter’s data was abandoned, not hacked. Then again, no reasonable person would take Giuliani’s word for that. If Hunter’s data had been hacked, Giuliani had a vested interest in concealing that fact. The emails show that Twitter execs used the ban to buy time while they conducted their own investigation.

History has vindicated Twitter’s caution. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally authorized a major interference campaign for the 2020 election based on conspiracy theories about the Biden family and Ukraine.The FBI investigated Giuliani for his role in Ukraine, but ultimately wasn’t charged, primarily because although his efforts helped both Russia and Trump, he got paid only by Trump.

This saga would prompt any reasonable person to think how Twitter’s rules could be crafted to better address the next foreign attack on our elections. Unfortunately, Elon Musk is not a reasonable person.

He’s a raging egomaniac who seized upon his former employees’ good-faith efforts to handle an unprecedented threat as a pretext to make twitter ground zero for foreign intelligence agencies to attack American democracy.

READ MORE: [Steve Doocy sparks Fox News debate after noting that the FBI avoided the Hunter Biden laptop scandal

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had to go harder rt (with young ppl?) b/c groyper spat?

an 12 22

Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s remarks at the New YorkYoung Republican Club’s Saturday night gala have elicited massive response – and condemnation – from many after she insisted had she been “in charge” of the January 6, 2021 insurrection the rioters “would’ve been armed” and they “would have won.”

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” Greene, a Republican from Georgia, told the group (video below). Some of the rioters and attendees were armed.

In addition to Greene and Bannon, Donald Trump, Jr. and far-right agitator Jack Posobiec were also in attendance, as was disgraced former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

READ MORE: ‘Mob Boss’: Trump Willing to ‘Burn the Country Down’ if DOJ Doesn’t Back Off Says His Former Longtime Attorney

The Southern Poverty Law Center described the New York Young Republican Club’s gala attendees as a “collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders” and noted the “group’s president declared ‘total war’ on perceived enemies.”

Some are questioning how Greene can retain her congressional seat given the oath of office she swore to, which in part reads: “I, __, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Former Democratic U.S. Senator from California Barbara Boxer tweeted: “If you’re in Congress and swore to protect the Constitution & you’re asked if you had anything to do with 1/6 insurrection, you say something like: I would NEVER partake in violence against America. You wouldn’t say something like: if I did it I would’ve been armed!”

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) quoting Greene, tweeted that winning is “overturning an election,” and “Being armed = using force to do it.”

Congresswoman Greene “represents today’s Republican party and defines a coup as ‘winning,'” she stressed.

“This is un-American and dangerous,” Escobar added. “And Republican silence is complicity.”

READ MORE: Don’t Call Us ‘Fascists’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Blasts News Media After Criticism Over Her Feral Hog Hunting Stunt

Veteran journalist and SiriusXM Progress host Michelangelo Signorile called Greene’s remarks, “Treason out loud.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene tells extremist confab that if she organized Jan 6 ‘we would’ve won’ and ‘we would’ve been armed.’ Take it as a plan for the next assault on democracy, which Trump is right now inciting,” he warned.

Gun violence prevention activist Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action observed this is a “Member of Congress fantasizing about killing her colleagues.”

Former Obama White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, now the director of the non-partisan University of Chicago Institute of Politics, quoted Greene and called her one of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “new top apparatchiks.”

Watch the video via Kyle Mazza below or at this link.

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an 12 22

We’ve been warned. When the Republicans take control of the House, it’s going to be all Hunter’s laptop, all the time.

Despite haughty GOP denials, the laptop story is probably a cover for another Russian hack and leak operation, and the Republicans are gleefully laundering it.

Republicans have browbeaten various social media execs – who are surely nervous about being called before GOP committees – into saying they were wrong to throttle access to what everyone correctly assumed was foreign election interference laundered through Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and election interference go-to-guy Rudy Giuliani.

READ MORE: On aid to Ukraine, the Republicans are jammed

Various major media outlets have authenticated a small percentage of the data dump as having belonged to Hunter Biden. But that’s exactly what you’d expect in a hack and leak operation. The question is whether the data were really abandoned by Hunter Biden or whether they were uploaded to that laptop as a pretext for trafficking in stolen secrets.

“That’s Rudy”

In October 2020, weeks before the general election,the New York Postran a story about what Rudy Giuliani claimed was a hard drive abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.

Over 50 retired intelligence pros signed an open letter arguing that L’Affaire MacBook bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinfo. Twitter’s former head of safety said this week that the story set off “every single one of my finely tuned [Russian intelligence] hack and leak campaign alarm bells."

READ MORE: GOP strategist pardoned by Donald Trump convicted of illegally funneling him Russian cash

Conveniently, the former shop owner who gave the data to Giuliani is legally blind, so he can’t say whether the man who dropped off the machines was Hunter Biden. He’s also a frothing conspiracy theorist who was unable to tell a straight story about the provenance of the laptop.

We know Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign of interference in the 2020 elections that focused on feeding anti-Biden propaganda to influential Americans, including members of Trump’s inner circle, according to a 2021 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report doesn’t name names, but contains enough clues to identify Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as the useful idiot in chief.

This time, the collusion between Trump and the Russians was right out in the open. With Trump’s support, Giuliani spent much of 2019 ostentatiously shuttling to Ukraine and huddling with Kremlin-linked oligarchs, including an active Russian agent who was later sanctioned by Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department for interference in the 2020 election.

Data from Hunter Biden’s computer were on the market in Kyiv around the time Giuliani went disinfo-shopping. As you recall, Giuliani was searching for dirt in Ukraine because Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, which, according to that ODNI report, was hacked by the Russian spy service known as the GRU in late 2019.

Multiple US intelligence agencies repeatedly and explicitly warned Donald Trump in 2019 that Giuliani’s bottomless thirst for dirt on the Bidens made him the target of a Russian intelligence operation. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien warned Trump that any information Giuliani brought back from his Ukraine junket should be considered “contaminated” by the Russians. Trump reportedly shrugged and said, “That’s Rudy.”

Stolen and dumped

Let’s not forget Trump’s first impeachment was the result of a desperate bid to wring dirt out of the Ukrainians. Trump froze congressionally authorized defense aid to Ukraine in order to strong-arm the country’s new president into announcing a bogus investigation into Hunter Biden.

Republicans have falsely claimed that forensic analyses have proven that the data was found on a laptop that Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware. These analyses have shown that some of the materials were produced by Hunter Biden. But that’s how hack and leak attacks work.

In a hack and leak, data is stolen and dumped.

A largely genuine trove of stolen data is also the perfect place to hide forged or stolen elements, which enjoy unearned credibility because they’re packaged with real stuff. That’s why the victims of hack and leaks are advised never to confirm the authenticity of anything.

The attackers are counting on the public to draw the erroneous conclusion that, because some things are genuine, the whole package is real, and – most importantly – that it came from where the cover story says it came from, be that an imaginary collective of good-hearted “hacktivists” or a computer repair shop in Delaware. Anywhere but the GRU.

The GRU is notorious for hacking and leaking.

A GRU unit known as FancyBear or APT128 famously deployed this tactic against the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. They also targeted George Soros, the World Anti-Doping Agency, scientists investigating the poisoning of a former Russian agent, and countless others. For particularly high-value targets, GRU combines hacking with good-old-fashioned stalking, following their targets around, hoping to catch them using insecure hotel wifi.

Isn’t it a crazy coincidence that a disk image of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” was revealed to the world by the same guy who we know was the main conduit for Russian disinformation about the Bidens? A guy who has also been investigated for other kinds of election interference on behalf of Trump.

If you believe that, I’ve got an extended warranty to sell you.

READ MORE: Fiona Hill warns Musk is 'transmitting a message' for Putin as DeSantis rushes to billionaire’s defense

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ref wapo

Military

White House was warned Giuliani was target of Russian intelligence operation to feed misinformation to Trump

By Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller and Josh Dawsey

October 15, 2020

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pauses while addressing Trump supporters on Oct. 12, 2020, during a Columbus Day gathering at a Trump campaign field office in Philadelphia. (Jacqueline Larma/AP)

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

...

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https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf

march 2021

Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections

Key Judgment 1: We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the

voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting

results. We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without

detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around

voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits. The IC identified some successful compromises of state

and local government networks prior to Election Day—as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts—that we

assess were not directed at altering election processes. Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or

inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and

results.

Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government

organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the

Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process,

and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016,we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts

to gain access to election infrastructure. We have high confidence in our assessment; Russian state and proxy actors

who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect US public perceptions in a consistent manner. A key element of

Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence

narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media

organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and

his administration.

Key Judgment 3: We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut

former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public

confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the

US. We have high confidence in this assessment. We assess that Supreme Leader Khamenei authorized the campaign

and Iran’s military and intelligence services implemented it using overt and covert messaging and cyber operations.

Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy

influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this

judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as

being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools—

primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy

regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine

former President Trump’s reelection.

Key Judgment 5: We assess that a range of additional foreign actors—including Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and

Venezuela—took some steps to attempt to influence the election. In general, we assess that they were smaller in scale

than the influence efforts conducted by other actors this election cycle. Cybercriminals disrupted some election

preparations; we judge their activities probably were driven by financial motivation

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wore 2 watches to hearing/ 12 22

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ducked ga test surgery? put him on bus?!

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an 8 22 he is now a target vs witness?

Former President Donald Trump's embattled personal attorney and ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani complained in an appearance on Newsmax that Monday's revelations that he is a "target" in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' Georgia's investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election are evidence that the United States is descending into fascism.

“It’s just a further desecration of the Sixth Amendment. I was his lawyer of record in that case. The statements that I made are either attorney-client privileged because they were between me and him, or they were being made on his behalf in order to defend him," Giuliani said. "When you start turning around lawyers into defendants when they're defending their clients, we’re starting to live in a fascist state. Look, I’ve already had my law office raided. I never thought I'd ever see that happen."

Multiple media reports have indicated that Giuliani, who is scheduled to testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta on Wednesday, "should expect to be indicted" in Willis' ongoing criminal probe. Reuters noted that Giuliani has already claimed that he "would refuse to answer any questions about Trump that would violate attorney-client privilege."

nope? READ MORE: [Donald Trump labeled a 'flight risk' after he revealed that the FBI seized his passports

But therein lies a potential problem for Giuliani, because attorney-client privilege is not assertable when knowledge of or participation in a crime exists. According to NOLO, "the crime-fraud exception applies if the client was in the process of committing or intended to commit a crime or fraudulent act, and the client communicated with the lawyer with intent to further the crime or fraud, or to cover it up."

Watch below or at this link.

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cnn

...In December 2020, The New York Times first reported thatTrump's former attorney Rudy Giuliani called Cuccinelli, second in command at DHS at the time, and asked him whether the department could seize voting machines in certain states to be reexamined for evidence of widespread voter fraud.

At the time, it was unclear if Trump facilitated the call between Giuliani and Cuccinelli.

Cuccinelli told CNN on Tuesday that he did tell Giuliani the department had no legal authority to seize voting machines or interfere with state-run elections. Cuccinelli also said that "no one at any level pushed us to do anything outside of our existing mission sets."...

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edit bd

...

Last night’s hearing, however, suggested one more layer.

A cover-up of the congressional coup.

READ MORE: Eighth January 6th hearing provided the 'starkest illustration' yet against Donald Trump: journalists

By the Congress.

Hinting hard

The goal appears to have been getting enough members of the US Congress to vote to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The GOP had a Senate majority at the time. They could have, in theory, overruled the will of the people, at least temporarily. Ultimately, however, just 147 Republicans, including eight senators, objected.

I don’t know, had they amassed enough votes in the Senate, where things would have gone after that. Perhaps it would have triggered the 12th Amendment. Perhaps it would have thrown the process back to red states that Joe Biden had won, where friendly Republican legislators would have fixed things so Trump could stay in office.

READ MORE: [Watch: Outtakes of Trump on January 7th — he can't say the election's over

In any case, the former president spent a lot of time talking about congressional Republicans and talking directly to congressional Republicans to such a degree as to suggest there was another layer of his grand seditious conspiracy that’s only now coming into light. That’s certainly what the J6 committee has been hinting hard at.

Co-conspirators?

Last week, the panel’s Stephanie Murphy saidTrump met in late December with US Reps. Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Brian Babin, Jody Hice, Louie Gohmert, Andy Harris, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Scott Perry and Jim Jordan. Margaret Taylor Greenewas there. So were Mike Pence, Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. (Seven of these members asked for pardons. Ditto Meadows, Giuliani and Greene.)

They tried getting the former vice president to go along with the conspiracy. It called for him to reject the count all by himself or send it back to the states where state GOP legislators were waiting.

Pence had refused before. I’m guessing those at the meeting expected him to again. He did. The next step was finalizing a scheme to bring tens of thousands of Trump loyalists to the capital, including armed paramilitaries (eg, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers), in order to terrify not only Pence but GOP senators into reinstalling Trump.

Terrifying GOP senators

According to the J6 committee’s Elaine Luria, Trump was told 15 minutes after returning to the White House after his speech on the Ellipse that the US Capitol was under siege by an armed mob. After the briefing, Luria said, Trump began calling GOP senators for the purpose of persuading them to overrule the results of the election.

On the one hand, the former president had insurgents sacking and looting the seat of government, threatening lawmakers with death – in Mike Pence’s case, with hanging from a makeshift gallows. (It was revealed last night that Pence’s Secret Service detail believed they were going to die. They sent messages of love to their families.) On the other, Trump pushed GOP senators by phone to get on board.

During that time, White House staffers tried and failed to persuade Trump to respond to the assault. (He did not issue orders to anyone, not the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security, the attorney general, no one.) Instead of telling them to go home, as staffers had hoped, he posted a tweet accusing Pence of betrayal.

After “pouring gasoline on the fire,” as witness Sarah Matthews said, the former president made more phone calls to Republican senators. Later that evening, after Trump had called for the insurgents to go home, Rudy Giuliani made even more calls to Republican senators.

Indeed, the J6 committee’s Adam Kinzinger named them. They were: Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Tommy Tuberville and Lindsey Graham. Of that number,only three voted to overturn the results of the election: Cruz, Tuberville and Hawley.

The cover-up

Giuliani also called US Rep. Jim Jordan.

Jordan, as I wrote last week, was nominated to serve on the initial select committee to investigate J6. Speaker Nancy Pelosi vetoed his nomination, though. Good thing she did. The current committee would have been compromised by the presence of a congressman who was a serial witness to the serial crimes under investigation.

Jordan was nominated by Kevin McCarthy. As the J6 committee reminded us last night, the House minority leader talked to Trump after the attack. He said Trump said he had “some responsibility” for J6. McCarthy said he told Trump that the House Democrats were likely to pass an impeachment resolution and that he should resign.

Trump didn’t resign, of course.

Perhaps the fix was in.

Implication by omission

Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the J6 committee, reminded us that the committee’s work goes on. Hearings will resume in September, she said. Then the Wyoming congresswoman used some curious math:

Today, we know far more about the president’s plans and actions to overturn the election than almost all members of Congress did when President Trump was impeached on January 13, 2021, or when he was tried by the Senate in February of that year.

Fifty-seven of 100 senators voted to convict President Trump at that time, and more than 20 others said they were voting against conviction, because the president's term had already expired.

Cheney said “almost all,” I think, because a dozen GOP members had been deeply involved in or material witnesses to Trump’s conspiracy.

She said “57 of 100,” I think, because it takes 67 senators to remove and convict a president. She said “more than 20 others,” because she’s apparently giving these GOP senators the benefit of the doubt.

But that still leaves around 20 unaccounted for. Why?

Perhaps because some, or all, of these 20 or so Republican senators had been in contact with the former president as the insurrection was unfolding and therefore potential co-conspirators in the crime.

Perhaps because some, or all, of these 20 or so Republican senators voted against conviction, thus taking steps to cover up the crime.

In any case, it was implication by omission.

The appearance of a conspiracy

We know at least six of them were evidently in both camps. On the evening of J6, Rudy Giuliani called Blackburn, Hawley, Cruz, Hagarty, Tuberville and Graham hoping they would object to the vote count. (Three did.) This same group voted to acquit Trump of treason.

If that’s not a rigged outcome, it sure looks like one.

Liz Cheney seemed to be inviting us to put the former president’s second impeachment trial in light of what we know now.

She seemed to be asking us to consider what it means when at least a dozen sitting members of the House were material witnesses as well as grand jury members deciding on an indictment (impeachment).

She seemed to be asking us to see that at least six of those Senators were materially involved in a crime of which they sat in judgment.

If that’s not a conspiracy, it sure as hell looks like one.

READ MORE:Video shows Josh Hawley running to evade the rioters he had earlier praised

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https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109871416/grand-jury-subpoena-giuliani-eastman-graham

no lnx

Georgia grand jury subpoenas top Trump allies, including Giuliani and Eastman

July 5, 2022

Heard on All Things Considered

STEPHEN FOWLER

John Eastman, attorney for former President Donald Trump, stands at left as Rudy Giuliani speaks in Washington at a rally in support of Trump.

A special grand jury in Georgia has issued subpoenas to some of the key figures associated with former President Donald Trump's failed efforts to reverse his narrow defeat, as a wide-ranging investigation into possible criminal interference ratchets up.

Those summoned by the seven subpoenas approved Tuesday include Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney; John Eastman, the former Trump lawyer who told Georgia lawmakers they had a "duty" to submit alternate electors; Cleta Mitchell, who was on the infamous 2021 call with Georgia's Secretary of State where Trump wanted to "find" votes; and others who guided attempts to subvert election results.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has also been subpoenaed in relation to phone calls he made with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger regarding absentee ballot rejections, according to the filings.

A 23-person special grand jury has been meeting since May to determine what, if any, state laws were broken in the months-long attempt to undo President Joe Biden's roughly 12,000-vote victory over then-President Trump, including potential crimes like "the solicitation of election fraud, making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office" and other disruptions to the election.

Recent witness testimony includes Raffensperger, Democratic attorney general nominee and state Sen. Jen Jordan and Democratic secretary of state nominee Rep. Bee Nguyen.

Tuesday's court filings shed light on the potential direction of the investigation into crimes related to Trump's obsession with Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. That interest was fueled by a variety of figures who provided dubious legal justifications for undoing his defeat, including Giuliani and Eastman.

Giuliani's lawyer says he has 'no current comment'

The court documents note Giuliani's presentation to state lawmakers in an unofficial hearing in December 2020 that included numerous false claims about Georgia's elections, even after several claims had been debunked by state and local officials.

"Despite this, the Witness made additional statements, both to the public and in subsequent legislative hearings, claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia," the summons reads.

In a statement to NPR,Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello said "we have not been served with any subpoena, so we have no current comment."

District attorney in Georgia asks for a special grand jury for Trump election probe

Eastman, who pushed a theory that then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election results and according to the House Jan. 6 committee also asked for a presidential pardon, told state lawmakers in a hearing that they could ignore Georgia's election results and appoint an alternate slate of electors.

Other figures named Tuesday include Jenna Ellis, who the district attorney says authored memos citing disputed legal theories to justify the plan to have Pence reject electors from Georgia and other swing states, andKenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who allegedly worked with the chair of the Georgia GOP to have 16 people secretly meet in the state capitol building to serve as fake electors.

Georgia officials fact-check an infamous Trump phone call in real time

HOUSE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE HEARINGS

Georgia officials fact-check an infamous Trump phone call in real time

The court documents say Chesebro drafted two documents in support of the plan, provided a Microsoft Word document template for the fake elector plot and told the state party he was working with Giuliani to implement the plan.

Georgia has played an outsized role in the fallout from the last presidential election, including the leadup to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Hearings held by the House committee investigating the attack have featured several Georgia witnesses in recent weeks as they try to outline how Trump's refusal to accept defeat contributed to the violent attempt to stop the Electoral College certification.

Raffensperger, his top deputy and a former Fulton County poll worker testified about the negative impact of false claims made about the election from individuals like Giuliani, including death threats and disruptions.

Georgia's special grand jury cannot indict individuals but will make recommendations to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis about how to proceed.

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willard world soc

...After Trump announced on November 14 that he would be challenging the election results in court, Giuliani was tasked with creating a team of lawyers. In a November 19 press conference, Giuliani announced theteam, which included Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Joseph diGenova. Less than three weeks after joining Giuliani’s team, diGenova appeared on a far-right Newsmax podcast and called for the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, to be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot” for stating that the 2020 election was free of manipulation.

In the meantime, Giuliani and Ellis were pressuring Republican state lawmakers to unilaterally overturn the results in their states. Previous reporting has established that they met with the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee on November 25, during which Ellis urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to fix a “corrupted, irredeemably compromised election,” either by arranging for a new, “special election” or directing “the manner of your electors.”

Similar appeals were made by Ellis and Giuliani toArizona lawmakers on November 30, Michigan lawmakerson December 2 and Georgiarepresentatives on December 4.

The Post report states that on January 2, 2021 Trump, Giuliani and Eastman spoke to 300 state legislators on a conference call to provide “evidence of fraud” and galvanize the lawmakers to “decertify” the election results. “You have the real power,” Trump told the lawmakers, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. “You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”

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looks really bad esp vs lady ruby and dtr

1/6 hearing tues #3? 6/21/22

vs

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/rudy-giuliani-destroy-donald-trump/

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an 6 22

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is facing an ethics charge as a result of a case brought against him by the District of Columbia office that regulates attorneys.

According to Business Insider, the District of Columbia bar is alleges that Giuliani —who was also an ally and personal attorney to former President Donald Trump— "pushed baseless claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election in a Pennsylvania court and accused him of violating two professional conduct rules in the state."

The court documents filed on Friday, June 10, also highlight Giuliani's support of a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn the results of the state's election. The latest debacle with the D.C. bar comes one year after Giuliani's one-year suspension from practicing law in the state of New York. Now, his law career is in jeopardy in the District of Columbia as he may also be forced to refrain from practicing law in that district.

Following Trump's election loss in 2020, the Pennsylvania lawsuit argued that more than 1.5 million mail-in ballots were invalid because they were not in compliance with state election law. [// scott perry BS?] The filing notes that Giuliani was the attorney to seek an emergency ruling in hopes of blocking the certification of the presidential election. He also had a hand in filing other orders to have the Pennsylvania assembly select its own electors and deem Trump the winner of the state's election.

According to the court filing, Giuliani "brought a proceeding and asserted issues therein without a non-frivolous basis in law and fact for doing so" and "engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice."

The lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania was dismissed.

The D.C. Bar argues that the affidavits were "(a) unsupported, (b) unrelated to Trump voters (c) involve conduct outside the seven Defendant Counties, and (d) by their own terms were isolated incidents that could not have affected the presidential election's results by offsetting the Biden majority of over 80,000 votes."

A hearing will now be scheduled and Giuliani will have an opportunity to respond.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/giuliani-2656689107/

rant ~ jan 6 comm subpoena

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see ziegler 2/10 ari transcript: navarro

MYSTAL: He talked about -- in his book about how he`s had conversations with Steve Bannon about this Green Bay Sweep without Trump in the room, right?

So I wouldn`t -- I would ask him, did you have conversations with Steve Bannon without Trump in the room? Did you have conversations with Giuliani without Trump in the room or Bernard Kerik?

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willard war room?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/election-official-sues-trump-and-giuliani/

defamations?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/watergate/

no vid

veteran journalist Bob Woodward pointed out seven conspiratorial actions taken by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon to conduct a "Watergate-style" subversion of the election process, which he said should fall under investigation by a special counsel.

Woodward said he and Washington Post colleague Robert Costa uncovered those actions while reporting on their book, "Peril," but he told CNN's "New Day" that he only recently understood how those potential crimes set in motion the violent attempt to overturn Trump's election loss on Jan. 6.

"I just looked back at what we have in the book, and quite directly have we have the dots [but] we didn't connect them, though they're there," Woodward said, "and they're seven conspiratorial actions by Trump and Bannon, essentially, to subvert and destroy the process of certifying who the next president is going to be, and when you think about it, it's just like Watergate. It's a destruction of the process that we want to trust, and the -- I'm sorry, my memory is not great on this -- can I go through some of those conspiratorial actions?"

"First of all, on Dec. 30, Bannon talks to Trump and says, 'You've got to make a dramatic return to Washington,'" Woodward continued. "Trump is in Mar-A-Lago, he's going to have the New Year's Eve party down there, but he comes back, and Bannon says to Trump, 'You've got to call Vice President Pence off the ski slopes where they, Pence's staff and advisers, have stashed him away because they know in a week he's going to have to certify or decide what he's going to do about who the next president is, and then Bannon says to Trump, Jan. 6 is the moment of reckoning here, and if we can challenge the legitimacy of Biden, it casts a shadow over the Biden presidency, and then he says, 'We are going to kill the Biden presidency in the crib.'The violent language, of course, it was manifest, the violence itself, on Jan. 6."

"Then on Jan. 5, as Liz Cheney was pointing out, Bannon meets with others, including Rudy Giuliani and their phony Republicans, to block the certification of Biden, and then you put all this in and Trump put out a phony statement at the time -- this is on the public record -- saying he and Pence agreed that Pence has the power to walk away and essentially get Trump certified as president," Woodward added. "But that's totally untrue. So, anyway, we have a very clear-cut case, I would suspect it is quite possible that Attorney General Merrick Garland will appoint a special counsel to look at this, because the evidence is so clear for a massive Watergate-style attempt to destroy the process of electing a president."

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==

WHAT IS SUBSTACK?

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-had

NO LNX MANY  VID?

Team Trump Had a Second Pre-Insurrection War Room

An investigation of who was in this second Insurrection Eve war room has now begun.

Seth Abramson

Jun 6

Introduction

As this publication has exclusively and exhaustively detailed, on the eve of the January 6 insurrection Team Trump convened a 23-person war council at Trump International Hotel in D.C. to plot out—as attendees have since confessed—what would happen the following day. It is now clear that a second, contemporaneous pre-insurrection war council was held at a nearby Washington hotel and that it may well have been linked, through either phone or video conferencing, to the first.

This previously unreported news could significantly swell the size of Donald Trump’s pre-insurrection planning team, even as it remains possible (indeed, a possibility that has been extensively investigated here at Proof) that any remote conferencing that occurred the night before the January 6 insurrection also included the White House.

The Two War Rooms

The group that convened at Trump International on January 5 included, per eyewitness accounts previously compiled by Proof, the following members of Trump’s family, legal team, campaign staff, advisory corps, donor class, circle of friends, allies in Congress, and presidential administration:

Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Adam Piper, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck, Layne Bangerter, and two additional unnamed U.S. senators, one of whom prior Proof reportssuggest was Ted Cruz (R-TX). Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander“attended” by phone.

Other possible attendees—whose status is still being investigated in light of evidence they were present—include Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Guiliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. As Proof has previously noted, and as will become vital to the account below, four individuals from the two lists above now claim (or have had it claimed by legal counsel) that they weren’t, in fact, part of any meeting involving Trump International Hotel on January 5, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Those individuals are Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and David Bossie.

Based on the evidence now available, the largest possible size of the group that met at Trump International Hotel on January 5—all members of Trump’s inner circle—is 23.

But emerging evidence—see below—now suggests a sizable team of Trump insiders concurrently gathered, on January 5, at the Willard InterContinental Washington D.C. Hotel (“the Willard”) at 1401 Pennsylvania Ave., 0.3 miles from the White House.

The group that gathered at the Willard Hotel on January 5 appears to have been nearly as large, if not larger, than the group at Trump International Hotel. Possible attendees include, of those not also reported to have been involved in the January 5 meeting at Trump International, the following: Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Robert Hyde, Russell Ramsland Jr., Jim Penrose, Sal Greco, Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, and Dustin Stockton. Moreover, among the Willard war room attendees concurrently said to have been involved in a meeting at Trump International Hotel we find Rudy Giuliani, Ali Alexander, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Phil Waldron, and Peter Navarro.In all, the suspected roster of Willard war room attendees numbers 16, though that number may swell after additional investigations at Proof and elsewhere.

Indeed, just two photos of the Willard war room taken by Robert Hyde on Insurrection Day alone (the one below and this one) show ten people, only three of whom—Giuliani, Eastman and Hyde—can be identified,and are thus included in the attendee list above.

{Note: The man in the white shirt in the first picture belowmay be Owen Shroyer, who works with and for Alex Jones at InfoWars. The second picture below is Shroyer on January 5, 2021. Shroyer introduced Jones at the Freedom Plaza event that day.The two were followed on stage by Ali Alexander, who oddly said that Trump “calls me ‘Sammy Davis Jr.’ every time he sees me” (emphasis supplied). Alexander introduced Roger Stone by noting that Stone, who was then staying at the Willard, had offered “counsel” to Trump’s legal team—headquartered at the Willard—and that, as of January 5, Stone’s Stop the Steal “movement” was at “war.” After Stone speaks, someone is heard repeatedly calling “Victoria! Victoria! Victoria!”, which may refer to Trump lawyer Victoria Toensing. It is unclear if Toensing stayed at the Willard also.}:

Those who have followed the January 6 investigation closely will note that the Willard Hotel war room attendee list includes a substantially larger number of dubious figures (for instance Hyde, who aided in Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Ukraine, as detailed in a chapter in my 2020 Macmillan book Proof of Corruption) as compared to the Trump International list, which may underscores why it has taken so long for this second war room to be disclosed to the public.

Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the Willard

While Roger Stone spoke briefly to the crowd at Freedom Plaza on January 5—and in his remarks incited insurrection through militant, bizarrely pseudo-religious rhetoric—and while he also spoke in front the Supreme Court building earlier on January 5, in both instances traveling via golf cart and flanked by Oath Keepers, everyone seems to agree that Stone wasn’t at Trump International on January 5; that he never showed up to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech, as his Stop the Steal co-organizers Alexander and Jones and had expected him to do; and that he never showed up for his “Wild Protest” speech at the Capitol, despite having publicly raised money for the latter appearance.

So where was Roger Stone the rest of the time on January 5 and January 6? According to Stone himself, he was at the Willard Hotel. A video from ABC News confirms that this is where Stone was staying during the insurrection, with Stone further telling the network that he “never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport” on the afternoon of January 6. Stone’s statement makes clear that it was not that he stayed in his room at the Willard, but that he remained on hotel grounds—a distinction that is critical now. Stone’s NYPD bodyguard Sal Greco stayed with him at the Willard Hotel.

As for Alex Jones—who has said the White House asked him to lead the march on the Capitol; who has said he (with Alexander) was in text communication with the Trump campaign from the Capitol as it was being attacked; and whose top lieutenant Owen Shroyer appears to be pictured above, with Rudy Giuliani, in the Willard war room—per Yahoo! News he stayed at the Willard for a Stop the Steal event in November 2020 and, per Politico, also stayed at the Willard for a December 2020 Stop the Steal event.

But now an amazing five-part exposé by a French independent journalist publishing via Montréal-based website Centpapiers further reveals—using simple and easily confirmed photographic analysis—that the January 5 interview Michael Flynn conducted with Alex Jones, reported on at length at Proof, was held at the Willard, meaning both men were at the site of Trump’s second war room on Insurrection Eve.

{Note: This same exposé offers pictures that seem to indicate top Trump adviserPeter Navarro was with Dustin Stockton at the Willard at some point during the lead-up to the insurrection, as well as providing pictures of Stockton and his wife Jennifer Lynn Lawrence in the VIP area of Trump’s Ellipse speech alongside top Trump congressional ally Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of Ali Alexander’s self-confessed co-conspirators in plotting the dire events of January 6.}:

The aforementioned couple, Lawrence and Stockton, have at various points been Steve Bannon acolytes, employees, and business associates, and were known to have been at the Willard Hotel pre-insurrection. According to this report by the New York Times,

Two organizers helping the [post-election Stop the Steal] effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Trump’s border wall. In August [2020], federal prosecutors accused Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Lawrence and Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president. A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group.

…

[Jennifer Lynn] Lawrence had personal ties to Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions”, she said in an interview. She also knew [Michael] Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank.

…

By [approximately 2PM ET on January 6], with “all hell breaking loose”, as Stockton put it, he and Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”

While Lawrence and Stockton’s presence at the Willard Hotel doesn’t ensure Bannon’s, the two Bannon associates’ unusual use of golf carts in downtown Washington during the insurrection—mirroring the use of such vehicles by Stop the Steal, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers—as well as the notion that they went to the Willard to “await instructions” from an unnamed superior, group of superiors, or group of compatriots, suggests the possibility that Bannon and/or the Three Percenter leadership were at the Willard at some point during the run-up to the insurrection or on Insurrection Day.

How Proof Learned About the War Room at the Willard

On May 5, 2021, in a little-heard interview with self-described “birther” Peter Boyles, former Chapman University and University of Colorado-Boulder law professor John Eastman—known for falsely saying prior to the 2020 election that Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for Vice President due to not being a U.S. citizen—told Boyles that that in January 2021 he “was representing the President of the United States in the Supreme Court on one of the most significant legal issues to have come down the pike in half a century.” Eastman, who notes that he “spoke right before the president” at the Ellipse on January 6, further tells Boyles he can reveal private conversations he had with his “client” Donald Trump pre-insurrection because he has received “express” permission from Trump to do so.

Eastman confesses to Boyles that in the days prior to and including the attack on the Capitol, he, Giuliani, and unnamed others “had a war room at the Willard Hotel [in Washington] kind of coordinating all of the communications.…[it was in] a suite of offices.” Significant in this, of course, is not only Eastman’s description of the space as a “war room,” but his contention that Giuliani used the room in the days prior to the insurrection. Why does this matter? Because it raises new questions about another pre-insurrection war room: the one at Trump International. Was Giuliani at the Trump International war room on January 5, the Willard war room, or both? This question has larger implications than may at first appear, so we begin by unpacking what we know:

(1) Charles W. Herbster vacillated on the presence of only one person at the January 5 pre-insurrection war council at the Trump International Hotel: Rudy Giuliani.

After first writing on Facebook that he (Herbster) was “standing in the White House”, Herbster edited his post to write that he was in fact in Trump’s “private residence” in Trump International. But he also edited out Giuliani’s name, as if he’d either (a) been mistaken about Giuliani being at Trump International, or (b) suddenly felt it critical to not say that Giuliani was with him. Note that Herbster took this view of no one else at Trump International;as Proof has detailed, David Bossie and Michael Flynn both now maintain they weren’t at Trump International, and yet Herbster still hasn’t changed his contradictory statement on the matter.For a time even Tuberville contradicted Herbster and said he wasn’t at Trump International, and yet, despite Tuberville being a senator, Herbster still didn’t amend his statement on Facebook. Yet as to Giuliani Herbster did correct himself, suggesting a possibility Giuliani really was at a different location than the other individuals Herbster mentioned—but nevertheless attended the meeting Herbster described. Proof previously noted that this would be possible if the January 5 meeting at Trump International was “conferenced” with other locations.

(2) When the Associated Press asked Rudy Giuliani if he was at Trump International Hotel on January 6, Giuliani told the AP that he would have to check, via his “diary.”

Giuliani never got back to the AP, despite there being no known illegality—as yet—with respect to the event at Trump International. So why not tell the AP where he was on January 5? Doyle Beck told the AP Giuliani was at Trump International; it’s unclear why the conversation regarding his whereabouts isn’t one Giuliani is willing to have.

(3) On January 5, Flynn gave a long interview with Alex Jones at the Willard Hotel.

Both Stone and Giuliani were staying at the Willard Hotel, and Alex Jones and his team would have had to reserve a room at the Willard for any live recording there, so this creates numerous opportunities for overlap between Jones, Stone, Flynn, and Giuliani—the last of whom was then running an on-site Trump war room. Note that, as previously reported at Proof, Michael Lindell has said he was consistently with Flynn and Giuliani in the days prior to the insurrection. If Herbster is unclear and Giuliani cagey about whether Giuliani was ever at Trump International on January 5; and Flynn maintains he wasn’t at any meeting at Trump International (despite an Instagram photo placing him in the hotel lobby that day), one possibility is that any war room meeting(s) Flynn attended on January 5 were attended from the Willard, where we now know he was with Jones on January 5. Flynn is so adamant he wasn’t at Trump International on January 5 that he had his attorney send this author a letter threatening legal action for citing news reports placing him at that location on that day; this suggests a degree of confidence that no one can place him inside the Trump Townhouse at Trump International, his presence in the hotel lobby notwithstanding.

(4)As Proof has reported, Corey Lewandowski was also cagey about his location on January 5, telling a reporter for The Atlantic that he “met” with Donald Trump on that day—but also implying that he didn’t go to the White House in order to do so.

How could Lewandowski meet with Trump without being in the same space? Again, the specter of a very simple explanation—the use of phone or video conferencing—manifests. This might also explain the confidence that David Bossie, Lewandowski’s business associate, has had in maintaining he never entered Trump International on January 5, even as Herbster places him at an event Herbster attended from the hotel.

What Happened at the Willard Hotel

Eastman describes the “suite” of offices at the Willard—a term that suggests multiple rooms and work stations—as designed for “coordinating all of the [pre-insurrection] communication[s]” between members of Team Trump. Certainly, the suite could have coordinated communications via phone conferencing rather than video conferencing, but in either case it would seem that to “coordinate” communications between a large team of people at least some conferencing would have to have occurred at some point.

So if Giuliani had a “war room” at the Willard on January 5 that was specifically set up to “coordinate communications” pre-insurrection, why on earth would he need to walk over to Trump International to attend a second war room? Why not just conference the rooms? This question begs another: if Giuliani did decide to needlessly travel from one war room to another on January 5—during a period of hours that time was precious to Team Trump—why didn’t he bring Eastman with him? Indeed, an unresolved paradox is that Eastman appears to place himself with Giuliani fairly consistently during the days before the insurrection, yet no one places Eastman at Trump International Hotel.

A similar paradox involves Giuliani, Flynn, Lindell, and Powell. As Proof has reported, Lindell says he was with Giuliani, Flynn, and Powell on January 5, yet Flynn says he wasn’t at Trump International, Herbster at first wrote that Giuliani was there and then corrected himself, and no one places Powell at Trump International. Given that Powell was, like Eastman and Giuliani, a Trump legal adviser on January 5, one explanation for this would be that Flynn, Giuliani, and Powell were with Eastman at the Willard on January 5, whether or not they—or Lindell—also visited the Trump International war room.

More Bombshells From the Eastman-Boyles Interview

(1) Trump cybersecurity advisers Russell Ramsland Jr., Doug Frank, and Jim Penrose were with Eastman in the Willard Hotel war room at some point on January 5, 2021.

Specifically, Eastman told Boyles that “the [election] experts that I had met with [in November and December 2020, a group into which Eastman puts Ramsland, Frank, and Penrose] were with me on January 5.” Given this statement, it’s worthwhile to say a little more about two of these men.

Jim Penrose

According to The Hill, Penrose is “a former head of the National Security Agency’s Operational Discovery Center.”

Besides having run an operational center for the NSA—which sounds oddly similar to Eastman’s depiction of the Willard Hotel war room as having been a “communications coordination” center during the insurrection—one of Jim Penrose’s specializations, reportedly, is “how misinformation campaigns [can]…influence elections.” Does this mean that Trump had a misinformation operations expert running a secret war room during the January 6 insurrection? That’s a question the FBI will now need to answer.

Russell (“Russ”) Ramsland Jr.

Russ Ramsland co-founded Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), a Dallas-area cybersecurity firm, with a number of men, among whom was Adam Kraft, a former DIA employee of Michael Flynn. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump after the 2020 election, has referred to ASOG as “our [Trump’s] team” on Fox News Channel.

The Washington Post writes that in 2018 ASOG began pitching GOP candidates on schemes to challenge their election losses by claiming election fraud. Per the Post,

By late 2019, ASOG’s examination [of elections in which Republicans had lost] had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela, and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show. ASOG’s examination [of elections] by last summer [the summer of 2020] had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by the Post. Ramsland had sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries.

There’s more of interest here than can be unpacked in one article. For instance, Stop the Steal’s Ali Alexander is believed to have contacted a DHS number to join a 90-minute conference call on December 21, 2020, the same day Trump met in the Oval Office with a delegation from the House Freedom Caucus led by Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).Of the call to DHS, Alexander wrote on Twitter that he hoped it would “change the world”, raising the question of who at DHS could have been in contact with Alexander, and whether they were also in touch with Ramsland as he worked with Trump’s legal team. {Note: While I’ve confirmed that Alexander called a “DHS” number, it remains unclear whether it’s a “Department of Homeland Security” call-in number or a D.C. “Department of Human Services” number; in the latter case, the call may have been about January 6 permitting, though it’s unclear why this would “change the world.”}:

Trump’s 2019 and 2020 efforts to steal the election—detailed in Proof of Corruption—were linked to, among others, Texas Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas, and fracking industries, an echo of the phrase used to describe Ramsland’s donors and investors. Were any of the individuals who met in Texas in 2019 with Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and Florida-based Trump donor Harry Sargeant III to discuss the 2020 election, energy issues, and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs who allegedly had dirt on Joe Biden involved in funding Ramsland’s dubious pre- and post-election “election integrity” efforts? Republican donors who made their fortunes in the oil, gas, and fracking industries were also, as Proof of Corruption details, involved in Trump’s clandestine outreach to Venezuela in 2019 and 2020—Venezuela being the nation in which the Post saysRamsland’s donors were hoping he’d look for and find political dissidents to reveal a supposed election-theft scheme originating in Caracas.[ghost of hugo chavez?]

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The Post notes that Ramsland’s lies “were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the ‘kraken’ lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell—who the Post has learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG—and aired publicly by Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.” Rep. Gohmert attended the December 21 pre-insurrection meeting at the White House, intended as a follow-up to the raucous December 18 Oval Office meeting attended by Giuliani and Powell. This underscores that, at a minimum, three individuals who Ramsland had worked with to spread false claims of election fraud were in the Oval Office with Trump during the 120 hours—December 17 to December 21—it appears the initial planning for the insurrection occurred. Indeed, the Post writes the following of November and December of 2020:

During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.

The Post alleges that at least three such “anyones”—Gohmert, Powell, and Giuliani—were part of Ramsland’s “network” of collaborators. Per the Post, “ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but…[Ramsland] never spoke[ ] to Trump himself.”

Whether or not Ramsland spoke with Trump pre-insurrection, the fact that he is, per the Post, a Cruz donor as well as a Trump donor; someone whose first client was an “associate of Steve Bannon”; co-founder of ASOG with a Flynn associate; and a man who successfully lobbied top Trump congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to use his services underscores that if he was in the Willard war room on January 5 the number of Trump associates who may have been there, nearby, or in contact with the war room is considerable.

Beyond the obvious figures, others written about at Proof but with less frequency may also be in the picture with respect to the Willard war room. The Post reports that one apparent investor in Ramsland’s efforts to spread election conspiracy theories prior to the 2020 election was Charles Richard Saulsbury, the fabulously wealthy Texan whose son Bubba Saulsbury was with Mike Pence at the vice presidential mansion on the night of January 5,as exclusively reported by Proof. If a Ramsland investor was with Pence while Ramsland was at the Willard, is it possible that any phone- or video-conferenced strategy session that evening involved not just the Trump International and Willard Hotel war rooms but both the White House and vice president’s mansion? We can’t, at present, know this. But we do know that Bubba Saulsbury—who’d come to D.C. thrilled about marching to the Capitol—saw or heard something on the evening of January 5, while with Pence, that caused him to flee Washington the next morning to avoid all of the events of January 6. What had Bubba Saulsbury heard, and from whom?

{Note: Saulsbury’s Facebook photos indicate he was staying at Trump International Hotel.}:

The Post reports that, during the time Ramsland may have been receiving investments from the Saulsburys—in 2019 and beyond—everything he did “became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his plan to challenge elections Republicans had lost] had to get to Trump.” This doesn’t sound like a man who would have sat at the Willard on January 5 without making any attempt to get in touch with the president.

Indeed, the Post reports that “In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus”—possibly the same seven Freedom Caucus members who five months later would be in the Oval Office discussing an allegedly stolen election with Trump: Gosar, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Gaetz, Greene, and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). Certainly, Trump was well aware of Ramsland by mid-November of 2020, with the Post reporting that “late on November 15, Trump retweeted to his millions of followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from twenty-nine states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish election systems company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’”

But Ramsland’s connections to key insurrectionists go well beyond these, to include ex-Trump legal adviser Lin Wood and Giuliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. The Post writes that “Ramsland contributed material to [Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory”, and also that “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm…said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”

Even former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a participant in the unprecedentedly wild December 18 meeting at the White House, is tied to Ramsland.Per the Post, “By December [2020], Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former CEO of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani.”

So if Eastman was with Ramsland in the second Trump war room on Insurrection Eve, did Ramsland’s associates Ellis, Gohmert, Byrne, Bannon, Wood, Powell, Saulsbury, Sessions, Waldron, Giuliani, or Flynn join them there at any point on January 5 or 6?

(2) Eastman was in the Oval Office on January 4 in a previously unreported meeting.

According to the ex-law professor, on January 4 three people met in the Oval Office with him and Donald Trump: Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob. Per Eastman, prior to the meeting someone had advised Trump that “law review articles” written about the 2000 election indicated that “maybe the Vice President had unilateral authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.” Presumably it was not Eastman who provided such erroneous counsel to Trump, as Eastman says that during his meeting with Trump and Pence, Pence asked Eastman if he believed vice presidents had the authority that Trump had been advised they had, and Eastman purportedly told Pence it was an “open question.” But per Eastman, he nevertheless told Pence it would be “foolish” to accept the alternate slates of electors the Trump campaign had had sent to D.C., as none had been certified by any state legislature. Eastman says he advised Pence to “delay the proceedings [in Congress]” in “response to the [GOP] state legislatures” that wanted time to “audit” their votes.

This meeting corroborates prior Proof reporting on Trump’s plan for January 6, which was not to win re-election—an impossibility—but simply to allow for so much chaos on Capitol Hill that Congress’ joint session would have to be postponed, giving GOP-led batlleground-state legislatures time to decertify their electors. As Eastman advised Pence and Trump on January 4, under such a scenario GOP-led state legislatures could try to certify new slates of Trump electors, arguably putting Pence in a novel situation the second time Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Many of the voter suppression bills the GOP is now pushing across America are “insurrectionist” in just this way; they aim to realize the vision of our democracy that Eastman shared with Trump and Pence on January 4—one in which state legislatures decide elections, not U.S. voters.

Conclusion

The Willard war room seems to have been focused on “coordinating communications” to ensure sufficient delay in the joint session of Congress that a coup of the incoming Biden administration would be possible through the creation of new slates of certified electors. While we know that the Willard war room hosted an advisory corps focused on the administrative components of this plot, the evidence also suggests that present in this second war room may have been individuals like Stone, Jones, Alexander, Flynn, Stockton, Lawrence, and Shroyer, who lacked the qualifications to have any role in any such administrative component—but would have been of great utility in orchestrating a paramilitary component to Trump’s plan to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

At the nexus of these two parts of Trump’s apparent coup plan was Giuliani, whose ties to both of the two teams that appear to have used the Willard were considerable.Notably, it was Giuliani who said at the Ellipse, “Let’s have trial by combat!”—a line equally relevant to the administrative components of such a plot or paramilitary ones.

A robust investigation of the Willard Hotel “war room” has only just begun. Its size, technological capacities, traffic, purpose, and full roster of attendees remain an open question. This article therefore serves as only the first of a series of articles about this critical development in the story of the January 6 insurrection. More is forthcoming.

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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-trump-brazil-scandal-did-donald

no pix twt with kush jan 8?

Introduction

When Proofpublished a major exposé on the potential involvement of the Brazilian government in the planning of the January 6 insurrection—in the form of significant evidence that the son of the Brazilian president, Eduardo Bolsonaro, as well as many Trump donors with significant ties to Brazil, attended a secretive January 5 meeting at Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel—a shrewd Proof reader asked (I here paraphrase), “How would the Brazilians have been able to aid Trump and his political team so close to the day of the insurrection?”

One possible answer is that, as we know from major-media reporting, the Brazilians had been working with Team Trump since early 2019 on weakening Venezuela, even as Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a gaggle of top Trump advisers (including now-Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas and notorious Trump national security adviser Erik Prince) were secretly negotiating with Venezuela’s government in ways they believed would benefit both themselves and Donald Trump’s political career. This possibility forms the basis of the following article, which includes, as well, a bundle of new evidence suggesting that the January 5 “war council**” involving all of Trump’s top advisers—an event lied about by a number of them—may in fact have involved not just one but two locations, and possibly the President of the United States himself.

{Note: See the national bestseller Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in mid-2020, for a whole chapter on the clandestine negotiations between top Trump agents and Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela.}:

Sidney Powell and Rudy Giualiani

When Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell, who for weeks had been working alongside Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani, announced nearly two months before the January 6 insurrection that she had secret sources in South America who were working with her to uncover smoking-gun evidence of voting-machine manipulation in the 2020 presidential election, the curtain suddenly rose on a large rogues’ gallery of possible Trumpist accomplices in Brazil and Venezuela. Tellingly, Giuliani began to publicly distance former president Trump from Powell the moment Powell began referring to clandestine political operations allegedly under way in South America. So why did Powell’s references to that continent necessitate a public split from the president and his family, when months and even years of QAnon conspiracy theories spilling from Sidney Powell’s lips had failed, apparently, to necessitate that critical political pivot?

According to a report in the New York Times, at a time post-election when Trump was working with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to support dissident elements in Venezuela—particularly on the question of whether Venezuela’s recent elections had been rigged to aid the nation’s current socialist president (unrecognized by the U.S.), Nicolas Maduro—members of Trump’s legal team suddenly gained access to “an affidavit…signed by a former military official from Venezuela about elections there”, as well as evidence (now widely believed to be manufactured) that “elections software company Smartmatic helped the Venezuelan government rig its [recent] elections by switching votes and leaving no trail.”How in the world would an obscure former federal prosecutor from Texas get connected to Venezuelan dissidents? What channels would a private citizen use to get in touch with elements of a hostile foreign governmentnot recognized by the United States, indeed the hostile foreign government Trump had publicly mused about invading? No one knows, and not only wouldn’t Powell say, but per the New York Times she would only show partial screenshots of the evidence in her possession—perhaps concerned that providing entire documents to the media might reveal their provenance.

It is worth repeating here that her legal partner in Trump’s scurrilous post-election lawsuits, Giuliani, presently represents and for some time has represented one of the most powerful—and corrupt—dissidents in Venezuela, Alejandro Betancourt, who is currently a wanted man in the United States, and whose Spanish castle was used by Giuliani as he was secretly trying to rig the 2020 presidential election as part of what is now known as the “Trump-Ukraine scandal.” Moreover, that Sidney Powell’s longtime client Michael Flynn is an Erik Prince associate; that Prince had in December of 2019 held secret talks with both Venezuelan dissidents and representatives of the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro; that Trump had expressed little admiration for Juan Guaidó,implying that he is resigned to a Maduro government in Venezuela;and that Trump had himself ostensibly spent 2019 working with Jair Bolsonaro to undermine Maduro—but only enough to put pressure on Maduro, not to effectuate any significant change in the governance of Venezuela, all point toward a coordinated Trump effort to acquire evidence of election fraud in Venezuela that began with Bolsonaro’s 2019 rise to power in Brazil and coincided with Trump’s own preparations to falsely announce evidence of voter fraud if he lost the 2020 presidential election.

{Note: Keep in mind that Trump and his closest associates have a long history of preparing voter fraud claims well in advance of an election. For instance, it was in mid-2016 that top Trump political adviser Roger Stone launched the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement—doing so many, many months before the 2016 presidential election to poison the well of Americans’ faith in their national elections’ integrity in the event Hillary Clinton was elected.}:

Daniel Beck and Eduardo Bolsonaro

As has just been reported by Revista Fórum in Brazil, it was shortly after Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, after having been elected at the very end of 2018, that the fortunes of certain top Trump allies started to rise in Brazil as part of—according to reports by local media—the newly elected president’s bid to strengthen his ties with Donald Trump.

According to Revista Fórum, a company run by QAnon conspiracy theorist, Txtwire CEO, and January 5 “war council” attendee Daniel Beck—the son of Doyle Beck, a powerful GOP official in the blood-red state of Idaho who may also have been at the war council—“won in December [2019] a bid of [$2,041,700 U.S. dollars] to arm vehicles of the Federal Highway Police (PRF), under the [Bolsonaro] Ministry of Justice.”

Beck’s company, Combat Armor Defense, also won, after Bolsonaro’s election but before he had assumed power, a contract from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense: a more modest $50,000 contract, one that would soon be dwarfed by the one earned after the Bolsonaro administration was in place. Just so, according to Revista Fórumthe Trump-donor-run company only “installed itself in Brazil after the election of Jair Bolsonaro, in 2019. Combat Armor’s headquarters are [now] in Vinhedo, in the interior of São Paulo.” The Brazilian media outlet notes that Beck and his company plan to soon“open a new [facility] in Indaiatuba [in Brazil]”, the clearance for which would likewise have been granted by the Bolsonaro administration prior to the January 6 insurrection in the United States.

Notably, the most powerful member of the Brazilian House from São Paulo is none other than Eduardo Bolsonaro—the son of Jair Bolsonaro and the head of the House Foreign Relations Committeein Brazil. The younger Bolsonaro is, therefore, as important to the future of Daniel Beck’s company as any government official in Brazil with the sole exception of the President of Brazil himself.

It’s under these circumstances that the FBI will undoubtedly be asking the following question: if Daniel Beck was invited, for no reason anyone can fathom, to participate in a twenty-person secret meeting about the January 6 plan-of-attack at Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel on January 5—an illicit event that we know included two members of Trump’s family, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and concerned the political, legal, financial, professional, and personal future of the then-President of the United States, their father Donald Trump—and if the Brazilian official most significant to the livelihood of the aforementioned Daniel Beck was at that very moment in D.C. meeting with the aforementioned President of the United States and Donald Trump’s other politically active adult child, Ivanka Trump, exactly what are the odds that at some point these two meetings were conjoined via video teleconference or speaker phone?

{Note: I am leaving out of this essay—as it’s a topic worthy of its own article—the longtime and highly controversial links between late Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and special treatment for his casino plans in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro was working to aid those plans when Adelson died.}:

Charles Herbster and Layne Bangerter

Before the FBI gives a final answer the question above—about the possibility that the now-infamous January 5 “war council” was held simultaneously in two locations—it will first need to wrestle with another, damnably thorny one: why did one of the self-admitted attendees at the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting, Charles W. Herbster, originally report on Facebook that the meeting was in fact taking place at the White House? For that matter, when Herbster then edited his post to change the location from the White House to Trump International Hotel, why did he delete the name “Rudy Giuliani” from his post but make no other edits? In other words, why did Herbster consider it accurate to say that Giuliani was at the meeting, but not accurate to pin Giuliani’s location during the meeting as Trump International Hotel? Or, in the alternative, why was it deemed important to keep Rudy Giuliani—he of the top-shelf South American connections related to prior Trumpist attempts to steal the 2020 election, and the only person present at the January 5 war council with a professional duty to report out its result to the President of the United States, were the president not to attend himself—out of the January 5 pre-insurrection picture altogether?

We know that there were “call-ins” to the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting during its run-time, as Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander says he spoke to top Trump political adviser and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle at a time she was in the Trump International Hotel meeting. We also know, as previously reported by Proof, that there were others besides Daniel Beck inside Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel who would have good cause to know Eduardo Bolsonaro, including powerful GOP official Layne Bangerter, whose connections to not just Brazil generally but São Paulo specifically go back decades. And we know that Michael Lindell—and possibly, per a January 6 livestream by the MyPillow CEO and former crack addict, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn—were all with Eduardo Bolsonaro at some point on January 5. So how much sense would it make for there to be no January 5 uplink between Donald Trump’s public residence (the White House) and his private residence (Trump International Hotel), at a time when so many interconnected persons were meeting at these two locations to discuss the same topic[pix w 5 ? ppl blurred]

Note: Everything about the above January 5 social media post, made at a time when Daniel Beck couldn’t have known it would be controversial—lending it important indicia of reliability from an investigative standpoint—contradicts recent statements by Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who claimed his presence at the meeting lasted only five or ten minutes, not “the evening”, and that the topic of discussion was “2022”, not “the elections [of 2020], illegal votes [in 2020], court cases [in 2020], the republics’ [sic] status [in 2020] and what to expect on [Capitol Hill] tomorrow [January 6, 2021].” Proof has asked before and will ask again: having already been caught lying about his presence at the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting, why would Tuberville continue lying? Who that was present at that meeting—either live or via teleconference uplink—would be worth Tommy Tuberville lying to protect at a moment that he would reasonably believe himself to be under aggressive FBI investigation?}:

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro

It’s worthwhile, now, to return for a moment to the Trump-Bolsonaro relationship.

It’s not just that Trump and Jair Bolsonaro purportedly share the same goals with respect to Venezuela—I say “purportedly” because of the evidence that Trump used Giuliani, Prince, and Sessions to try to strike some sort of murky deal with Maduro that would allow him to remain in power (see Proof of Corruption), though it’s not clear what information or other assets Maduro would have had to provide Trump in return—it’s that Bolsonaro’s particular focus in his dealings with Trump has been on the matter of election integrity, and how the issue of election integrity could be cynically leveraged to undermine (in, one notes, a classic neo-fascist irony) election integrity.

Per a report by WSWS, on the evening of Insurrection Day Jair Bolsonaro declared,

“I followed everything [that was happening at the Capitol]. You know I’m connected to Trump. You know my answer [about whether I think the 2020 election was stolen]. Now, [there have been] a lot of [voter] fraud allegations, a lot of [voter] fraud allegations.”

But Bolsonaro didn’t stop there. In the shadow of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government that had only just ended, he opined about his own recent election: “Mine [my 2018 ‘first-round’ election] was defrauded. I have proof of it. I should have won in the first round.”

On January 7, the day after the insurrection, President Bolsonaro continued railing about election fraud: “What was the problem [in the United States on Insurrection Day]? Lack of trust in the vote. So there, the people voted [in November] and the mail vote was boosted because of the so-called pandemic, and some people voted three or four times. Dead people voted. If we don’t have printed ballots in 2022 [in Brazil], some means to audit the vote, we are going to have a problem worse than in the U.S.”

In view of the foregoing, the FBI must now investigate whether Trump’s legal team—present at the January 5 war council at Trump International Hotel—believed that the Bolsonaros, both father and son, were key allies in getting evidence of “voter fraud” in Venezuelan elections. Such evidence would have been critical to Trump’s publicly confirmed, twelve-part pre-inauguration plan to hold onto the American presidency.

{Note: On Wednesday, March 10, Proof will publish the details of this twelve-part plan, which prominently includes the absolute necessity that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell publicly present new and compelling evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election in the days immediately following Eduardo Bolsonaro’s visit to the United States.}:

Eduardo Bolsonaro

As much as Eduardo Bolsonaro may have billed his several-day trip to Washington as a “vacation” from his official duties, and as much as he may have attempted to double down on this thin ruse by posting a picture of himself at the White House with Ivanka Trump holding his newborn daughter Georgia Bolsonaro (with his wife, Heloísa Bolsonaro, claiming that the purpose of the trip to the White House was simply to visit “Aunt Ivanka”) all of the available evidence suggests that Bolsonaro did nottravel to Washington 48 hours before an armed insurrection against the United States Capitol and leave Washington 48 hours after an armed insurrection against the United States Capitol—meeting with Trump family members, Trump administration officials, Trump campaign officials, Trump lawyers, and Trump political advisers at various locations throughout his stay—just to take a photo of a family friend holding his baby.

Consider the following facts:

  1. WSWS reports that Bolsonaro’s trip to the White House was “on the evening of January 5,” meaning that it coincided with the Trump International Hotel war council attended by at least one of Bolsonaro’s key foreign “constituents.”The timing of the meeting—approximately sixteen hours before the most important moment in Donald Trump’s life, given the repercussions he stood to face legally and politically and financially if he lost the White House—is not consistent with a social visit, nor is the simultaneous (and otherwise inexplicable) invitation of two men Eduardo Bolsonaro would have reason to know, Daniel Beck and Layne Bangerter, to Trump’s private residence inside Trump International Hotel.
  2. Bolsonaro brought the outgoing Brazilian ambassador to the United States with him to the White House on January 5. By bringing Nestor Forster Jr., Brazil’s outgoing ambassador, with him to the White House, Bolsonaro ensured that Trump would spend the last few hours before a potential civil insurrection—one whose potential dangers Trump was already aware of, given the public lies he had already told about going to the Capitol the next day, when in fact he had no intention of doing so—with the two most important diplomats from the nation of Brazil, by January 5 Trump’s most staunch ally in the entire Western Hemisphere. Forster’s presence also gives the lie to Heloísa Bolsonaro’s patently silly “Aunt Ivanka” story. Moreover, given that President Bolsonaro had wanted Eduardo to be his ambassador rather than Forster, and given that Forster was on his way out of his role, and given that (say it with me) Eduardo’s dad is the President of Brazil, the delegation Jair Bolsonaro sent to the White House on January 5 not only had to be received by President Trump himself but could not possibly be seen by Trump and/or his family as having anything less than the full authority of the Bolsonaro administration behind them. Indeed, Eduardo’s social media posts from January 5, while hiding the full scope of his visit to the White House, acknowledged his visit’s significant and indeed undeniable diplomatic import.
  3. Eduardo Bolsonaro had met with President Trump before, suggesting that it would’ve been a “snub” if Trump had refused to meet with him on January 5. Jair Bolsonaro brought his son with him, rather than his foreign minister, when he met with Trump and Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-A-Lago, in March 2019, less than 90 days after Bolsonaro’s inauguration. It is nearly impossible to conceive of Trump refusing to see Eduardo Bolsonaro when the son of one of his top foreign allies in the world was in the White House. So why didn’t Eduardo Bolsonaro’s social media postings on January 5 acknowledge a visit with the President of the United States? Why, instead, did Bolsonaro—and for that matter his wife—use social media to create the cover story that they were only at the White House to introduce their daughter to “Aunt Ivanka” in her suspiciously-close-to-the-Oval-Office personal office inside the White House? {Note: Trump has a history, documented in the Proof trilogy, of “dropping in” on meetings that aren’t on his schedule in order to meet privately with individuals without having these meetings appear in any records. In one of the most damning examples of this, Trump “dropped in” on a meeting between his lawyers, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s lawyers by suddenly showing up on speakerphone to tamper with a federal witness—urging Manafort to “stay strong” as the FBI was trying to get him to flip. This event is detailed in the Proof trilogy.}:
  4. Eduardo Bolsonaro didn’t go to the White House just once during his 120 hours in America—he went at leasttwice. Most don’t realize that not only did Eduardo Bolsonaro travel to the White House, the seat of the Trump administration and Ground Zero for January 6 planning, on the evening of January 5, he also returned to the White House on January 8 to meet with—perhaps among unnamed others—Jared Kushner (see photo below).
  5. If Tuberville, attending an event at Trump International Hotel with several other senators, was indeed “asked to speak” about the future of the U.S. at an event that was ongoing at one of three times—while Eduardo Bolsonaro was at the White House; while Bolsonaro was meeting with Lindell, who attended the Trump International event; or at some other point when Bolsonaro was in D.C. blocks from where Tuberville was speaking—what would cause Bolsonaro tomisssuch an event?
  6. It is important to remember that Eduardo Bolsonaro runs Brazil’s House Foreign Relations Committee, had been used by his father as an ambassador to the Trump administration in the past, and was with his nation’s designated ambassador to the U.S. on January 5. What could (at least) three United States senators be talking about on the eve of Joe Biden’s certification as president-elect that Bolsonaro would nothave wanted to and been intended tohear? Why would such a presentation, from at least three members of the upper house of Congress who would help determine America’s future on January 6, be of utility and interest to Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck and a couple of GOP officials from Idaho, but not top Trump ally Eduardo Bolsonaro? Why would Bolsonaro, who is friends with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and would spend at least some part of his D.C. trip with Michael Lindell (and possibly Lindell’s constant pre-insurrection companions, per Lindell, Giuliani and Powell and Flynn) but then be kept from attending a meeting all six of these people allegedly attended?

Steve Bannon

All of the above is made more troubling by the presence of Steve Bannon as the White House’s top outside political adviser in the days leading up to the insurrection. There is no evidence that Bannon was at Trump International Hotel on January 5, but we do not yet know if he was at the White House or in communication with either the White House or Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel on that critical date.

What we do know is that Bannon helped Donald Trump to strategize for January 6—and that Eduardo Bolsonaro is one of Bannon’s closest associates.

As WSWS notes, Eduardo, who may well have met with Trump mere hours before the insurrection, “is a close associate of American fascist ideologue Steve Bannon. As for [Brazilian ambassador Nestor] Forster [Jr., who was with Eduardo Bolsonaro at the White House on January 5], he has worked as a bridge between [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump loyalists. The conservative dailyEstado de S. Paulorevealed that Forster has fed the Brazilian cabinet…reports from the far-right, pro-Trump media about fraud in the U.S. elections in order to support [Jair] Bolsonaro’s alignment with Trump.”

Not only does this reporting bring both Eduardo Bolsonaro and Nestor Forster deeper into Trump’s inner circle in the hours before the insurrection, it also underscores that when Bolsonaro and Forster went to the White House on January 5 they were focused on the very same thing Donald Trump was: “reports from the far-right, pro-Trump media about fraud in the U.S. elections.”As noted already at Proof, both above and in prior articles, the Bolsonaros’ association with this topic is both a domestic one (i.e., a focus on Bolsonaro’s own claims of election fraud, which would be bolstered if Trump could establish, however fraudulently, that such activity occurs at a high level even in the United States) and an international one (i.e., inasmuch as both Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro believe that the key to toppling the regime of a supposed mutual enemy in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, was spiriting out of Venezuela evidence that Maduro won his recent elections by fraud—“evidence” that would simultaneously benefit Bolsonaro in his ongoing contestations with Brazil’s northern neighbor, and Trump in his efforts to “prove” that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him).

The Typo Heard Round the World

All of which brings us back to Charles Herbster, a Trump administration official on January 5 and yet a man who couldn’t—if we are to credit what he and other Trumpists are implicitly telling us—distinguish between the White House and a Trump hotel. Indeed, whatever the outcome of the ongoing FBI investigation into the White House’s connections to the January 6 insurrection, can anyone identify a more bizarre “typo” by a Trump administration official, or indeed anyone associated with the American government, than a top Trump adviser stating, by accident, that he was at the White House—the White House—when he really wasn’t?

To be clear, there is no evidence that Herbster was at the White House rather than Trump International Hotel on January 5. The question here is what Herbster could have seen or experienced on January 5 that would cause him to accidentally place himself, in a social media post, at the White House. What might cause confusion of this sort? David Bossie, said by Herbster to be a January 5 meeting attendee, tried to convince the Alabama Political Reporter that (in somewhat kinder terms) Herbster is senile, but the facts don’t support it: the wealthy Herbster was not only a Trump administration official on January 5 but an ambitious one, having announced plans to run for the governorship of a (technically) purple state, Nebraska. So rather than asking whether Charles Herbster has lost his memory, perhaps we should be asking a question about another man’s memory: Tommy Tuberville’s. Is the extraordinary fact of the Herbster “typo” at all related to the extraordinary nature of Senator Tuberville’s “confession” to having been at Trump International Hotel—which confession contains within it a slew of new and seemingly unnecessary lies?

{Note: Keep in mind that Herbster didn’t just edit his Facebook post: he posted it, he edited it, he deleted it, and then re-posted it, suggesting that he realized at some point in this sequence of events how explosive it was.}:

It must be emphasized that the notion that the President of the United States’ public residence in D.C. having a ready-to-roll video-conferencing hook-up to his private residence in D.C. is not only not far-fetched, it’s consistent with what we know about security protocols and Trump’s proclivities. Certainly, the president would want and in some cases need ready access to staff at the White House while relaxing at his private residence a few blocks from the Oval Office. And if such a hook-up does exist, it adds nothing to this commonsensical presumption to say that it would be state-of-the-art.

Jared Kushner and Eduardo Bolsonaro

Another unanswered question: why did Eduardo Bolsonaro have to return to the White House less than 72 hours after he left it, on January 8? What business was unfinished?

What we know for certain is that, at a minimum, Bolsonaro met with one of Trump’s top political advisers, Kushner, during his return visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: twt pix w/ kush]

This is the translation of Eduardo Bolsonaro’s captioning of his meeting with Kushner:

“I was pleased to be received at the White House, albeit quickly, by Jared Kushner, [who was] responsible for so many peace deals in the Middle East. [His] simultaneous approach, based on [a] dialogue between Arabs and Jews, invented a new paradigm [that can] be followed by other world leaders.”

Just as Eduardo Bolsonaro explained his January 5 visit to the White House to meet with a member of the Trump family as a mere friendly visit with “Aunt Ivanka,” here the Trump-liaison son of the President of Brazil, a top Trump ally—again oddly unwilling to say whether he spoke to the President of the United States while he was at the White House—uses a slightly different cover story, assuring his social media followers that his trip to the White House was “quick.” Needless to say, this was and is impossible for his followers on social media to confirm, but Bolsonaro’s seemingly unnecessary editorial remark raises more questions than it answers. If Bolsonaro had already been at the White House less than 72 hours earlier, what communication did he need to have with one of Trump’s top political advisers that couldn’t have occurred via phone? Especially if the interaction was intended to be “quick”?

Second, Bolsonaro’s lauding of Team Trump for simultaneously communicating with both sides of an entrenched divide has echoes of Trump’s apparent foreign policy in South America that cannot be ignored. Is the analagous situation Eduardo Bolsonaro is imagining Trump’s agents simultaneously speaking with the Maduro government and the Venezuelan opposition led by Juan Guaidó? Or is he referring to his father at once reaching out to the both the Trump administration and the incoming Joe Biden administration? We cannot know for certain what Bolsonaro was referring to, but we can say that on January 8 the young Bolsonaro (also known as “bananinha” or “Little Banana” in Brazil) was his country’s de facto ambassador to the United States, meeting with the Trump adviser (perhaps among others) who had acted as his own country’s de facto ambassador to basically every autocratic nation Trump had sought to do illicit business with—Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, for instance—and then declaring that “other world leaders” should use the clandestine negotiating tactics Kushner had perfected during his time in the White House. While cryptic, this message deserves consideration by federal officials investigating what Bolsonaro was doing in America during the insurrection.

Conclusion

As already noted at Proof, Eduardo Bolsonaro is considered to be one of the most corrupt men in Brazil, with his noteworthy specializations including (a) clandestine negotiations with foreign leaders, (b) working with rough-and-ready paramilitary forces to illegally seize and maintain control of civilian areas, (c) paying middlemen for illicit services, and (d) being a “Trump whisperer” to not just the former president himself but his family and whole inner circle.

It is certainly worth the FBI investigating whether Giuliani’s confidence that he could get smoking-gun evidence of voting irregularities in the ten days after a presumptively delayed joint session of Congress was prompted by his significant contacts in South America, just as the mystery of Daniel Beck’s attendance at the January 5 war council— along with others with ties to the very city represented by Eduardo Bolsonaro—could be explained by the possibility that these two men were at the same meeting on January 5 rather than different ones, and that the President of the United States was also present.

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dominion? saw it on facebook or somewhere? [substack says distance from chavez ghost b/c it might reveal venez plot?!

It was all made up!' Maddow reveals bombshell Rudy Giuliani testimony about origins of Trump's big election lie

Bob Brigham Raw Story

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Tuesday examined the origins of former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" of election fraud, which she described as the "current animating force"...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/giuliani/

lic suspended?

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apr gaslight nation unholy trinity many names

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-gaslit-nation-with-andrea-29574442/episode/giuliani-and-the-unholy-trinity-82192331/

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an Before he was elected mayor of New York City in 1993, Republican Rudy Giuliani was a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York — and he had a reputation for being tough, focused and aggressive. But now, ironically, Giuliani finds himself being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. His home and office in Manhattan were recently searched as part of a DOJ investigation of his Ukraine-related activities of the Trump era. And CNN's Marshall Cohen offers some insights on those search warrants in an article published on May 7.

Cohen explains, "The Justice Department's criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani involves an international cast of characters: Trump White House allies, Republican lawyers, Ukrainian oligarchs, diplomats, right-wing journalists and other figures who aren't household names…. Giuliani has denied all wrongdoing and claimed the investigation itself is unconstitutional."

Cohen goes on to offer a "breakdown" of "the dozen Americans and Ukrainians who CNN has confirmed were mentioned by name in the search warrantsagainst Giuliani." Although there may be others mentioned in the warrants, Cohen notes, the people discussed in his article are the ones CNN has confirmed.

The 12 include Florida-based businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman; Florida-based businessman David Correia, an associate of Parnas and Fruman; former Ukraine prosecutors general Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko; Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former Ukrainian official who worked under Lutsenko; attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova; conservative pundit John Solomon, known for his work with The Hill and the Washington Post in the past; former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; Glib Zagoriy, who served in the Ukrainian parliament; and Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General Gyunduz Mamedov.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump was impeached by House Democrats after trying to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him dig up dirt on now-President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. And House Democrats who pushed for the impeachment, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff of California, stressed that Trump seriously crossed the line by asking a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and withholding military aid to Ukraine in the hope of getting that investigation.

Trump loyalist Giuliani tirelessly railed against that impeachment in 2019 and went out of his way to smear the Bidens, promoting the far-right conspiracy theory that the real election interference in 2016 wasn't Russia interfering on behalf of Trump, but Ukraine interfering on behalf of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Cohen notes that Parnas, who paid Giuliani for half a million dollars of consulting work in 2018, "publicly flipped on Trump and Giuliani and implicated them in the anti-Biden schemes in Ukraine" and "assisted House Democrats with their impeachment inquiry against Trump in 2019." And Fruman, Cohen points out, "worked closely with Parnas and Giuliani to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine."

Shokin, according to Cohen, "allied with Giuliani to spread false claims of corruption against (Joe) Biden" and "falsely claimed he was fired because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company where Biden's son served on the board."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/ukraine-prosecutor-reveals-he-was-likely-ousted-for-refusing-to-launch-hunter-biden-probe

no lnx

the ME

ormer top Ukrainian prosecutor believes he was ousted last year over his refusal to open an investigation into Hunter Biden; an investigation Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's aide ensured would be opened following former President Donald Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani's request.

During an interview with Buzzfeed,Rouslan Riaboshapkaon Wednesday, May 5, discussed a 2019 transcript that he believes is an indication that his firing was politically motivated. From Strasbourg, France,Riaboshapka highlighted a phone call between Giuliani and Andriy Yermak on July 22, 2019.

"It reveals an important detail," Riaboshapka said of the transcript. "Yermak promised Giuliani to open an investigation into Hunter Biden," the son of President Joe Biden. "I didn't know about the essence of the call. I didn't know Yermak promised to help Giuliani."

That call came just three days before Trump's infamous phone discussion with Zelensky which subsequently led to his first impeachment trial.

"Just let these investigations go forward," Giuliani said to Yermak at the time, according to the transcript. "Get someone to investigate this."

"We'll be ready ... to coordinate, to work and investigate everything, which you listed," Yermak responded. At a later point during the phone discussion, Yermak reassured Giuliani that the situation would be "deeply" investigated.

Riaboshapka is the second [erson to insist his firing was politically motivated. Back in April 2019, Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was also ousted. During Trump's impeachment trial, she also testified and revealed that she believed Giuliani and several Ukrainian political operatives were responsible for her firing.

However, Giuliani has denied any allegations of wrongdoing. Zelensky's office has also released a statement about the incident. According to Zelensky's office, neither Yermak nor the Ukrainian president pressured law enforcement agencies about the investigation.

"Mr. Riaboshapka's statements may be caused by internal political circumstances in Ukraine and have nothing to do with the foreign policy of the state," the statement from Zelensky's office read. "The Office of the President is interested in developing a strong system of independent law enforcement agencies in Ukraine."

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Giuliani is likely behind the latest Hunter Biden fiasco — which ... ›

Here's the damning timeline of Trump's blatantly corrupt Ukrainian ... ›

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barr quashed rudy investigation? amb yovanovich

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/rudy-giuliani-case/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/federal-investigators-carry-out-search-warrant-on-rudy-giulianis-apartment/

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fbi 250K$ reward for KK?

report opens way for crim pros?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/trump-russia-campaign/

max Boot, a Russian-American author and historian and a fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations,says the U.S. Intel Community's just-released report on Russia's attack on the 2020 presidential election is "evidence of cooperation" – at least – between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

The report details that Russian President Vladimir Putin once again interfered in the election, again to help President Donald Trump, and to hurt now-President Joe Biden.

"I would say this is certainly evidence," Boot says, "it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."

Boot praised the Biden administration for authorizing the release of the report, which he says Americans would not have seen under the Trump administration, while singling out Acting Trump DNI and DNI Rick Grinnell and John Ratcliffe, who "consistently tried to minimize and downplay Russian election interference."

Importantly, Boot notes the report shows "just how closely the Russian messaging during the election echoed the messaging of the Trump campaign of Fox News and this kind of whole right wing media industrial complex."

"It's fascinating to see the extent to which the Russians were pushing the same messages about alleged Biden corruption, about his supposedly corrupt son, about you can't trust mail-in ballots, that the Democratic Party is trying to interfere with the election. These were the things that Trump was saying, but these were also the things that the Russians were saying, and in fact, the report highlights the close ties between Russian agents of influence like Andrii Derkach from Ukraine. Ukraine and Rudy Giuliani the president's lawyer, Konstantin Kilimnik is another one, who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, so these ties are a copious and disturbing and to use a word we haven't heard in a few years, I would say this is certainly evidence. If not, it may be evidence of collusion, but it's definitely evidence of cooperation and and congruence between the Russians and the Trump campaign."

Watch...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/oval-office-meeting/

President Donald Trump, weeks after losing the November 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and more than 70 electoral votes, discussed declaring national security emergency powers his White House attorneys told him he did not have.

That's according to a stunning report that details a December 18 meeting in the Oval Office and the White House Residence from Axios, "Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency."

The meeting included White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, on the one side, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, former Trump administration official Emily Newman, and attorney Sidney Powell, who is now being sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion voting machines.

Powell "proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion's voting machines."

At one point Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani joined by phone,and was forced to tell everyone in the "heated" meeting to calm down. Axios reports at one point the "meeting had come entirely off the rails," and says "people were yelling and cursing" inside the Oval Office.

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, "wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: 'I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation,' he said, according to Axios."

Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. "What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?" Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.

Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.

He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They're saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let's give this a shot.

The words "martial law" were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.

But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.

Both Lyons and Morgan "expressed skepticism" about Flynn and Powell's idea of "invoking national security emergency powers."

"Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell's theories, but he said, 'At least she's out there fighting.'"

Axios adds the "handful of White House lawyers and advisers" were "determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy."

Read the entire report here.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rudy-giuliani-2649955361

salon

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on seven foreign members of Rudy Giuliani's inner circle who sought to interfere in the U.S. election and sway the results in Trump's favor.

The president has also reportedly dropped his reliance on Giuliani for his second impeachment trial, refusing to pay Giuliani for his unsuccessful post-election campaign to overturn November's results. Meanwhile, the New York State Bar Association has moved to disbar Giuliani this week. Needless to say, the week after he told thousands of Trump supporters to hold "trial by combat" before many of them violently stormed the U.S. Capitol with aims to halt the Constitutionally mandated certification of Joe Biden's Electoral College victory was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for Rudy Giuliani. [twt doc]

the  Treasury's targets include Russian-linked Ukrainians Konstantin Kulyk, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, Andriy Telizhenko, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and –– most principally –– Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker sanctioned just last year, who played a key role in orchestrating the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. It was with the help of these actors that Giuliani spearheaded a failed campaign to smear President-elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, with false claims of past corruption. Trump's call to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky –– in which the President pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden on his behalf –– would become the impetus for the President's own impeachment.

"Since at least 2019," said the Treasury in a statement on Wednesday, "Derkach and his associates have leveraged U.S. media, U.S.-based social media platforms, and influential U.S. persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former U.S. officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a steadfast Trump loyalist, also attempted to add distance between his agency and Giuliani and his goons. "Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy [...] The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes."

"Trump has been blaming his longtime personal attorney and many others for the predicament he now finds himself in, though he has not accepted any responsibility in public or in private," CNN reported this week. "Giuliani is still expected to play a role in Trump's impeachment defense but has been left out of most conversations thus far."

The New York State Bar Association has also made moves to disavow Giuliani in light of last Wednesday's chaos. The Bar announced on Monday that it has launched an inquiry into Giuliani's role in Trump's months-long crusade to undermine the election. The group's bylaws make explicit reference to anyone "who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means" and disowns anyone who has engaged in such activity.

The Association stated, "Mr. Giuliani's words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election's outcome to take matters into their own hands," adding, "Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power."

Giuliani, who called for "a trial by combat" in the rally leading up the riot on Capitol Hill, now faces the threat of permanent expulsion from the Bar, which would render him unlicensed to practice law in the state of New York. "We cannot stand idly by," said the Association, "and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked."

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trump teleprompter we hate violence, cya but also cut off $, but then impeach w/ eastman?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/giuliani-2649936248/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/rudy-giuliani/

called wrong moc

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an

A screaming Joe Scarborough demanded the arrest of President Donald Trump, the president's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and the president's son, Donald Trump, Jr., for inciting Wednesday's deadly violent insurrection.

"Are we a nation of laws?" the "Morning Joe" co-host yelled the morning after thousands of armed Trump MAGA supporters, some draped in "Make America Great Again" flags, breached the nation's Capitol Building, with hundreds crawling the halls of America's seat of government.

"Donald J. Trump called for the insurrection against the United States of America. He called for it.[trial by combat?]  Rudy Giuliani called for 'combat justice,' just an hour or two before this happened. Donald Trump, Jr. said, 'We are coming for you!'"

"That's insurrection against the United States of America. And if Donald Trump, Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump are not arrested today for insurrection and taken to jail and booked, and if the Capitol Hill Police do not go through every video, and look at the face of every person that invaded our Capitol, and if they are not arrested and brought to justice today, then we are no longer a nation of laws and we only tell people they can do this again."

Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski also blasted the Capitol Hill Police for treating the insurrectionists with kid gloves "because they are white," and accusing them of opening "the fucking doors" for the Trump insurrectionists.

"If these insurrectionists were Black, they would have been shot in the face. And my god, if these insurrectionists were Muslim, they would have been shot from the top of buildings."

Watch:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rudy-giuliani-2649698626/

12/20 an alexh

Although Joe Biden's inauguration is only three weeks away, President Donald Trump and many of his loyalists have yet to acknowledge the president-elect's victory. And that includes the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has announced yet another election-related lawsuit challenging Biden's win in Wisconsin.

Making debunked and totally baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, Trump and his allies have filed one lawsuit after another in the hope of overturning the 2020 presidential election results — and most have already been dismissed or rejected in the federal courts. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to even consider a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who asked the High Court to throw out the election results in four states that Biden won: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.

Giuliani, according to Independent reporter Justin Vallejo, is challenging a December 14 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court — which rejected the Trump campaign's efforts to get more than 50,000 ballots thrown out in Wisconsin. The former New York City mayor is hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will invalidate the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision.

Vallejo notes that Trump's campaign "says its petition will present claims that ballots were counted by voters without identification, incomplete absentee ballots were counted, and ballots were collected by hand at events held before the election."

Previously, a lawsuit from the Trump campaign asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the election results in Pennsylvania, but it refused to consider that case. And the justices later rejected Paxton's widely condemned lawsuit out of Texas.

When the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against the Trump campaign on December 14, it was a 4-3 decision — and Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote, "Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration. The challenges raised by the campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began."

During a recent appearance on the podcast of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon — who is facing criminal fraud charges for allegedly defrauding donors to the We Build the Wall campaign — Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn insisted that the campaign will continue to fight the election results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and claimed that there will be "action out of Georgia" as well.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate are scheduled to officially count the Electoral College results during a joint session of Congress on January 6. Some far-right House Republicans, including Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have vowed to challenge the election results that day. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged Biden as president-elect and Sen. Kamala Harris of California as vice president-elect and is urging other Senate Republicans to do the same. Since Democrats still control the House of Representatives, and a majority of the Senate acknowledges Biden's win, Trump has no path to overturn the election in Congress, despite his hopes.

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an 1220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/bill-barr-2649627878/

Lev Parnas, a former business associate of Rudy Giuliani, made explosive allegations against outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr in a federal court filing on Tuesday. Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations and fraud charges, has accused Barr of timing his arrest last fall in order to prevent him from testifying at House impeachment hearings last fall.

The motion was filed in the Southern District of New York by attorneys for Parnas, a Ukrainian-born businessman who in 2018 and 2019 ran political errands in Ukraine on behalf of Giuliani and Trump. Parnas argues that his indictment last October was part of an intervention by Barr "to protect the President and thwart [Parnas'] potential testimony in the impeachment inquiry."

Parnas filed his complaint as reports broke that federal prosecutors in New York have discussed with Justice Department officials in Washington seeking a warrant for Giuliani's electronic communications, and, according to a person familiar with the case, at least one of the former New York mayor's cell phones. Approval from higher-ups at Justice is required before prosecutors may request a search warrant for any materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege. It is unclear whether such approval has been granted in this case.

According to multiple reports and individuals familiar with the case, Giuliani's business dealings abroad have been part of a federal probe led by the FBI and the Southern District of New York — the very office Giuliani once led as U.S. attorney. Those investigations grew out of the arrest last October of Parnas and business partner Igor Fruman, who were detained at Dulles International Airport outside Washington as they waited to board an overseas flight. The two men were arrested just hours after meeting with Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. According to the court filing, Giuliani was originally supposed to join Parnas and Fruman on their trip to Ukraine, but canceled earlier that day. Two other Giuliani associates also slated to make the trip had canceled a few days earlier, according to the document.

Prosecutors charged Parnas and Fruman, along with two other associates, with conspiring to make campaign donations on someone else's behalf and violating the federal prohibition on soliciting donations from foreign sources. A superseding indictment this September added fraud charges in connection with their company, Fraud Guarantee, which contracted with Giuliani to do promotional work. Giuliani has not been charged in connection with any aspect of the case. Parnas and Fruman have both pleaded not guilty.

In the new filing, Parnas lays out a series of events that he believes Barr helped engineer to secure his silence.

In late September, Parnas received a letter from House investigators asking him to preserve documents and prepare for a deposition. When Parnas told Giuliani about this, he was directed to attorney John Dowd, who had previously represented President Trump in connection with Robert Mueller's investigation of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair now serving time in prison. After securing the president's personal approval, Dowd took Parnas as a client.

On Oct. 8, a Tuesday, Dowd sent an email to a number of attorneys affiliated with Trump's defense team, calling the president "Boss" and promising that Dowd would "eliminate any doubt" that Parnas and Fruman would answer questions before Congress. Dowd then sent a letter to House investigators informing them that Parnas and Fruman would not appear for their scheduled deposition on Thursday, Oct. 10.

The next day, Parnas and Fruman were arrested. Two of the attorneys copied on Dowd's email were the same people who had been scheduled to fly with them to Europe. That night, Barr, who had been informed about the indictment in advance, met Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch for dinner in New York. The attorney general visited the Southern District offices the following morning on what aides described as a "routine" visit.

At the time of the arrest, however, the federal investigation into Parnas was not over, and did not in fact conclude for 11 more months, until a grand jury returned the fraud charges. It is not entirely clear why an immediate arrest was deemed necessary, although Parnas was described as a flight risk — on a trip the president's personal attorney was supposed to make with him.

Days after the arrest, Giuliani parted ways with his own attorney, Jon Sale, a prominent Miami lawyer Giuliani said he had retained for impeachment defense. Giuliani previously told Salon that Sale had been the person who first connected him with Parnas in 2018. He and Sale also shared a significant client: Venezuelan financier Alejandro Betancourt, who was under investigation in a multibillion-dollar money laundering probe and also knew Parnas.

Within a few weeks of these events, Parnas fired Dowd, after what he later described in a TV interview as a jailhouse loyalty shakedown.

"I called Dowd to come there. And I started seeing in the process of the bail stuff, the way things were going on ... I didn't feel they were trying to get me out," Parnas told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in January. "John Dowd, instead of comforting me and trying to calm me down and telling me I'm going to be OK, he started talking to me like a drill sergeant."

"Were they telling you to sacrifice yourself to protect the president?" Maddow asked.

"That's the way I felt," Parnas replied. He dismissed Dowd along with Kevin Downing, another former Manafort attorney. In subsequent months, Parnas apparently turned over evidence to House impeachment investigators, but was never called to testify, likely because of his tarnished reputation following the arrest.

Parnas' motion seeks to convince the court to turn over numerous documents about the circumstances surrounding his investigation and arrest, as well as the investigation (or lack thereof) of other people associated with the Ukraine affair.

To make his case, Parnas must show that Barr improperly intervened in the indictment. His filing cites numerous instances of the attorney general improperly inserting himself on Trump's behalf in other legal matters, such as the cases of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone and Trump sexual-assault accuser E. Jean Carroll. Parnas must also show that he and his associates were singled out for these campaign finance violations where others involved, such as the people who actually made the donations, were not.

The court filing quotes a voicemail Giuliani left with Parnas' attorney, the second half of which was apparently captured accidentally after Giuliani forgot to hang up. In the message, Giuliani asks whether it's possible to speak with or about Parnas, and leaves his number. After a pause, according to the transcript, Giuliani can be heard telling his attorney, who apparently was also present, "That's the soon-to-be-gotten-rid-of number." The two carry on a short conversation, then the voicemail ends.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-white-house-2649585320/

no lnx twt

Trump allies floating increasingly 'anti-democratic' ideas as their ‘desperation’ grows — and officials are 'scared'

Alex Henderson December 21, 2020

President Donald Trump can't stand rejection, and his campaign has had a lot of it since the 2020 presidential election — from judge after judge dismissing his legal team's election lawsuits to the Electoral College certifying President-elect Joe Biden's victory. Following all that rejection, journalist Charlotte Klein stresses in an article published by Vanity Fair on December 20, Trump and his supporters are resorting to increasingly extreme ideas in the hope of preventing Biden from being inaugurated less than a month from now.

"Having effectively exhausted his legal options — at least 86 judges, including dozens appointed by Republicans, have shut down the president's unprecedented attempt to overturn his defeat through the courts — Donald Trump is apparently now entertaining even more anti-democratic paths to preserving his power," Klein explains. "During a White House meeting on Friday, nearly a week after the Electoral College certified Joe Biden's victory, Trump reportedly discussed invoking martial law to overturn his losing election result — a strategy one of the meeting's attendees, former national security adviser and recent pardon recipient Michael Flynn, had recently proposed on cable television."

According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, far-right Republican attorney Sidney Powell was also present in the White House during that Friday, December 18 meeting with the president — who floated the idea of choosing her as a special counsel to oversee an investigation of voter fraud. Powell, in her lawsuits, has been alleging that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud during the election but has offered no proof of it.

Others who were present during that meeting included attorney Rudy Giuliani, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Klein writes, "As others in the room pointed out Powell's failure thus far to support her fraud claims with verifiable evidence, (Powell) 'accused other Trump advisers of being quitters,' according to the Times. Another reported an idea weighed during Friday's meeting was an executive order to seize voting machines to examine them for alleged fraud, after Giuliani separately asked the Department of Homeland Security to do so earlier in the week — apparently to no avail."

Flynn isn't the only Trump supporter who has been urging Trump to declare martial law. Far-right Georgia-based attorney Lin Wood, who has been working closely with Powell on election-related lawsuits, has also made that frightening recommendation:

Haberman and Axios' Jonathan Swan have both posted tweets noting how worried some people in Trump's circle have been about the increasingly extreme ideas they are hearing:

Klein points out that "concern about the president's increasingly desperate quest to remain in power has intensified among those in Trump's circle," noting that a senior administration official, quoted anonymously, told Axios, "People who are concerned and nervous aren't the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe. These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rudy-giuliani-2649560392/

grifter bitcoin cigars utube

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jenna and rudy pos, rudy hosp 4 days got same antibiody rx trump got

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/hunter-biden-2649459491/

irs bs on hold before election protocol

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/hunter-biden-2649459491/

irs bs on hold before election protocol, rudy bogus?

Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani reportedly met with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents in Delaware who were investigating Hunter Biden's finances while President-elect Joe Biden was on the campaign trail.

Now, more questions are looming about the FBI. An editorial published by The New York Times lays out how the latest Pittsburgh inquiry raises questions about politicization among FBI agents.

While Hunter Biden did admit that there is a current tax investigation underway, there is speculation that the entire basis of the latest investigation stems from Giuliani's farfetched attempts to throw a curveball at the Democratic presidential candidate prior to Election Day.

It has been reported that U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr personally requested for top Pittsburgh federal prosecutor Scott Brady to review the investigative material Giuliani had gathered on the Biden family. Back in January, Brady met with Giuliani for nearly four hours to discuss the findings.

Due to the election and Giuliani's affiliation with Trump, the meeting is said to have "raised alarms within the F.B.I. and the Justice Department." There were also concerns about the politicization of the bureau in the middle of an election year.

Mr. Giuliani had served as Mr. Trump's attack dog during the Russia investigation before becoming the face of an effort to tarnish Hunter Biden during President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s campaign. If Mr. Brady's investigation became public, the agents feared that the F.B.I. could be drawn into a politically toxic battle in the midst of the presidential election, just as it was in 2016.

Giuliani's track record before and after the election has also been a factor taken into consideration which raises questions about the credibility of the latest investigation.

Mr. Giuliani had tried to promote scrutiny of Hunter Biden's work for Burisma, which had been mired in a corruption scandal. He accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of corruptly pushing for the ouster of Ukraine's top prosecutor, who had been investigating Burisma, as a favor to his son while he was vice president. No evidence of wrongdoing by the president-elect has emerged.

As of Saturday, Dec. 12, Hunter Biden has not been charged with any financial crimes.

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kos

So you probably heard that Benito Shit-giggles is trying to overturn our election, and he's sent Four Seasons Total Lawyering founder Rudy Giuliani out to the wastelands to do his bidding.

And you probably saw some of that fake hearing in which Rudy — screwy-as-an-Argentine-bluebird-duck's-penis Rudy Focking Giuliani — tried to shush his (presumably drunk and loony) witness Mellissa Carone.

Yeah, you remember.

Well, there's more. Carone did an interview with SarahPalin.com today — because 2020 needed far more toppings for the shit sundae — and … erm … this happened:

When it comes to her feelings on politics or just about anything, Carone doesn't mince words. While she's been called 'a drunk' and 'stupid' by the basement dwellers, this mother of a four-year old and a four-month old keeps telling her story with a smile.

"This is what they do to Trump," Carone said. It's not going to work with me. I won't back down because I am very religious and I know God is watching over me. This started with COVID. The Obamas funded that Wuhan lab to make COVID. Then the impeachment process. They've used every avenue possible to cheat, they used Dominion. Dominion software was created to cheat. I have a binder from Dominion that proves this. There's so much more that will be exposed."

:{:{}:

}:

[VID]

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-lawyers/

raw

According to the Washington Post's in-depth look at Donald Trump's strategy to save his presidency with accusations of massive election fraud, the report notes that thepresident's legal options were impacted when lawyers working for the campaign fled rather than implement the president's plans.

The report notes that the president and his team started game-planning out a strategy to contest election results back in June with the expectation that he was looking at a tight election and plans were worked out to have Trump declare himself the winner the night of the election.

However, after Fox News called Arizona for Vice President Joe Biden that evening, those plans fell apart which led to an all-hands-on-deck meeting to come up with a new approach.

According to the report, that led to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's ill-fated press conference held in a landscape maintenance company's parking lot which set in motion an exodus of legal expertise.

The Post reports that the president's inner circle, "briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president's approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a '5 to 10 percent chance of winning,' one person involved in the meeting said. Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy."

The report goes on to note, "some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week."

According to one campaign insider, "Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that's when it became clear there was no 'there' there."

Giuliani's widely-derided press conference then led to a gulf "between the outlooks of most lawyers on the team and of Giuliani, who many of the other lawyers thought seemed 'deranged' and ill-prepared to litigate, according to a person familiar with the campaign's legal team. Some of the Trump campaign and Republican Party lawyers sought to even avoid meetings with Giuliani and his team. When asked for evidence internally for their most explosive claims, Giuliani and Powell could not provide it, the other advisers said."

According to the report, Giuliani's claims that he could win the case led to a shouting match between the former New York City mayor and Trump deputy campaign manager Justin Clark during a conference call where Clark "called Giuliani an expletive and said he was feeding the president bad information. The meeting ended without a clear path, according to people familiar with the discussion."

The report goes on to note that "the next day, a Saturday, Trump tweeted out that Giuliani, [Jenna] Ellis, [Sydney] Powell and others were now in charge of his legal strategy. Ellis startled aides by entering the campaign's Arlington headquarters and instructing staffers that they must now listen to her and Giuliani."

Powell has since been fired by the president for making claims about voter fraud that even the president found too farfetched.

You can read more here.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/fox-news-figures-lavish-praise-rudy-giuliani-and-sidney-powells-unhinged-press

no twt

Fox News figures lavish praise on Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s unhinged press conference about their plan to subvert the election

WRITTEN BY BRENDAN KARET

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ

PUBLISHED 11/19/20

Fox figures are attempting to defend the conspiratorial press conference from President Donald Trump’s legal team, during which his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell pushed a bunch of conspiracy theories and generally laid out how they are trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.

This post will be updated throughout November 19.

:{:{}:

}:

CNN Politics: “At no point did Trump’s legal team offer any proof for their allegations of widespread fraud.” Following Giuliani and Powell’s stunt, CNN’s Tara Subramaniam and Holmes Lybrand offered a fact check noting that the “briefing was overflowing with falsehoods and conspiracy theories” for which they provided no proof. ” [CNN Politics, 11/19/20]

Politico: “Giuliani and fellow Trump lawyers crank out conspiracies as legal challenges implode.” Politico's Quint Forget and Alex Isenstadt examined how “the former New York mayor and his colleagues spun a web of mistruths that made mention of the Clinton Foundation, liberal megadonor George Soros and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.” [Politico, 11/19/20]

Fox figures lauded Giuliani and Powell

Fox host Lou Dobbs talked up Giuliani and Powell's unhinged press conference [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight

LOU DOBBS (HOST): President Trump's attorneys say they can prove illegal ballots were used to inflate Biden's vote tally in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The legal team also expects to file new lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, perhaps even Virginia and New Mexico. That's in addition to the 20 lawsuits that are now being litigated by the campaign or Republican Party attorneys.

Another issue at the center of today's news conference, the use of Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic software. Defense attorney Sidney Powell cited a whistleblower's stunning affidavit. It says Smartmatic's technology was used to rig elections in Venezuela, it is now in the, quote, DNA of every vote-tabulating company's software and system. Smartmatic and Dominion deny those charges. But Sidney Powell argues that algorithms in the Smartmatic software were used to change results in the presidential election. 

Co-hosts of Fox’s The Five defended Giuliani and Powell.[Fox News, The Five, 11/19/20]

Video file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Five

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compared Powell to John Adams.[Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show, 11/19/20]

On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Fox contributor Ken Starr compares Sidney Powell to John Adams

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Audio file

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

Media outlets have debunked Rudy Giuliani's conspiracy theories. Ignoring that, Tucker Carlson now demands new investigations. [Media Matters, 11/19/20]

CitationFrom the November 19, 2020, edition ofFox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Fox News legal analyst: “The unabashed arrogance of the media was on full display today, as they were demanding to see the evidence. They’re not entitled to see the evidence.” [Fox News, Hannity, 11/19/20]

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aha/query: how can there be so much failing UP in trump admin? eg JOK, repeatedly proved to be bogus, but never matters?  failsons;  nothing matters but loyalty and power?  operates in post-truth world?  side effect of RWI pumping nutrients into ecosystem to build farm team of bottom feeders/ grifters?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rudy-giuliani-press-conference-2648986338/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rudy-giuliani-press-conference-2648986338/

kos

high noon on Thursday, Donald Trump's crack legal team sauntered out for a showdown with destiny. They were there to demonstrate for America that Trump's refusal to concede the election wasn't a demonstration of infantile refusal to accept reality, but was really real. Really real. Oh, so real.

And in their presentation on why the press should never again say they were lacking evidence, what emerged before their own tech team appeared to pull the plug was a claim that Democrats engaged in a vast conspiracy to "inject" hundreds of thousands of Biden votes by using voting machines built by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, with the help of wealthy Jew George Soros, that sent American votes overseas to servers in Germany where they could be altered according to orders from antifa. And then, when even that proved inadequate to defeat Trump, Democrats brought in "garbage cans" full of votes that were marked for Biden. Then counted them three times each. That may sound like an exaggeration. It's not. It's only a subset of the claims that were made during this peek into an alternative reality. Also Rudy Giuliani's hair dye began pouring off his head at a rate that made it look as if his brain might be leaking from his skull. Which seemed entirely possible.

Giuliani took the stage first to begin the general theme of the day, which was to berate the press for saying that there was no evidence of voter fraud when he had a fistful of affidavits. Affidavits, people! For example, Giuliani claimed to have "60 witnesses" to an incident in which a truck pulled up in the wee hours of the morning "and people rushed to it thinking it had food" but instead it was "full of ballots, thousands of ballots" that were in garbage cans and paper bags. And then these votes were brought in "when they thought all the Republican observers had gone home" and run through the voting machines three times. This was not a single event, declared Giuliani, but a product of Joe Biden's "election fraud team" that worked in "Democrat led cities" to plant the votes needed to put Biden ahead of Trump.

Giuliani then gave way to Sidney Powell, who demonstrated that when it comes to being disconnected from reality, this conference went to 12. Powell immediately veered away from trash can votes and right into how the election was really rigged by voting software written for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Chavez, rather unexpectedly, is apparently very anti-Trump. (That's really unexpected since he died in 2013.) But Powell launched into an emotional explanation of how "Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro," and these companies are, of course, run by "the number two associate of George Soros." As Powell went on, she also expressed how Cuba was involved, and how there was an "algorithm" that allowed this Venezuela-Jewish-Cuban cabal to define the values of votes. That algorithm that "probably flipped votes all over the country" because, according to Powell, "Donald Trump won in a landslide."

Yes, she said that. This came right before the part where she explained that she also has an affidavit from someone who chatted about all this with Chavez (I am still not making this up) and that it was all approved by antifa. It was a Biden-Venezuelan-Jewish-Cuban-antifa conspiracy. And if you think she didn't mention the Clinton Foundation in this … oh yes she did. All of these groups "had the election rigged for Mr. Biden," said Powell. She went on to explain: "They can say a Biden vote counts 1.25 and a Trump vote counts 0.75, and that may be the numbers that were used here." All of this was explained to her by the Chavez chat man. Also, there is a server in Germany that is definitely connected. Though we don't know how. So … just assume everyone not standing on the stage was a part of the conspiracy.

Powell then gave way to Jenna Ellis, who explained that, lord help everyone, all that had gone before was only the "opening statement" to the full trial they wanted to have. Ellis then explained that this would not be a trial of the public opinion before complaining that there wasn't time to do it in court. But definitely, definitely, 99% of the press wasn't worthy to even report on the story. Because they're part of the conspiracy.

The whole thing finished off with some Q&A time in which Giuliani stepped forward to embrace everything that Powell had claimed about Chavez, Soros, antifa … the works. That included complaining about states being "stupid enough to send our votes out of the country ... to be counted by people who are allies of Chavez and Meduro ... run by an ally of George Soros." He knows this is a fact, said Giuliani. "When I first heard it, I didn't believe it, until Sydney showed me the documents ... you can Google it, well, unless they took it down." This was accompanied by more complaints about antifa's role in fixing the election.

And you know all of this has to be true, because Giuliani gestured around the stage to proclaim, "There is nobody here who engages in fantasies." This was followed by a claim that Trump won Michigan by 50,000 votes, and that the campaign was looking into challenges in both Virginia and New Mexico. By that point, Giuliani's hair dye was largely on his shirt.

All this happened. And I didn't even touch on the most ridiculous moments.

[twt

fox News aired Giuliani's presser in its entirety -- here's what their correspondent had to say about it afterwards

Fisher: "Certainly a colorful news conference, but it was light on facts. So much of what he said was simply not true, or has already been thrown out in court."]

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/did-donald-trump-steal-the-election-2648992261/

digby

Back in September, Politico's Anita Kumar reportedthat for the previous year the Trump campaign had been assembling a team of election lawyers from all over the country to familiarize themselves in local election laws and prepare "prewritten legal pleadings that can be hurried to the courthouse the day after the election, as wrangling begins over close results and a crush of mail-in ballots." The effort was led by "a 20-person team of lawyers" from major law firms who were overseeing a strategy in "key states the Trump campaign is targeting, like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan." It sounded like a very serious and professional operation, one which came as no surprise to me, since Republicans have specialized in disenfranchising Democratic voters for many decades.

Trump himself repeatedly made clear on the campaign trail what he planned to do, from contesting the validity of mail-in ballots to declaring himself the winner on election night regardless of whether the votes had been counted and filing a flurry of lawsuits contesting the election with an eye toward having "his" judges (including newly-minted Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett) deliver the election to him if necessary. I don't think anyone can possibly say they are surprised at how he has reacted to losing the election.

In the weeks before Nov. 3, Trump did have that team of high-powered legal talent arguing cases around mail-in ballots and shifting deadlines in various states, some of which did make it to the Supreme Court. But then the election actually happened and vote-counting began, and since then Trump's crack team has been been remarkably unsuccessful. The good lawyers have either been pressured to to quit orthrew in the towel themselves as it became patently obvious that they had no evidence of voter fraud.

That hasn't stopped Trump from plowing ahead anyway with the self-described "elite strike force" led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, last seen prior to the election with his hand down his pants in the latest Borat movie and famously presiding over a post-election press conference at a landscaping company next door to a sex shop and a crematorium. Trump was evidently impressed by Rudy's performance in both venues, because he gave the former LifeLock spokesman (hat tip to Salon's Roger Sollenberger) full authority to conduct the legal strategy to overturn the election results by any means necessary.

CNN reports that Giuliani has taken full control. For instance, upset by what he was hearing from three of the lawyers assigned to argue one of the Pennsylvania cases, the man once described as "America's mayor" fired them on the spot and took over the case — which was being argued the very next day — himself. He hadn't been inside a courtroom in more than 30 years, and it showed. He was very nearly laughed out of court.

Giuliani was undaunted. He immediately pulled together the other members of the "elite strike force": Sidney Powell, who is former national security adviser Michael Flynn's Fox News lawyer; veteran right-wing husband and wife team Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, also Fox News lawyers; and over-the-top Trump defender and campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis. None of them have any expertise in election law, but then they don't have a legal strategy either.

Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and "save democracy" from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.

This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It's a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on "faithless electors" last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.

In order to blow the smoke as thick as possible, Giuliani and the "strike force" held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Thursday which was so surreal that it may have displaced the COVID task force briefing where Trump suggested that people might inject disinfectant as the all-time weirdest press conference of the Trump era.

Giuliani, Powell and Ellis held forth for 90 minutes, going full Infowars and throwing out one insane conspiracy theory after another. They said that Dominion voting machines had been created by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (who has been dead for seven years) and financed by George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and "communistic" countries China and Cuba. Just in case that didn't work, the corrupt Democrats had also rigged the vote with a sophisticated computer hack that was only foiled because Trump won so overwhelmingly that it tripped up the algorithm which allowed the "strike force" to catch them in the act. Also, the mail-in ballots were fraudulent because so many of them were filled out properly. (Yes! The fact that there were very few problems with mail-in votes was somehow evidence they were fake!)

Meanwhile, rivulets of black liquid were running down Giuliani's face as if he were an extra in an Alice Cooper video from the 1970s. The assumption is that it was some kind of temporary hair dye. But it could have been embalming fluid, for all we know.

Powell later made the rounds to expand on their theory and she made no bones about what they hope to do:

You'll notice that she just blithely uses the term "overturn," as if that were perfectly normal.

If that doesn't work, the "strike force" are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can't send Biden's required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state's delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!

Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It's unlikely, but it's possible. It's tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mick-mulvaney

former?

former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney criticized Rudy Giuliani's handling of President Donald Trump's post-election legal challenges as he claimed the effort to overturn the election result "is not a television program."

On Wednesday, Mulvaney appeared on "Fox Business" where he discussed the current legal battle over the election. He expressed concern about Giuliani's involvement in the legal proceedings. Mulvaney, who now serves as the Office of Management and Budget Director, admitted he does not understand why the president's campaign team would incorporate Giuliani instead of hiring the nation's most experienced election attorneys.

"I'm still a little concerned about the use of Rudy Giuliani. It strikes me that this is the most important lawsuit in the history of the country,and they're not using the most well-noted election lawyers," Mulvaney said.

Mulvaney went on to stress that the legal battle is a real despite what Guliani's rants may indicate.

"There are folks who do this all of the time. This is a specialty. This is not a television program. This is the real thing," Mulvaney said. "And I was struck by a couple things that Rudy said in court yesterday. So on one hand, I think it needs to go forward. It absolutely does. I wish that it was being prosecuted a little more efficiently."

So far, the vast majority of Trump's lawsuits have led to unfavorable outcomes. While Trump may be out of the public eye at the moment, he has not refrained from circulating misinformation. Despite having no evidence of widespread voter fraud, the president is still tweeting falsehoods and claiming he won the election.

His administration is still refusing to cooperate with the incoming Biden administration.

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fixer cohen says useful to russia b/c drunk

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rudy-giuliani/

alexh no twt

no attorney has done more to fight the results of the 2020 presidential election than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has been claiming that President Donald Trump — not President-elect Joe Biden — is the real winner. He says Trump was deprived of a victory by rampant voter fraud, which Giuliani has offered no credible proof of. The fees that Giuliani charges as Trump's personal attorney are not cheap, and according to New York Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, Giuliani recently asked for $20,000 per day.

Schmidt and Haberman report, "The request stirred opposition from some of Mr. Trump's aides and advisers, who appear to have ruled out paying that much…. A $20,000-a-day rate would have made Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has been Mr. Trump's personal lawyer for several years, among the most highly compensated attorneys anywhere."

Giuliani, however, flatly denies asking for that amount. The Trump attorney told the Times, "I never asked for $20,000. The arrangement is, we'll work it out at the end." And Giuliani insists that anyone who told the Times that he wanted $20,000 per day "is a liar, a complete liar."[twt]

trump's campaign has been fighting the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and other battleground states that Biden won.And Schmidt and Haberman note that "there is little to no prospect of any of the remaining legal cases being overseen by Mr. Giuliani altering the outcome in any of the states where Mr. Trump is still fighting in court, much less of overturning President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s Electoral College and popular vote victory." But some Trump allies, the Times journalists report, believe that "Giuliani is encouraging the president to continue a spurious legal fight because he sees financial advantage for himself in it."

According to Schmidt and Haberman, "Mr. Giuliani had sought compensation for his work dating back to the day after Election Day, when Mr. Trump began publicly claiming that he won despite the results, according to people familiar with the request, who asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive discussions. At $20,000 a day, Mr. Giuliani's rate would be above the top-of-the-line lawyers in Washington and New York who can charge as much as $15,000 a day if they are spending all their time working for a client."

Despite Trump and Giuliani's bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, Biden's victory over Trump was decisive. In addition to winning thepopular vote by more 5 million, Biden won 306 electoral votes.

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-Rudy Giuliani: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube ›

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1120 an

no lnx twt

Meaghan Ellis November 14, 2020

Rudy Giuliani may be President Donald Trump's personal attorney, but his presidential campaign is reportedly not pleased with his involvement in the post-election legal battle. For months, the president had been setting the stage to contest the results of the presidential election by claiming that the results would be rigged due to widespread voter fraud. But now, Giuliani threatens to dismantle it all.

It was announced on Friday that Trump placed Giuliani in charge of the election lawsuits — a new development his campaign team is not thrilled about. Some of Trump's advisors have even described Giuliani as a "counterproductive" presence in what is already being described as an uphill, and nearly impossible, battle.

A half-dozen other Trump advisers have described Mr. Giuliani's efforts as counterproductive and said that he was giving the president unwarranted optimism about what could happen. Those advisers have said that they are concerned Mr. Giuliani is damaging not only Mr. Trump's remaining legal options, but his legacy and his future opportunities in politics as he considers another campaign in 2024.

The latest development comes just days after Giuliani's prelude to disaster on last weekend. From the moment the Trump campaign learned of the location of Giuliani's press conference held on last Saturday, they knew it was a disaster in the making. In fact, the location, alone, signaled alarm bells for campaign advisors.

At the time, it was announced that Giuliani would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, Penn. Although campaign advisors scrambled to axe the event, Giuliani forged ahead. Standing outside of the Four Seasons location, which adjacent to a crematorium and sex shop/adult bookstore, the former New York City mayor spewed countless conspiracy theory with little to no evidence to back his claims.

Ironically, Giuliani was holding the press conference as President-elect Joe Biden was being declared the winner of the election.

A report published by Politico has outlined the consequences that could arise as a result of Giuliani's actions.

Giuliani's promotion also threatens to complicate a legal apparatus that has been in the works since June. The campaign began assembling a team of lawyers in swing states and counties where recounts might take place. The effort has been overseen by Citizens United President David Bossie, who was tapped because of his conservative street cred and connections to pro-Trump activists around the country.

As of Saturday, November 14, Trump has had nearly a dozen post-election lawsuits dismissed by judges in state courts across the country.

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Trump's election battle has left lawyers from both parties baffled

Meaghan Ellis November 06, 2020

Lawyers from both sides of the political aisle are baffled by what appears to be President Donald Trump's strategy to wage war on states where the election results are not in his favor.

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As of Friday morning, Trump has unleashed a barrage of lawsuits to contest election results in multiple swing states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. In addition to the lawsuits, Trump has repeatedly taken to Twitter with fear mongering remarks that discredit United States' election system.

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At one point, Trump even claimed his lead "magically disappeared." In fact, Eric Trump, the president's son, even scrutinized vote counting in Pennsylvania as he described it as "fraud."

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"Guys, this is fraud. This is absolute fraud," Eric Trump said. "They're trying to make a mockery of the election of this country."

However, legal experts are pushing back against the president's claims. In fact, many are puzzled by the president's strategy, according to ABC News. Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, admitted she does not even see a legal strategy but rather a publicity stunt based on Trump's latest antics.

"I don't see any real legal strategy here," Weiser said, "They look more like public relation stunts meant to create a false impression that the election is filled with improprieties and fraud."

Even Trump's personal attorney former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted that they must abide by the law and allow all votes to be counted.

"We were supposed to be allowed by law to observe the counting of the ballots," Giuliani, said Wednesday.

However, he also claimed that the Trump campaign team "has not been able to see if ballots were properly postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside," per the publication. According to Giuliani, their concerns are "all the things that often lead to disqualification of ballots."

However, in all states where vote counting is underway, there are Republican and Democratic state officials overseeing tabulation. Despite the Trump campaign's claims, Weiser also suggested that Trump's attack on the election process looks "more like an effort to inject conspiracy theory" as opposed to a legitimate claim of wrong doing on the part of election officials.

"It all looks more like an effort to inject conspiracy theory into the public," Weiser said, "an attempt to sway public opinion to believe something dramatic is going on when there actually is no drama."

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/compromising-giuliani-footage-ny-posts-suspect-story-and-cernovich-and-posobeics-meltdown/

no pix thank god twt lmx

Compromising Giuliani Footage, NY Post’s Suspect Story, and Cernovich and Posobeic’s Meltdown

By Kristen Doerer | October 26, 2020

Comedian and prankster Sacha Baron Cohen came out with a new movie Friday containing a compromising scene of Trump’s personal attorney and top sycophant Rudy Giuliani reclining on a bed with his hands in his pants in front of a woman playing the 15-year-old daughter of Cohen’s character.

Photos of the compromising scene were released in advance of the movie last Wednesday, incensing far-right activists Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who complained that the media was not paying enough attention to the highly suspect story they’ve been pushing about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter.The pair—who peddled the debunked 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory accusing top Democrats of child-sex-trafficking—accused Twitter of bias for allowing the photos of Giuliani to remain on the site and called the photos “revenge porn.” Neither Cernovich nor Posobiec appeared to see any irony in their meltdown over the compromising Giuliani photos.

Cohen has made a career out of pranking conservative politicians, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. In “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” Cohen returns to play Borat, a racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic character from Kazakhstan who must deliver his 15-year-old daughter to Vice President Mike Pence. After Borat fails to deliver his daughter to Pence at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, his daughter, played by 24-year-old actress Maria Bakalova, becomes a conservative journalist and must deliver herself to Giuliani. Here’s The Guardian’s description of the scene:

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Unsurprisingly, the images and discussion about what they mean for Rudy Giuliani, an incessant peddler of conspiracy theories, circulated over social media since their release last week.

Giuliani, who is known for making false claims about the Bidens, was a main source for the New York Post’s Oct. 15 story that claimed to have “smoking-gun” emails showing Hunter Biden was using his father’s position as vice president for his own gain and that Joe Biden was in on it as well. The emails were supposedly retrieved from a laptop obtained by Giuliani after it was dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved, and Giuliani supposedly learned about the existence of said emails from former Trump campaign manager and disinformation peddler Steve Bannon, who is currently under indictment for fraud.

As many journalists pointed out, the story by the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post was chock full of red flags, including that the emails were never verified, that Russian operatives had sought to feed Giuliani disinformation to use against the Bidens, and that neither Giuliani nor Bannon are trustworthy sources. Three men allied with the president had first tried to pitch the story to the Wall Street Journal before Giuliani’s explosive, tabloid claims and publication of the New York Post article. The Wall Street Journal’s eventual reporting on the matter stated, “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.”

Both Facebook and Twitter have limited distribution of the New York Post story due to the unsubstantiated claims to limit the spread of disinformation, and Twitter initially blocked users from sharing pictures of the unverified emails or links to the New York Post’s stories with the unsubstantiated claims.

Nonetheless, it has been heavily pushed on conservative media and in right-wing circles, with conservatives crying of censorship. 

The day before the compromising photos of Giuliani were released, Giuliani told right-wing Newsmax TV that Hunter Biden had numerous pictures of “underage girls” on the laptop he claimed belonged to Hunter. Conspiracy theorists and radical commentators like Wayne Allen Root and Alex Jones, have gone all in accusing Hunter Biden of pedophilia, and Josh Bernstein went on to accuse Joe Biden of it as well.

Both Cernovich and Posobiec peddled the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed that hacked emails sent by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager contained coded messages connecting several high-ranking Democratic Party officials to an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Cernovich “made his career on trolling the liberal establishment by accusing people of pedophilia or child sex trafficking.”

The pair, normally in favor of accusing people of pedophilia, came rushing to defend Giuliani with gusto once the compromising footage was released.

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Cernovich attacked Twitter for locking the New York Post out of its account for violating its hacked-materials policy. “The New York Post got locked out of its twitter account but Twitter is going to let everyone post revenge porn of Rudy Giuliani, a clear violation of New York law and also Twitter’s own terms of service,” he tweeted. About 20 minutes later, Posobiec tweeted, “Twitter is allowing a coordinated unlawful revenge porn campaign against Rudy Giuliani to flood their networks today.” 

Claiming it met the statutory definition of revenge porn, Cernovich took to Periscope to ask, “Why is Twitter allows reveng porn re Rudy Giuliani?” Revenge porn is the nonconsensual publication and distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of an individual.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘You’re defending Rudy, blah, blah, blah.’ Some people are making assumptions about me,” Cernovich said, before going on to defend Giuliani, attack Cohen, and accuse the media of a disinformation campaign.

“Sacha Baron Cohen said she was 15,” Cernovich said, referring to the moment when Borat busts into the room in pink lingerie and asks Giuliani to take him and not his 15-year-old daughter. “So, I think Sacha Baron Cohen should be investigated immediately.”

“If you’re laying down because a woman put you on your back because you think you’re about to get a BJ, that you’re laying down on your back, because you’re about to get a BJ, and your hands are in your pants, is that an intimate encounter?” Cernovich asked. “That’s what I mean, you don’t have to be a constitutional lawyer to say, yeah. Clearly.”

Posobiec agreed that the images were revenge porn, claiming, “I didn’t post the Hunter Biden revenge porn photos, because I know how the law works” and “Everyone posting the Rudy Giuliani Borat photo is in violation of revenge porn law.”

But that narrative didn’t fly with Giuliani.

About three hours after the images were shared, Giuliani shared his own narrative, arguing that the video was a complete fabrication and that he was really just reclining on the bed to tuck in his shirt after asking for Borat’s daughter’s number. “This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family,” he tweeted in a thread, which Posobiec promptly retweeted, seemingly forgetting the revenge porn narrative he had just helped shape.

On Friday, the day of the release of the new Borat movie, Posobiec took to Bannon’s “War Room Pandemic” to push the Hunter Biden conspiracy theory. While there, he asked whether Child Protective Services was ever called on Hunter Biden’s family, presumably in reference to Giuliani’s pedophilia charges.

Tags: Hunter Biden Jack Posobiec Mike Cernovich Rudy Giuliani Sacha Baron Cohen Steve Bannon Pizzagate

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/former-cia-official-reveals-why-intel-officers-are-terrified-to-brief-trump-on-russia/

U.S. intelligence officers responsible for briefing President Donald Trump on the country's potential threats are reportedly "terrified" to brief him on anything Russian-related due to concerns about his possibly explosive reaction.

During an interview with GQ magazine, former CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos weighed in on Trump's perplexing affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to like him. At this point, Polymeropoulos insists no one is willing to brief the president on anything involving Russia.

"No one's going to brief anything on Russia to the president," Polymeropoulos told GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe. "They're terrified of doing that. I know that from the briefers. Because he'll explode and the whole thing will get derailed, because he has this weird affinity for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin."

When Polymeropoulos was asked why the subject of Putin and Russia are such delicate issues in the White House, insisted Trump "wants Putin to like him."

According to Polymeropoulos, the issue is sensitive for Trump because: "He doesn't want to be embarrassed in front of Putin, that's part of the dilemma. Polymeropoulos went on to recall how Trump interacted with the Queen as he noted that the president insists on being connected to people who have "glamour and cachet."

"Just look at how he behaves with the Queen. That's how he behaves with everyone who has any glamour and cachet," Polymeropoulos continued, adding, "Putin has everything he doesn't have."

The latest news comes as intelligence reports warn of the possibility of Russian election interference as election day fast approaches. In 2016, the former Soviet republic was accused of running disinformation campaigns in an effort to sway the election in Trump's favor. Now, reports suggest Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani may be Russia's new target to help circulate disinformation campaigns on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in a manner similar to the attacks on former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly refused to address situations involving Putin.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/john-bolton-rudy-giuliani/

When Former National Security Adviser John Bolton received a warning about President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani due to his suspected ties to Russian operatives, he wasted no time heeding the warning and urged his staff to steer clear of having any involvement or interactions with

The Daily Beast compiled a report based on what the publication described as "interviews with 11 knowledgeable sources" detailing Bolton's repeated attempts to maintain distance between his department and Giuliani.

It has been reported that in January of 2019, the intelligence committee warned Capitol Hill and the White House that Giuliani was "a target of Russian intelligence operation to feed disinformation to Trump." As months passed, the warnings about Giuliani are said to have "intensified."

"Officials said the warnings about Giuliani intensified in the spring and summer of 2019 as the president's personal attorney appeared on television propagating disinformation about the Bidens and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Masha Yovanovitch. One ex-NSC official said that Giuliani, as a U.S. citizen, was neither named nor referenced in contemporaneous intelligence reports about Russian disinformation efforts. But Giuliani's alarming role was the subject of informal discussions between White House and intelligence officials." - The Daily Beast

A former official also raised concerns about Russia's server hack of the Ukranian energy company Burisma—where Hunter Biden once served on the executive board. It reportedly led to "informed speculation among professionals that this would be the entrée to fabricate material connecting Hunter Biden to corruption inside Burisma, and it wouldn't take more than 10 percent truth."

Bolton even warned his subordinates to refrain from being in meetings with Giuliani present. In fact, Bolton's directives were so specific he even advised against his staff attending Trump's Oval Office meeting May 23, 2019 following the Ukrainian inauguration of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

An unnamed Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee also weighed in as he admitted that Giuliani had been a big topic of discussion.

"Rudy's been the topic of conversation a lot," said the other source, a Democratic member of the House intelligence committee. "Wittingly or unwittingly, Rudy seems to care more about what he can gain politically from his relationship and discussions with Russian assets than he does about how he might be being used."

When contacted about the latest debacle, Giuliani claimed he was unaware of Bolton's opposition toward him.

"I didn't find out that John was unhappy with me or opposed to me until he left [the administration]…I've known him for ten years," and claimed that "when I was being considered for Secretary of State, I told him I'd consider him for deputy."

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https://www.salon.com/2020/09/23/more-giuliani-mystery-he-created-two-unknown-companies-amid-his-work-for-trump-in-ukraine/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/giuliani-created-2-secret-companies-amid-his-work-in-ukraine-and-we-think-he-only-had-one-client/

rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, has told Salon that he created two new companies last year amid his work on Trump’s behalf trying to dig up damaging information on Joe Biden in Ukraine. The purpose of the companies, especially that of Giuliani’s brand new one-man law firm — as well as their possible connections to the president — is somewhat unclear.

According to New York records, one of the companies, first called Giuliani Media and now known as Giuliani Communications, was created in November, just before Giuliani traveled to Ukraine with a production crew from One America News Network (OAN).

During that trip, Giuliani interviewed Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as an “active Russian agent,” for material included in a documentary later aired on OAN. Giuliani released his interview with Derkach a few months later.

Although the existence of Giuliani Communications has not been previously reported, its creation lines up with reports at the time that Giuliani planned to create a podcast aimed at defending Trump from the impeachment narrative. He eventually launched that podcast, which airs regularly, and has conducted video interviews as well — including the one with Derkach. For unclear reasons, Giuliani changed the company name to Giuliani Communications in March 2020, the same month he released his Derkach interview.

giuliani’s other new company is his personal law firm, Rudolph W. Giuliani PLLC, which was created in June 2019, according to New York records. The company was first identified in an October 2019 report from Roll Call. Giuliani told Salon that he had set up the firm because a client of his wanted money put in escrow.

“I didn’t want Giuliani Partners to do it, because I know the ethical rules,” Giuliani said, but declined to name the client or to explain the potential ethical problems further. “I’m just a country lawyer,” he added.

“The question is what the client hired Giuliani to do,” Brett Kappel, top authority on lobbying and government ethics law, told Salon. If the client had hired Giuliani to provide legal advice, Kappel explained, or to “represent him in litigation or a negotiation where an exchange of money was contemplated,” then Giuliani would be required to place any funds entrusted to him by the client in an escrow account separate from the law firm’s funds. The former New York mayor’s consulting business,Giuliani Partners, “isn’t a law firm and isn’t subject to the same ethical requirements,” Kappel said.

That raises the intriguing question of why Giuliani had not set up a personal law practice until he got this specific request from this specific client. Although attorneys can represent clients without forming a firm, a PLLC shields the owner from liability.

At the time Giuliani formed his PLLC, he had already been representing Trump as his personal attorney for more than a year. He also claims to have represented Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, with whom he also struck up a business arrangement in 2018. Parnas and Fruman later ran political errands for Giuliani in Ukraine.

On the day Giuliani set up his personal firm, he seemed to have Ukraine on the brain, tweeting, “New Pres of Ukraine still silent on investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 election and alleged Biden bribery of Pres Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Obama people.”

That same month, according to the Washington Post, Giuliani began doing consulting work forLuis Abinader, a presidential candidate in the Dominican Republic. It is not clear whether he also did legal work for Abinader.

A few days later, Giuliani he took a trip with Parnas to London that lasted several days, during which Giuliani met with Venezuelan financier Alejandro Betancourt, who is currently the subject of a major money laundering investigation in the U.S. Giuliani later took on Betancourt as a client, and spoke on his behalf to Justice Department prosecutors in September.

Giuliani told Salon in a previous phone conversation that Parnas was his client during a trip the two took to Madrid in July 2019, when he met with top Ukrainian foreign policy official Andriy Yermak (who subsequently became chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky). Giuliani made the claim about representing Parnas when he was asked about his meeting with Yermak, explaining that attorney-client privilege barred him from discussing details of their conversations. Parnas’ current attorney has denied that Giuliani was representing Parnas at that time.

Giuliani claims to have done all his work for Trump free of charge, though the president has never publicly acknowledged that. Giuliani’s work on Trump’s behalf ultimately led to the president’s impeachment.

“Trump did not disclose on his financial forms, as required, that he was taking pro bono counsel from Giuliani,” Jordan Libowitz, of the government watchdog Citizens for Ethics in Washington, told Salon. Trump has alleged that “there’s no way of assessing the value of Giuliani’s work,” Libowitz said, “even though it is his responsibility to keep track of it.”

Giuliani disclosed the previously unknown companies in a conversation with Salon about another previously unreported company that he created in 2002 and which received taxpayer-backed emergency loans this spring. Salon’s investigation of the company offered new insight into Giuliani’s arcane business arrangements, which are reportedly the subject of subpoenas from federal investigators in the:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ Southern District of New York. Experts told Salon that the company’s loan application raises questions of bank fraud, a felony.

That SDNY probe is also reportedly investigating whether Giuliani’s activity in Ukraine violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

Matt Sanderson, a top FARA law attorney, told Salon that despite reams of reports, and Giuliani’s history of peddling known Russian disinformation about both Joe Biden and his son Hunter, there isn’t enough public information to determine whether Giuliani’s work in Ukraine would qualify him, or OAN, as foreign agents.

“We would have to know if anyone acting on behalf of foreign interests, especially someone tied to the government, paid for or directed that work,” Sanderson said.

OAN, as a U.S. media company, is exempt from registering as an agent. Sanderson, however, pointed to a recent episode involving former CNN host Larry King, who conducted a blatantly unethical interview with Russian journalist Anastasia Dolgova that was filmed in two parts: King’s scripted questions, and then Dolgova’s answers.

King’s exposure, Sanderson told ProPublica, might hinge on whether he was “acting in his capacity as a member of the news media,” or was “doing an infomercial where he’s paid specifically to do the interview.” The same might apply here to OAN, Sanderson said.

Trump has often spoken glowingly of OAN — which has positioned itself significantly to the right of Fox News and has frequently spread even more blatant misinformation — as a preferred alternative. The president promoted the network’s Ukraine coverage several times on Twitter, including a Chanel Rion interview with former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, during which Giuliani was present at the table.

Giuliani’s interview with Andrii Derkach is no longer available on OAN’s site, and all stories in which “Derkach” is tagged have been removed. OAN president Charles Herring previously told Salon that the network’s website automatically deletes older content, but there are indications that the Derkach material was deliberately removed. One story in which his name was misspelled as “Derkash,” for instance, was not deleted.

Giuliani did not reply to Salon’s questions about whether he had charged or expensed any of his Ukraine-related activity on President Trump’s behalf to either Giuliani Communications or Rudolph W. Giuliani PLLC.

---

an

can they just not help themselves to helping themseselves to whatver they can grab?

invisible company owned by Rudy Giuliani got taxpayer-backed PPP money — but lists no employees. Was it fraud?

Roger Sollenberger / Salon September 17, 2020

A payroll company owned by Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, took between $150,000 and $350,000 in taxpayer-backed emergency small business loans this spring. It’s unclear what Giuliani did with the money. The loan reveals…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/rudy-giuliani-collaborated-on-smear-of-joe-biden-with-active-russian-agent-whos-now-under-us-treasury-sanctions

former LifeLock spokesperson (and New York mayor) Rudy Giuliani is now seeking to distance himself from a member of the Ukrainian parliament who was sanctioned last week by the U.S. Treasury Department as an “active Russian agent.”

:{:{}:

}:

The sanctions target Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker who has ties to Russian intelligence that date back more than a decade. Treasury now accuses Derkach of running a “covert influence campaign” aimed at the 2020 U.S. presidential election since late 2019.

Giuliani met with Derkach last year in Ukraine in the former mayor’s role as Donald Trump’s attorney, during a trip aimed at digging up dirt on Joe Biden, then viewed as the Democratic frontrunner and now the party’s presidential nominee. Derkach and Giuliani discussed the much-debunked allegations about Biden in a segment on One America News Network (OAN), which Giuliani replayed on his personal podcast this March.

According to the Treasury Department, Derkach was pushing “false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 presidential election” into U.S. media via press conferences, interviews and other statements.

His efforts include releasing edited audiotapes that purport to document improprieties by Joe Biden in his dealings as vice president with the Ukrainian government.

When asked how he felt about his work with someone whom the Trump administration has now sanctioned as an active Russian agent, Giuliani offered no remorse, replying to Salon by text message:

“Yes I am very comfortable with what I did now leave me alone I’m with my friends discussing our experience on September 11 andkeep covering up for the Biden Family making millions selling his public office.”

Giuliani, who forwarded a supposed dossier of information on Biden to the State Department in the spring of 2019, told NPR that he had “never tried to influence the election.”

Derkach, Giuliani said in comments to NPR, “had no unique information that wasn’t already known except the $5.3 billion and that is being investigated in UKRAINE.” That again promotes Derkach’s debunked claims that Biden and his family somehow enriched themselves on a grand scale from business deals in Ukraine.

Giuliani’s activity in Ukraine last year led directly to the impeachment of his client, President Trump.Even as congressional impeachment hearings were proceeding, Giuliani traveled to Ukraine with an OAN news production team in an apparent attempt to justify his smears against Biden and create an alternative to the impeachment narrative. A few weeks after his trip, the House voted to impeach Trump.

Giuliani also popped up in an intriguing photograph with Chinese journalist Ding Gang, an associate of expat billionaire Guo Wengui, a Mar-a-Lago member who has been accused of being an agent of the Chinese government. [twt pix of bannon]

as Salon first reported, Bannon’s nonprofit group Citizens of the American Republic — subject of a documentary and now also a federal investigation — employed topTrump campaign strategist Jason Miller from October 2019 until at least February 2020, at a salary of $20,000 a month.

==

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https://archive.thinkprogress.org/rudy-giuliani-armenia-speech-russia-3ef1a9cdff8e/

Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, raised eyebrows when ThinkProgress first reported that he would be speaking alongside a sanctioned Russian official at a panel in Armenia on Tuesday.

The confusion was only amplified by the actual content of Giuliani’s speech — prompting observers to question why the former New York City mayor would be invited to speak about technology in the first place.

Giuliani appeared next to sanctioned Russian official Sergei Glazyev, a man with a history of working closely with some of the U.S.’s most notorious anti-Semites. The pair were on a panel at the Eurasian Week conference, an annual affair dedicated to the future of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus.

The topic of Giuliani’s panel was “Technological breakthrough and EAEU potential,” a subject on which Giuliani would appear to have little expertise. But that lack of knowledge didn’t stop Giuliani — whom Trump previously named as an adviser on cybersecurity affairs — from speaking for roughly 20 minutes on topics ranging from sharing intelligence to electric grids to the safety of driver-less cars.

His lack of expertise on the various topics was immediately apparent to at least one member of the audience.

“Giuliani showed up, and they gave him the podium, and he gave a talk on cybersecurity — but quite frankly it was a total bullshit talk,” one attendee, who requested anonymity, told ThinkProgress.

Despite Giuliani’s claims that he was in Armenia as a private citizen, both conference material and his own introduction identified him as an adviser to Trump. (Needless to say, Giuliani is the most prominent Trump adviser to now speak alongside a sanctioned Russian official in a supposedly private capacity.) And when he was asked whether the U.S. and EAEU could potentially cooperate in the realm of cybersecurity, Giuliani responded, “I don’t see any risks in sharing secrets on cybersecurity.”

The EAEU, of course, includes Russia, which led hacking and social media interference efforts to support Trump’s campaign and sow division across the U.S. Likewise, the EAEU was initially positioned as the Kremlin’s grand geopolitical project following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 — although that project eventually faltered following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Despite Giuliani’s nominal role as a cybersecurity adviser to the president, his work on the matter appears negligible, and it’s unclear whether he’s accomplished anything of note while in the position — besides flying to Armenia to stand alongside Glazyev.

[Why is Rudy Giuliani scheduled to speak alongside a sanctioned Russian official?

In Armenia, Giuliani is spending time with notorious pro-Kremlin figures.]

Giuliani’s partners

It’s also worth noting who joined Giuliani at the conference: In addition to Glazyev, Giuliani’s company included individuals like Ara Abrahamyan, a businessman who has previously said that Putin “gives orders and I carry them out,” and others who have vocally defended the Kremlin in the past.

As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Kovensky noted:

Giuliani was invited to the event by Russian-Armenian multimillionaire Ara [Abrahamyan], who heads the Union of Armenians of Russia, according to a local press report. [Abrahamyan], an UNESCO goodwill ambassador, was awarded an order “For merit to the fatherland” by Putin at the Kremlin last year.

[Abrahamyan] sits on the advisory board of TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a consulting firm the New York Times described as “providing image consulting to Russian oligarchs and clients with deep Kremlin ties.”

Another listed speaker, Russian official Georgy Kalamanov, recently offered a full-throated defense of the Kremlin against accusations that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal in the U.K. (For good measure, one of the few Americans at the conference, Daniel Witt, has his own history of helping whitewash post-Soviet dictatorships.)

All told, Giuliani’s speech was an effective capstone to a series of questionable decisions that Trump’s personal lawyer has recently made, including his bizarre condemnation of Romania for cracking down on corruption too effectively.

It’s unclear if Giuliani was paid to attend the event in Armenia. However, Giuliani has picked up numerous clients as part of his work at Giuliani Security & Safety, his personal consulting firm — clients he’s been only too happy to help, regardless of his position as Trump’s adviser and personal lawyer. Neither Giuliani’s firm nor conference organizers responded to ThinkProgress’s questions.

For at least one person who attended Giuliani’s speech, the talk was a waste of time.

“Maybe he just assumed people in the audience don’t speak fluent English, so he could get away with it,” the conference attendee told ThinkProgress. “Eventually it got to the point where I started to reevaluate my life and think, ‘What the fuck am I doing here, sitting here listening to Rudy Giuliani talk about something he clearly knows nothing about when I have real work to get back to?'”

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https://www.newsweek.com/giuliani-mysterious-ties-russia-former-soviet-union-decades-1215349

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Trump Lawyer Rudy Giuliani's Mysterious Ties to Russia and Former Soviet Union Go Back Decades, Experts Argue

BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 11/16/18 

02:21Who is Rudy Giuliani?

WORLD

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

DONALD TRUMP

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

GIULIANI

While lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani represents President Donald Trump on matters related to the special counsel's investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia, Giuliani has maintained his own ties to the Kremlin and its allies.

In the month of October, Giuliani traveled to Armenia at the invitation of a Kremlin-linked businessman to participate in a forum for a Russia-led economic union. That same month, the former New York mayor was also named in a criminal complaint because his former law firm allegedly helped Kazakh fugitives launder stolen money. Both Armenia and Kazakhstan were once part of the Soviet Union, and today their governments, security services and intelligence organizations maintain close ties to Moscow.

But experts say Giuliani's ties to individuals from the former Soviet Union go back decades—and his lucrative connections to the region have occasionally been intertwined with Trump's.

"One of Giuliani's earliest associations was with Semyon 'Sam' Kislin, who donated money to both his 1993 and 1997 campaigns [for mayor] and was appointed by Giuliani to serve on the New York City Mayor's Council of Economic Advisors," Olga Lautman, an investigative reporter who spent three years tracking ties between the Russian mafia and Trump's associates, told Newsweek.

Kislin's website details that the Russian was an active member of the mayor's council until Giuliani left office in 2001.

"According to FBI and Interpol reports, Kislin, a wealthy commodities trader, was using his company to launder money from Russia to the U.S.," Lautman added.

Giuliani and his representatives did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Newsweek.

Giuliani's former law firm also has longstanding ties to a couple from Kazakhstan who fled their country after being accused of stealing millions.

On October 8, Viktor Khrapunov, the former mayor of the Kazakh city of Almaty, and his wife, Leila Khrapunova, were found guilty of financial fraud, taking bribes and running a criminal organization. They were sentenced to 17 and 14 years in jail respectively. Law enforcement officials say the couple helped launder around $10 billion stolen from their country.

It is unlikely, however, that the Khrapunovs will go to prison anytime soon. The couple is avoiding jail time in Switzerland, where it is exceptionally difficult to get an extradition request approved. Lawyers representing the city of Almaty argue that the couple successfully laundered billions of dollars stolen from Kazakhstan in jurisdictions across the U.S. and the world. There are currently court cases pending against them in California and New York.

Court documents allege that the Khrapunovs have deep ties to Trump's former adviser Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman with a criminal history who claims to have been a CIA informant. In 2013, Sater's development company Bayrock helped the Khrapunovs purchase three condos in Trump Tower Soho and quickly resell the properties.

Financial analysts say it's likely the purchases were used to launder money.

It is unclear whether Trump was aware of the purchase or of the origin of the funds used to buy the condos. But Giuliani, Trump's longtime friend and associate, must have been aware that the Khrapunov's money had a dubious provenance. Years earlier, Giuliani's law firm helped establish a company in the Netherlands through which some of the couple's money was funneled.

On October 22, the New York City-based human rights organization Avaazfiled a complaint asking Dutch courts to investigate two companies that were set up in the Netherlands to launder some of the Khrapunovs' stolen funds.

The companies are Bayrock B.V., the Dutch subsidiary of Sater's former employer Bayrock Group LLC, and KazBay B.V., another company Bayrock Group opened for the Khrapunovs.

KazBay B.V. was registered in 2007 with the assistance of Giuliani's then-law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.

"Rudy Giuliani's law firm was involved in setting up one of the companies, and there are a bunch of overlapping connections between that company and the other companies connected to the Khrapunovs, like the Switzerland-based company Helvetica Capital S.A.," Emma Ruby-Sachs, deputy director of Avaaz, told Newsweek.

"One of the concrete connections is that $1.5 million went into KazBay from Bayrock and Helvetica. We also know that the biggest overlap is in the stakeholders and individuals used to set up these companies, and we know there is a connection between this fraud and Felix Sater," Ruby-Sachs added.

Sater, a longtime adviser of President Trump who attempted to help him set up a Trump Tower in Moscow, is named as a beneficiary in the complaint. Giuliani is personally named over a dozen times in the complaint's footnotes.

It was not the first time Giuliani and his firm had dealt with Kazakhstan. Bracewell & Giuliani LLP had an office in the country as early as 1997, the same year Khrapunov became mayor of Almaty. Giuliani's firm used its office in Kazakhstan to collect donations from U.S. expats for the former mayor's failed presidential bid in 2008. During the campaign in 2007, Giuliani threw a fundraising event in Almaty. It's unclear if he ever traveled to the country personally.

Ten years later, Giuliani has been working for Trump, but he has refused to give up his lucrative contracts with foreigners. In June, he traveled to Paris to speak at the annual conference of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), an Iranian opposition group that the U.S. government previously listed as a foreign terrorist organization. People familiar with the matter told Newsweek that the MeK often pays speakers five-figure sums.

But experts say the former mayor has placed a specific emphasis on cultivating ties with the former Soviet Union, and that he has made numerous trips to the region, including some since Trump took office.

"In 2004, Giuliani took a trip to Russia and met with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Moscow's then-Mayor Yury Luzhkov, known for his corruption and dealings with Russian organized crime officials, and he unexpectedly made his way to a steel plant near the Kazakh border. Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works was flush with cash and looking for acquisitions in the U.S., and some speculated that Giuliani was eyeing a role as the middleman," Lautman explained to Newsweek.

[Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani speaks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during their meeting in Moscow, on September 9, 2004.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES]

Many of Giuliani's trips to the region were organized with the assistance of a murky consulting firm called Tri Global Strategic Ventures. According to the company's website, several people on the company's board have links to the Russian government, including Ara Abramyan, the Armenian businessman who invited Giuliani to Armenia last month.

Tri Global Strategic Ventures did not return requests for comment from Newsweek. A phone number for the company's alleged spokesman Vitaly Pruss led to the voice mailbox of an employee who identified herself as Veronica, but neither Abramyan nor Veronica returned Newsweek's calls.

Last year, Tri Global Strategic Ventures organized a trip for Giuliani to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where he met with Kharkiv Mayor Hennadiy Kernes and the oligarch Pavel Fuchs, both of whom were loyal to the Pro-Putin regime of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Fuchs, who made his fortune in Moscow's real estate industry, allegedly played a role in the failed attempts to establish a Trump Tower in Moscow around 2008. He is also reportedly under investigation in Ukraine for allegedly attempting to purchase $160 million of the frozen assets of Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 after being ousted by a pro-Western social movement.

[RELATED STORIES

Rudy Giuliani's Mystery Trips Raise Scrutiny

Giuliani Retweets 'Anti-Christ' Soros Attack

Rudy Giuliani Says US Will Overthrow Iranian Regime]

The website for Tri Global Strategic Ventures is peppered with pictures of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral and of Giuliani attending various meetings. Following Giuliani's 2017 trip to Ukraine, which was one of a handful of meetings with Ukrainians that Giuliani and his representatives held in the last year, the company published a press release claiming that "the meeting between the official delegation from the City of Kharkiv, Ukraine and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and John Huvane, CEO of Giuliani Security & Safety, was a success."

The president's lawyer's company will allegedly help the city of Kharkiv establish a new office for emergency management.

"The most controversial recent event was Giuliani's trip to Armenia last month at the invitation of Ara Abramyan, an oligarch closely linked to Putin. Giuliani spoke on a panel at the event alongside Sergei Glazyev, an official sanctioned by the U.S. who is an extremist and is viewed as a possible eventual successor to Putin," Lautman added.

In an interview with the local press, Giuliani said he was visiting Yerevan, Armenia, as a private citizen and was not representing the U.S. president. Nevertheless, he failed to respond to questions about whether he was paid to appear on the panel with Glazyev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin who was one of the first people sanctioned by former President Barack Obama for Russia's illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

"Giuliani also met with Armenia's Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan. But overall, the visit itself seemed to be more about Guiliani's dealings with Russia and Mr. Abramyan than Armenia itself," Grigor Atanesian, an investigative reporter in Armenia, told Newsweek.

During his panel in Armenia last month, Giuliani lectured the audience about Armenia's ability to protect itself from cyberattacks. The event was part of the annual business forum of the Eurasian Economic Union, a Moscow-led economic bloc that includes Armenia, Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

---

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-trolls-hype-coronavirus-and-giuliani-conspiracies

db no lnx pix docs

...The network of Russian-linked trolls identified by The Daily Beast goes beyond just a single post on COVID-19 conspiracies. From at least 2016 through this year, trolls sought to spread disinformation on elections in the U.S. and Europe, pit Western countries against each other, and ruin Ukraine’s international reputation.

In December 2019, as impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump took place, Russian-linked trolls spread an article that falsely claimed Democrats colluded with a former KGB officer during the 2016 elections. The article, “Former KGB agent sponsored Democrats in the 2016 election,” falsely accuses Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk of having worked for Soviet intelligence during the Cold War and financing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The theme of Democratic collusion with Ukraine to undermine Trump’s candidacy, often touted by President Trump and his allies, is a theme Russian intelligence operatives have pushed for years, according to The New York Times.

Relying on Rudy

Many of the Secondary Infektion stories used phony screengrabs or forged documents to further their narrative. By contrast, the authors of the fake KGB support story relied on the conspiracy theorizing of Rudy Giuliani and the Trump-cheering cable news channel OANN to push their story.

:{:{}:

}:

“Rudy Giuliani's recent visit to Ukraine exposed many secrets of the Democratic Party, which is trying to distract the public from its crimes through the impeachment of the incumbent US president,” the trolls wrote alongside links to OANN’s coverage of the impeachment scandal.  

The Secondary Infektion crew also ventured beyond the relitigation of America’s 2016 presidential election to meddle in elections in Europe.

In advance of Sweden’s 2018 elections, the trolls used a series of fake conspiracies focused on the right wing nationalist Sweden Democrats party to interfere in Sweden’s 2018 election.Secondary Infektion propagandists forged a fake letter in stilted English purporting to show Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warning Poland’s foreign minister that “Russian special services are going to provide technical and material support to the Swedish Democrats and help them in the election campaign” as part of a hacking campaign.

“It bears the digital hallmarks of forgery,” said Sam Meyer, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Meyer ran the Pompeo letter image through the Tungstène imagery analysis software and found that the image was based on a digital template bearing the State Department letterhead and Secretary Pompeo’s signature with the text digitally added separately.

Many of the the Secondary Infektion articles identified by The Daily Beast appeared aimed at dividing the U.S. from its allies in Europe.

Since its forces began occupying eastern Ukraine, Russia has tried to oppose the U.S. sale of lethal aid to Ukrainian forces, particularly the Javelin anti-tank missiles which could be useful in fending off Russian armor. As the Trump administration mulled the prospect of a sale in the fall of 2017, Russian trolls published a forged screenshot pretending to come from the Twitter account of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria. “Javelins from Ukraine will help #YPG/#YPJ fighters defeat #IS in Deir al-Zour. #JazeeraStorm #defeatDaesh.”

Except the tweet was never sent and neither American nor Ukrainian forces ever transferred Javelins to partner forces in Syria. The apparent goal of the forgery and accompanying article was an attempt to paint the Trump administration’s arms sale to Ukraine as reckless and to create tensions between the U.S., Ukraine, and Turkey, which has strongly objected to transfers of less sophisticated arms to Kurdish forces in Syria.

But not all of the articles fit into such neat thematic categories. At least one appeared aimed at diverting attention from or at least provoking confusion about a criminal case involving the theft of classified information from the National Security Agency.

Federal prosecutors charged former NSA contractor Hal Martin in 2016 with unlawfully taking home vast amounts of classified NSA data. Martin had initially come under suspicion as a result of an investigation into the publication of classified NSA hacking tools released by a group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers,” which some believe may be a front for Russian intelligence.

Martin was never charged with involvement in the Shadow Brokers leak. But in November 2016, a month after prosecutors arrested him, personas bearing the hallmarks of the Secondary Infektion campaign began posting articles falsely claiming that Martin had betrayed the identities of undercover CIA officers associated with the Bush-era torture program.

Another Secondary Infektion article took aim at what would seem an unlikely target for the Kremlin: former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In 2018, while Medvedev was still serving as prime minister of Russia, the trolls used a fake screenshot of a nonexistent article from The Guardian to cast doubt on his political future, writing that Medvedev was “facing a whole bunch of problems, from lack of financing to health issues and even alcohol.”

Bang for the buck?

For all the effort put into the troll campaign, the impact appears to have been small to nonexistent. In 2016, IRA trolls operating Twitter and Facebook accounts racked up millions of views throughout the U.S. presidential election, but the greater scrutiny of Russian disinformation and more cautious operational security practices used by the Secondary Infektion have come at a steep cost in terms of reach.

None of the articles or forgeries identified by The Daily Beast appear to have been picked up and amplified by news outlets or social media users outside of Secondary Infektion.

"One of the biggest mysteries about Secondary Infektion is what the operators thought they were doing,” said Nimmo. “I've never seen so little bang to the buck."

In the history of documented Secondary Infektion articles, only one appears to have gained any traction—the leak of authentic U.K.-U.S. trade documents shortly before the British general election in 2019.

[Leaked: Secret Documents From Russia’s Election Trolls

RED SPILL

Spencer Ackerman,

Gideon Resnick,

Ben Collins

Trump’s New Favorite Channel Employs Kremlin-Paid Journalist

MOONLIGHTING

Kevin Poulsen]

The reach of articles identified by The Daily Beast is much shorter. The posts, published to obscure and niche web forums like WorthyChristianForums and DefendingTheTruth, garnered just a few dozen views according to view counters available on some of the sites. Some generated agreement or at least debate among a handful of forumgoers and social media users where they were posed, but they also generated derision and skepticism as well.

“Arthur,” one Reddit commenter wrote under a Secondary Infektion persona’s piece about Brexit, “you've done something that I couldn't imagine was possible. You've written a piece so poor that brexiteers and remainers can unite around how dreadful your opinions are. There's something in here to make everyone scoff.”

Others social media users noticed the pattern of single-use accounts posting articles on known Russian themes and found them appropriately suspicious. “New Reddit User. 1 post. Article about the east.” a Redditor commented on a post trying to stir up tensions between Hungary and Ukraine. “You almost got me Putin.”

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

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2/19

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giulianis-ukraine-investigation-on-oan-stars-some-kyivs-most-dubious-characters

no lnx

Ukraine—The witnesses stand, with their right hands raised, as if being sworn in for, well, an impeachment hearing. Only this is not in Congress. The cast of obscure Ukrainians—a group seen at home as odious and discredited—are appearing in a television show with President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, in what he casts as an investigation that parallels the process in Congress.

It would only be credible in a parallel world.

[Ukrainian Who Claimed to Have Dirt on Biden Firm Is Arrested

SWEPT UP

Betsy Swan,

Adam Rawnsley]

Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat, has been helping Giuliani produce the show for OAN, the One America News Network, a conservative channel now favored by Trump. OAN is publicizing the two-part broadcast this weekend, promising “witnesses who destroy [House Intelligence Committee Chairman] Adam Schiff’s baseless impeachment case against President Trump.”

“Watch top Ukrainian officials testify under oath the side of the story Schiff doesn’t want you to hear,” proclaims the YouTube promo for the broadcast.

But “top officials” they definitely are not. Indeed, Giuliani’s choice of guest stars in his would-be reality show, and his wider cast of sources, caused shock among many in Kyiv’s establishment who know their questionable backgrounds in considerable detail.

Tune in to @OANN with @ChanelRion and America’s Mayor and Attorney @RudyGiuliani to hear about the TRUTH in the 2016 US election and what really happened in Ukraine with the real corruption. pic.twitter.com/idHVeBOhYz

— Andrii Telizhenko (@AndriyUkraineTe) November 30, 2019

What Giuliani’s collaborators have in common is their willingness to testify in his parallel proceedings—or possibly the impeachment trial in the Senate, in the improbable event they are called—or contribute in other ways to Trump’s cause. Some of them have been doing so for years in Ukraine.

Their testimony won’t accommodate President Donald Trump’s “favor” requested during the infamous July 25 phone conversation with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump and his representatives made it clear they wanted an announcement by Zelensky of a Biden investigation, and that has not happened. But will Giuliani's machinations help put pressure on Zelensky finally to come around? That remains an open question. Those working with Giuliani include a member of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, who is in Zelensky’s party.

Trump asked Zelensky for two things: to investigate the Bidens and explore the debunked theory that Ukraine meddled significantly in the 2016 election. He asked Zelensky to find the “hidden DNC server” mentioned in Russian propaganda in order to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report indicting 12 members of Russian military intelligence, the GRU, for hacking the Democratic National Committee.

“The server, they say Ukraine has it," Trump told Zelensky. But Ukrainian independent corruption and hacking experts share doubts about Giuliani’s sources’ intentions and the so-called evidence against Joe Biden and his son. They also see no substantiation of Russia’s aggressively propagated conspiracy theory.

Trump also asked Zelensky to work with Giuliani.

These requests, coming at a time when vital military support for Ukraine was frozen and no date was set for a promised White House meeting—pending Zelensky’s cooperation—are what triggered impeachment proceedings against Trump for abuse of power. He is accused of using the authority of the United States government to further his own personal political agenda.

None of the requests has been fulfilled and there is a strong belief among Ukraine’s independent corruption fighters that President Zelensky is not going to take Trump’s side in the impeachment process. Last week, Zelensky studiously avoided Giuliani.

[Rudy’s New Ukraine Jaunt Is Freaking Out Trump Lieutenants

EUROTRIP!!

Asawin Suebsaeng,

Erin Banco

[RELATED IN WORLD

Rudy & His Ukraine Ally Sprint Away from ‘Russian Agent’ Pal

Russian Trolls Tried to Infiltrate Left-Wing Media]

"Maria Kolesnikova, a coordinator of Viktor Babaryko's campaign headquarters, makes a heart sign with her hands outside the headquarters of Belarus' Central Electoral Commission in Minsk on July 14, 2020. - The Belarus central electoral commission on July 14, 2020 refused to register the jailed main rival to President Alexander Lukashenko as a candidate for August's presidential polls.

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this has complete bak 2 aNd 3

TWO

see RudyGiu 3 bak

rudy tag 918 congrats feck on opioids

see g and bracewell for older, lots of coal polluters

promoted 11/9  CCA trump pal atty gen'l?

capt 920 code fix html  Paleofuture

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RS

rudy Giuliani has consulted with Paul Manafort “several times” in recent months as he quests to smear Joe Biden and boost a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine and Democrats — not Russia — were the ones who did the real malfeasance ahead of the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

This isn’t exactly a great look for Trump’s personal lawyer-turned-global conspiracy theory propagator, as Manafort is currently in prison for a smorgasbord of financial crimes, many related to his dealings in Ukraine. So why exactly was Rudy seeking guidance from Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager? It’s complicated.

Giuliani has been in touch with Trump’s former campaign manager (through a lawyer) because of their shared interest in discrediting the Mueller investigation, which led to Manafort’s imprisonment, and the role a controversial “black ledger” could play in proving the probe was a hoax — just as Trump, Hannity, and the rest of the GOP’s crackpot crew has been saying all along.

The ledger, which was obtained by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, contained evidence of Manafort receiving over $12 million in off-the-books payments from the political party of Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-friendly former Ukrainian president whom Manafort helped get elected. Manafort resigned as Trump’s campaign manager after the existence of the ledger was reported by the New York Times in August 2016, and now Giuliani is out to prove the ledger was fraudulent and part of a joint effort by Ukraine and the Democratic Party to to sink Trump’s campaign.

RELATE

Hiding?'

Manafort is, not surprisingly, happy to offer his assistance. “I said, ‘Was there really a black book? If there wasn’t, I really need to know. Please tell him I’ve got to know,’” Giuliani told the Post of his conversations with Manafort’s lawyer. “He came back and said there wasn’t a black book.”

The only problem is that there is no actual evidence the ledger is fraudulent. If there was, as the Post points out, it probably would have been brought up by Manafort’s defense team when he was on trial last year, and before he admitted to receiving $60 million in payments for his work in Ukraine, $30 million of which he laundered. As Ukrainian journalist Serhiy Leschenko, who played a central role in exposing the ledger, wrote for the Post in September, the idea the ledger is fake is nothing more than a scam meant to muddy the waters and raise suspicion. “Giuliani’s entire approach is built on disinformation and the manipulation of facts,” he wrote. “Giuliani has developed a conspiracy theory in which he depicts my revelations about Manafort as an intervention in the 2016 U.S. election in favor of the Democratic Party.”

Sadly, Giuliani’s efforts have indeed raised suspicion in some Senate Republicans, who have added some kindling to the conspiracy theory in the form of a congressional inquiry. “Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored,” wrote Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) of their new investigation into the matter. “Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempt to undermine our democratic processes,” the senators wrote in the letter.

In other words, this conspiracy theory probably isn’t going away anytime soon. After all, Republicans don’t have much left to cling onto as they try to position themselves on the side of the president.

Despite having no official government role, Giuliani has emerged as one of the central figures in the scandal surrounding Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election. He’s long been in contact with a host of shadowy Ukrainian figures, and his name was mentioned several times in both the whistleblower complaint and the president’s July 25th call to Ukrainian President Zelensky. “Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy,” Trump told Zelensky, according to a partial readout of the call released by the White House. “If you could speak to him that would be great.”

On Monday, House Democrats subpoenaed Giuliani for documents related to his efforts in Ukraine, going back to early 2017. “Our inquiry includes an investigation of credible allegations that you acted as an agent of the president in a scheme to advance his personal political interests by abusing the power of the office of the president,” Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to the former mayor.

Giuliani likened the request to McCarthyism. “We’re getting really close to, if we haven’t met, the standard of the McCarthy hearings where nobody seems to care about things like attorney-client privilege,” he told the Times. Though Giuliani has not said explicitly that he won’t comply with the subpoena, it doesn’t appear he’s going to. On Tuesday, he hired former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale to represent him.

In This Article: Paul Manafort, Rudy Giuliani, Ukraine

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https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/giuliani-foreign-clientele-possible-conflicts-231413

giuliani took money from Qatar, Venezuela, Iranian exiles

His foreign clientele could present conflicts of interest as secretary of state.

By ISAAC ARNSDORF 11/15/2016

Rudy Giuliani's paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation's top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling.

Since leaving the New York mayor's office, Giuliani has made millions as a lawyer and consultant, including for some clients at odds with U.S. foreign policy. When some of those ties s...w those concerns have no doubt been eclipsed by Donald Trump's own web of business entanglements, which are still not completely known to the public. Giuliani's participation in Trump's transition and contention for the job of secretary of state poses a direct challenge to Trump's promises to root out Washington self-dealing and ban his administration's officials from lobbying for foreign governments.

In 2011, an exiled Iranian political party called the Mujahedin e-Khalq, known as the MEK, paid Giuliani to give a speech in Washington calling on the State Department to remove the group from its list of terrorist organizations. The MEK recruited a host of other formal officials to its cause and succeeded in reversing the terrorist designation in 2012.

A subsidiary of Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, advised Qatar's state-run oil company on security at a natural gas plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Qatar is a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military base but once stifled an attempt to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who went on to mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the 9/11 commission report.

The same subsidiary, Giuliani Security & Safety, provided security advice to a Singapore gambling project on behalf of a partnership that included a tycoon close to the North Korean regime who is considered an organized crime figure by the U.S., according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. "I think the person involved, if it's correct, was a 1 percent owner that had no involvement with us, we never worked for, had nothing to do with," Giuliani told NBC's Tim Russert at the time.

Giuliani Partners also advised TransCanada, which sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline that President Barack Obama rejected but Trump has said he wants to approve. And Giuliani helped the maker of the OxyContin painkiller, Purdue Pharma, settle a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with a fine.

The Houston-based law firm Giuliani joined as a named partner in 2005 lobbied in Texas for Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company then controlled by President Hugo Chavez, The New York Times reported in 2007. The firm also did work for Saudi Arabia's oil ministry, according to The Associated Press.

The law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, lobbied at the federal level during Giuliani's time there for energy companies including Southern Company, Duke Energy, Energy Future Holdings, Arch Coal, Chesapeake Energy and NuStar Energy, records show. It also represented Cornell Companies, a private prison operator that later merged with GEO Group. Giuliani never personally registered as a lobbyist. He left the firm for rival Greenberg Traurig this year, and currently is on leave.

Giuliani's assistant at Greenberg Traurig and the Trump transition didn't answer requests for comment.

The Clinton Foundation has been hounded by Republican suspicions of selling access to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and the nonprofit did accept big bucks from foreign governments. But Clinton's defenders point out there's no proof she ever made an official act to benefit a foundation donor, and, unlike Giuliani, she never personally profited from the foreign contributions to her charity.

When Giuliani ran for president, he reported assets of $18.1 million to $70.4 million.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-web-of-crazy-that-may-bring-down-a-president/

no lnx

The web of crazy that may bring down a president

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon October 4, 2019

Last weekend, for the first time, one of Donald Trump’s former insiders appeared on television and openly discussed the metastasizing Ukraine scandal in clear and concise terms. Former homeland security adviser Tom Bossert appeared on ABC’s “This Week”:

This Week

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@ThisWeekABC

Former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert on impeachment inquiry against Pres. Trump: "It is a bad day and a bad week for the president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent." https://abcn.ws/2mhOgOy

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@ThisWeekABC

Tom Bossert says Pres. Trump needs to "move forward" from focus on 2016 collusion allegations: "If he continues to focus on that white whale, it's going to bring him down. Enough." https://abcn.ws/2ojcGb3

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6:21 AM - Sep 29, 2019

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545 people are talking about this

Bossert was talking about two of the strands of what turns out to be a convoluted set of interlocking conspiracy theories, all of which involve Rudy Giuliani and all of which are, quite frankly, completely nuts.

There’s the one about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the “Black Ledger,” which forms one strand of the ludicrous “Ukraine framed Russia to help Hillary Clinton” 2016 collusion theory. Manafort knows his way around Ukraine and Giuliani has reportedly been consulting with him in prison, where Manafort is serving time for various felonies he committed during his work there.

The “CrowdStrike scandal” mentioned by Bossert intersects with the “Black Ledger” theory. This one holds that the security firm that first identified the Russians as being behind the Democratic National Committee hack was actually owned by a Ukrainian (it isn’t and never has been) and was in on the plot — as were the FBI and the DNC, including murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, who supposedly did the actual hacking as an “inside job.” All of it is utter nonsense. (The New York Times’ Scott Shane did a nice report on how Trump got hooked on this stuff.)

There’s also Attorney General William Barr’s “investigation of the investigation” which has him gallivanting all over the globe trying to prove that the CIA had it in for Trump and set up the bogus Russia investigation to trap him. This must also means that Robert Mueller was in on the scheme, since his team indicted a whole bunch of Russians.

As I said, Rudy Giuliani is at the center of all of these conspiracy theories, working under the influence of a couple of Ukrainian conmen in Florida with the full participation of his client, the president of the United States. They are both wallowing in the right-wing fever swamps and it’s as fetid and poisonous as Chernobyl during the meltdown.

Of course, there is also the other big Ukraine scandal that has gotten Trump into such hot water: the alleged influence-peddling extravaganza around Joe and Hunter Biden. As is his wont, Trump has blurted out a confession of wrongdoing, admitting that he asked the Ukrainian president to gather some dirt on his potential political rival as Trump was inexplicably holding up promised military aid. On Thursday, he said it again, adding that he thinks China should investigate the Bidens as well — in the same breath that he made new threats about the ongoing trade war.  He just can’t quit self-impeaching.

Later on Thursday evening, the House Intelligence Committee released transcripts of Trump’s Ukraine and EU ambassadors and envoys texting back and forth about Trump’s “crazy” quid pro quo, which makes clear that they were all aware of what was going on and were either trying to document their displeasure or cover the whole business up. They worked very hard to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a statement saying his government was taking up the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. in exchange for a visit to the White House and the release of nearly $400 million in military aid. To his credit, Zelensky didn’t do it, perhaps understanding that he was dealing with people who were unreliable.

Unlike all the other Ukraine scandals, this Biden conspiracy didn’t spring from the right-wing fever swamps, nor did Rudy Giuliani “uncover it” as he likes to brag he did. This one was a professional hit job carried out by the same team that brought you “Clinton Cash,” the book about the Clinton Foundation that formed the basis of the “Crooked Hillary” campaign.

This time it was a book called “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” by “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, who is now an editor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit he founded with Steve Bannon and right-wing billionaire Rebekah Mercer. Its purpose is clear enough: To launder far-right smears and dirty tricks.

I wrote about this gang back in 2015 for Salon when Schweizer gulled the New York Times and the Washington Post into partnering with him on the Clinton story, apparently convincing them that the man who wrote “Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Ruined the Global Economy and Will Do It Again if We Don’t Stop Them” was a straight journalist just looking for a little accountability.  The book was a huge success at what it set out to do: Tar Hillary Clinton as a corrupt criminal. Why not do it again with Joe Biden, who everyone knew was likely to run against Trump in 2020?

This time, with the notable exception of a couple of dubious stories in the New York Times, the media didn’t bite on the Biden story with quite the same eagerness. Bloomberg’s Joshua Green points out in this article on the subject that while it didn’t catch on in the mainstream press, it was huge in the conservative media, which apparently bothered Bannon a great deal. After all, the GAI was formed to push its smears into the mainstream.  Stories that exist only in the conservative bubble simply don’t have the same power to move the broader electorate.

Green notes that because Trump mainlines conservative media, he saw the story as very beneficial to his cause, adding that “what differentiates Trump from other power-consumers of conservative media is that he’s the president and was willing to use his governmental powers to attack a political rival.” Indeed he was. And it was a big mistake — it finally got the Democrats off the dime on impeachment.

Schweizer denies working with Giuliani or the White House. But then, he didn’t have to. He planted the seeds and then Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the Trump and Rudy show made it grow. Green writes:

[T]here’s no question the anti-Biden effort has boomeranged on Trump, who is suddenly under siege from the Democrats’ fast-moving impeachment inquiry. … At this point, no one can say what effect all this will have on the 2020 election. But it looks increasingly like it won’t be the one that Biden’s antagonists, from Trump to Schweizer, were aiming for.

It’s possible this will end up hurting Joe Biden, as these smears almost always do. But it’s hurting Trump even more. And to be honest, I’m not sure that Schweizer and company care that much. If a pain in the neck like Donald Trump gets caught in the crossfire I doubt they’ll lose any sleep over it. Political hitmen aren’t sentimental. They just move on to their next assignment.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/fox-news-outs-two-network-analysts-for-working-off-the-books-with-trump-and-giuliani-to-find-biden-dirt/

kos

Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace broke a bit of genuine news on Sunday morning when he reported that two of Fox News’ own frequent guests and Trump supporters may themselves be enmeshed in the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

Lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing have been working with Rudy Giuliani in his attempts to conduct opposition research on former Vice President Joe Biden, said Wallace. “According to a top U.S. official, all three were working off the books apart from the administration. The only person in government who knows what they were doing is President Trump.” This is a significant nugget for several reasons. First, Rudy Giuliani is still flatly denying he worked with other lawyers to collect Biden “dirt”; the Fox News anchor is therefore calling Giuliani a liar. Well, even more of a liar.

And second, the top-of-the-program callout of two of the network’s own frequent guests and analysts for undisclosed, “off the books” involvement in one of the scandals the network has been hosting them to opine on is, regardless of the obvious conflict of interest, nearly unheard of. From Lou Dobbs to Sean Hannity, the network has taken a notably lax attitude when it comes to network mouths splitting their time between the network and the needs of the Trump administration. They normally wouldn’t so much as peep about overtly conflicted guests!

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an 919

no lnx

Who fed Donald Trump his bogus Ukraine conspiracy theories?

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly September 30, 2019

One of the more bizarre elements of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted Ukraine scandal is his seemingly genuine belief that some nefarious Democratic scheme is hidden on Ukrainian computers. And one of the most important questions we should be asking is where he got that information.

First, some context: while most of attention has focused on the White House’s hamfisted attempt to gather dirt on the Biden family and its apparently widespread (and illegal) misuse of classification to hide politically damaging and legally incriminating information, there is also another sideplot: his conspiracy theory that Clinton’s missing emails, and perhaps other nefarious things, are somehow being stored on Ukrainian servers. This is a reference to what is known as the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory, a very fringe right-wing conspiracy theory so bizarre it barely makes it way onto onto Fox News. Rachel Sandler breaks it down at Forbes thus:

Silicon Valley-based CrowdStrike was hired in 2016 by the DNC to investigate the origins of the hack. The company didn’t give the DNC’s physical server to the FBI, which has been seized on by conspiracy theorists as evidence of a cover up.

According to the theory, which has been prominent on right-wing blogs and news websites and repeated by Trump and former campaign consultant Roger Stone,Democrats and CrowdStrike concocted evidence to frame Russia for the hack in order to discredit Trump’s win in 2016.

The supposed evidence of Russia’s innocence relies on the belief that a DNC server has been hidden in Ukraine, possibly by CrowdStrike’s cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch.

That belief may stem from a statement by President Trump in a 2017 interview with the Associated Press, in which he questioned why the FBI didn’t look at the DNC server, that CrowdStrike is owned by “a very rich Ukrainian.” Alperovitch is actually a Russian-born American citizen.

The theory is, of course, totally bogus. It’s also an attempt to absolve Russia of its culpability in the hacking of the DNC:

Ultimately, the president seems to be alluding to an idea that alt-right commentators and pro-Russia sympathizers have pushed for years: that CrowdStrike was wrong about Russia hacking the DNC—and, moreover, that CrowdStrike intentionally blamed Russia for political reasons. CrowdStrike’s findings have, of course, been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community, the Justice Department, members of Congress, and the office of Robert Mueller. Last year the government indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hacking plot…

These straw-grasping claims and distortions of fact are fuel for the fire of disinformation. Further, the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers which either had be put out to pasture, rebooted, or rebuilt to rid them of malware and intruders. As the DNC explained in a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Russian government, it had to “decommission more than 140 servers, remove and reinstall all software, including the operating systems, for more than 180 computers, and rebuild at least 11 servers” as a result of the hacking.

The unanswered question in all this is how Donald Trump came to believe in this nonsense, and why he continues to believe it. His own employees and administration official tried again and again to disabuse him of these notions, but he refused to give them up:

President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

Rudy Giuliani has been significantly involved in the obsession over Ukraine, as his bizarre spiels on cable news networks have amply demonstrated. Most recently he claimed to have been attempting to prove that Donald Trump (and, by extension, the Russians) was “framed by the Democrats”–a notion that Trump recently promoted on twitter.

But it seems unlikely Giuliani has been Donald Trump’s primary conspiracy theory conduit. Rather, he seems to have been roped into it by Trump, and enjoys the cable news limelight.

One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk.

So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?

We still don’t know. But we deserve to find out.

David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.

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romanian prosectutor?

selected stories

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/state-department-throws-rudy-giuliani-under-the-bus-after-he-says-he-was-on-a-mission-from-the-u-s-government/

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday to try to spin away from the growing scandal enveloping the White House. Giuliani told Hannity someone from the State Department rang him up and asked him to meet with a senior aide to President-elect Zelensky of Ukraine. Giuliani neglected to mention, and Hannity neglected to follow-up, on reporting from the Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump asked President-elect Zelensky eight times to meet with Rudy Giuliani, a private citizen who has not been elected nor confirmed for any role representing the United States.

In the clip below, Giuliani basically paints himself as a patriot, saying the State Department called to ask for his help and he gave it. But, the State Department had a little teeny bit of a different take on the situation than Giuliani, one that should be causing Rudy Giuliani to start losing a whole lot of sleep. When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson said, “Mr. Giuliani is a private citizen and acts in a personal capacity as a lawyer for President Trump. He does not speak on behalf of the U.S. Government.”

Folks, that is the sound of a bus the size of Ukraine driving right over Rudy Giuliani. You are on your own, Rudy. And when push comes to shove, just wait’ll you see the bus Donald Trump throws you under....Rudy Giuliani just said the State Department asked him to “go on a mission” AND WHY IN THE HELL IS STATE DEPT ASKING THE PRESIDENTS PERSONAL LAWYER TO GO TO UKRAINE WTF IS HAPPENING&...For the record, the statement from a State Department spokesperson is quite different than Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s comments on Sunday talk shows. In this clip from CBS’s Face the Nation, Pompeo refused to get into the details of Giuliani’s involvement and tried to spin this back to being about Biden.

If Mike Pompeo was involved in setting up the meeting for Rudy Giuliani and the Ukrainian official, which took place away from cameras in the Spanish countryside, he’s likely going to have to answer to Congress as well.

The U.S. Secretary of State endorses Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to seek help from a foreign government to investigate President Trump’s political opponent pic.twitter.com/hE8jHum8ib

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) September 22, 2019

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cf trms on odd russia timeline, myst phone call promise

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/impeachment-resignation-treason-federal-charges-reaction-to-the-stunning-trump-ukraine-news/

...Thursday ended with the absolutely bombshell news that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani allegedly schemed to withhold military and financial aid to Ukraine—unless the newly elected prime minister found some kind of dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who has done work in Ukraine. You could and should read more about this scandal from my colleague, Mark Sumner, who has a great summary of the situation and a complete timeline of the scandal.

For what it’s worth, we aren’t talking small funds here. We are talking $250 million in aid that the White House blocked this summer, which was, coincidentally, releasedtues? Almost immediately after the news skyrocketed to the top trending topic on social media,. More incredibly, Giuliani then ran to Twitter to not just affirm his role; he also directly implicated Donald Trump.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/deranged-police-state-fever-dream-internet-explodes-over-rudy-giulianis-incredibly-fascist-video-for-9-11/

no lnx

‘Deranged police state fever dream’: Internet explodes over Rudy Giuliani’s ‘incredibly fascist’ video for 9/11

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 11, 2019

Former New York City mayor, now President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani observed the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by posting a chilling, creepy, and many are saying “fascist” video in the early morning, tweeting “GOD BLESS AMERICA!” in all-caps.

The highly-edited video opens with staged images of people protesting fascism, as a young child slowly sings “America the Beautiful.”

The camera closes in on a lone police officer starting at the protestors, who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

In an apparent flashback the officer seems to be remembering his life: a police badge is pinned on his shirt, a flag-draped coffin of a U.S. service member is carried past him, and a young boy sits in front of a television set watching footage reminiscent of fire fighters raising a flag in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

He then flips down the clear shield on his helmet, and the camera shows him whipping out a club – just as the protestors jump the barricade.

The words “This We’ll Defend” flash on the screen.

Rudy Giuliani

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@RudyGiuliani

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

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The video is looped, repeating until the user stops it.

NBC News’ Ben Collins explains the video is “a ‘banned from the Super Bowl’ ad that skirted the rules and got conservative media attention.”

Ben Collins

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@oneunderscore__

Jesus. https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Rudy Giuliani

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@RudyGiuliani

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

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Ben Collins

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@oneunderscore__

This is not the start of a dystopian David Fincher movie about a cop who lost his mind (good guess!).

It's a "banned from the Super Bowl" ad that skirted the rules and got conservative media attention. He cut off the logo of the t-shirt company at the endhttps://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Rudy Giuliani

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@RudyGiuliani

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

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Response to the disturbing clip was astonishment, confusion, anger, and outrage – and with many decrying it as clear fascism.

Take a look:

southpaw

@nycsouthpaw

This video from Rudy honors the Republican tradition of using the memory of 9/11 to attack people who had absolutely nothing to do with it, and it’s incredibly fascist to boot. https://twitter.com/rudygiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

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@JewishWorker

Rudy Giuliani was always a fascist. Now he's just more comfortable being open about it. https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Anthony L. Fisher

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@anthonyLfisher

Rudy Giuliani was never more popular than the 3 months after 9/11/01. It was because he displayed empathy, compassion, and stoicism — not this deranged police state fever dream. https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Michelangelo Signorile

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@MSignorile

Wtf, Giuliani?  On 9/11.

The theme moving forward — we’ll defend our minority rule, via all means necessary.

Frightening. https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

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@longwall26

Rudy's been an out-fascist for a long, long time https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Bad Fox Graphics

@BadFoxGraphics

Once upon a time, Rudy Giuliani was an attorney who understood the First Amendment. https://twitter.com/rudygiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Alex Griswold

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@HashtagGriswold

Well... Rudy is certainly on brand

Tom Tomorrow

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@tomtomorrow

welp it's just Mayor 9/11 celebrating fascism on 9/11 day https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Rudy Giuliani

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@RudyGiuliani

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Embedded video

346

7:04 AM - Sep 11, 2019

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105 people are talking about this

Bobby Lewis

@revrrlewis

nothing says "i remember 9/11 and respect the freedoms that were attacked" more than a video comparing social justice protesters to terrorists https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

283

7:09 AM - Sep 11, 2019

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61 people are talking about this

Patrick Blanchfield

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@PatBlanchfield

not sure what's more risible here: Giuliani's slobbering fascism, or the fact that he has to use an unattributed commercial for a shitty clothing brand to do it https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Regular UltraDavid

@ultradavid

This is an ad for fascism, holy shit. I think Giuliani sucks, I've been worried about the right's nationalism, etc, but I'm still floored at how explicitly pro-fascist this is. These protesters are protesting fascism, it's on their sign, & this cop is gonna maul them for it. Wtf! https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

@jessesingal

I'm sorry but this is deranged https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

Cass OMalley ??????

@CassOMalley1

Gaslighting America on 9/11? Now this is DEPLORABLE https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1171663086178185217 …

[bunch more twts]

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OMG

mirror/whataboutism?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-and-his-henchmen-have-eagerly-dug-for-a-biden-scandal-in-ukraine-now-its-coming-back-to-bite-them

no lnx

Trump and his henchmen have eagerly dug for a Biden scandal in Ukraine. Now it’s coming back to bite them

Written by Bob Cesca / Salon September 10, 2019

As Donald Trump grows noticeably more desperate, he’s blundering his way into more unforced errors, metaphorically stepping on a series of rakes scattered on the White House lawn. With each careless step onto another rake, he keeps clobbering himself in the face again and again. In particular, Trump appears to be setting a trap for Joe Biden, should the former vice president win the Democratic nomination next year. But it’s a plot that’s already backfiring. After all, my rule remains: Trump always makes things worse for Trump.

Before we dig into the latest harrowing developments on this front, let’s review. Back in May, I wrote about a story originally reported by the New York Times involving Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

Late in the Obama administration, Joe Biden was dispatched to Kiev, armed with a relatively severe ultimatum. While there, the Times reported, Biden threatened to withhold a billion dollars in government loans unless the then-prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was fired. Shortly thereafter, Shokin was indeed fired and replaced by Yuriy Lutsenko. The cash was released.

Here’s where it gets hinky — but not really. Prior to Biden arriving in Kiev, an investigation had been underway by prosecutor Shokin into a natural gas company called Burisma Holdings. One of the corporation’s board members was Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son and a New York lawyer who apparently pulled down a salary of $50,000 per month for his position with the company.

While it may look as if Biden exploited the loan money as leverage in order to kill an investigation into a corporation that employed his son, Bloomberg learned that the Burisma investigation had been shuttled to the back burner in 2015 before Biden’s trip and, the report added, the Obama administration’s intention was to convince the Ukrainian government to crack down on corruption in general.

A former Ukrainian official, Vitaliy Kasko, told Bloomberg, “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against [Mykola] Zlochevsky.” Zlochevsky is the founder and owner of Burisma.

Fast forward to 2019. Somewhere around the time Rudy Giuliani held meetings with prosecutor Lutsenko in New York, Ukraine reopened the case against Burisma in March of this year (although Bloomberg disputes this detail as well). The Times also reported that Lutsenko took up the case again in order “to curry favor from the Trump administration for his boss and ally.”

Bloomberg and the New York Times agree in their reporting that Burisma was a topic of conversation between Giuliani and Lutsenko in Manhattan.

However, since Ukraine elected a new president, 41-year-old Volodymyr Zelensky, a reformer who’s not beholden to the Kremlin, prosecutor Lutsenko was replaced by Ruslan Riaboshapka in late August. So this means the Trumpers have to start from scratch, trying to convince the new Ukrainian government to keep digging into Hunter and Joe Biden. Naturally, Rudy answered the call, meeting with officials from the Zelensky administration in Madrid, according to the Times and confirmed by Giuliani, where Trump’s TV lawyer tried once again to convince Ukraine to focus on the Bidens.

The meeting must’ve gone badly because Trump has decided Prime Minister Zelensky isn’t an ally, and it probably doesn’t help that Zelensky isn’t a Putin disciple. Consequently, Trump has withheld $250 million in promised military aid to Ukraine, all while Ukraine continues to fight off Putin’s loyalists in that region. Trump also refuses to invite Zelensky to the White House.

Yes, it’s another gigantic, sloppy tongue-kiss for Putin from the president, further confirming Trump’s ongoing status as Putin’s puppet, endangering U.S. national security and undermining democracy here and elsewhere. And that’s not all …

It’s also collusion in plain sight. Trump and Giuliani are busily blackmailing Ukraine, leaving it vulnerable to Putin’s aggression, in order to strong-arm Zelensky into helping the Trump campaign defeat Joe Biden by manufacturing the whopper Democratic scandal of the 2020 election cycle.

As the Washington Post editorial board observed last week, “Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.”

Fortunately, the House Intelligence Committee, along with both the Foreign Affairs and Oversight Committees, will launch simultaneous investigations into Trump’s and Giuliani’s attempted collusion with Ukraine. Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement:

A growing public record indicates that, for nearly two years, the President and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, appear to have acted outside legitimate law enforcement and diplomatic channels to coerce the Ukrainian government into pursuing two politically-motivated investigations under the guise of anti-corruption activity. As the 2020 election draws closer, President Trump and his personal attorney appear to have increased pressure on the Ukrainian government and its justice system in service of President Trump’s reelection campaign, and the White House and the State Department may be abetting this scheme.

What separates this investigation from the ongoing 2016 Trump-Russia collusion probe is the clear-as-crystal fact that Giuliani confessed to meeting with Andrii Telizhenko in May, and with Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak in August to try to make it all happen. The Trumpers stupidly wanted everyone to know what they were doing in order to hamfistedly inject the Biden story into the conservative-entertainment complex.

Ever the impulsive, erratic doofuses, the Trump team badly botched the story and instead of keeping their powder dry, they circled back for more. I guess William Barr’s factually inaccurate summary of the Mueller report convinced Trump that he could get away with anything, no matter how obviously corrupt it was. As a result, we’re looking at yet another impeachment article added to the conga-line of high crimes committed by this White House.

Of course, none of this will keep Trump from amplifying the Biden story when the time comes. Regardless of the facts and irrespective of further revelations from the congressional committees, Trump will frame the story as Biden colluding with Ukraine. The Republicans are never afraid of projection, that’s for sure. Worse, Trump will accuse the House committees of also colluding with Ukraine if and when documents are requested from Kiev, including a transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky.

The good news is that the story is complicated and therefore not easily summarized by a Trump tweet or with a rally zinger for Trump’s Red Hats to repeat like the dutiful fanboys they are. Democrats will have plenty of time to prepare a defense, knowing exactly where Trump is headed with this non-scandal. There’s also the distinct possibility this will all end up as another rake handle to Trump’s face, magnifying the fact that he’s not just grossly unfit for re-election, but grossly unfit to continue serving his first term as well.

---

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-rudy-giuliani-links-911-terrorism-venezuela

video:

On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani links 9/11 terrorism to Venezuela

Giuliani: “We have to get rid of Maduro”

==

Trump’s Roy Cohns: William Barr has the power, but Rudy Giuliani slings the mud

While he was in Japan, Donald Trump demanded that the…

an 519

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This one act by Giuliani and his friends in the FBI could have been responsible for Trump’s win

How Rudy Giuliani engineered the infamous "Comey letter" of October…

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https://www.alternet.org/world/rudy-giuliani-lobbyists-joseph-kabila-democratic-republic-congo

Tuesday, The Independent reported that President Donald Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, met with lobbyists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a reception at a D.C. hotel in July:

An invitation for the reception billed it as an opportunity to learn about "the role Africa plays in gaining access to critical minerals, such as cobalt" and to discuss "the strategic relationship" between the United States and the nations of Africa.

In fact, the reception was part of an aggressive $8 million lobbying and public relations campaign that used lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration to try to ease concerns about Congolese President Joseph Kabila, whose government was facing threats of additional sanctions from the Trump administration for human rights abuses and corruption.

Joseph Kabila became leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo following the assassination of his father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. His second term was supposed to end in 2016 and he is constitutionally barred from running again, but he has resisted any transition of power or free elections, which were finally scheduled to take place later this month. Kabila's regime has been accused of extrajudicial arrests and killings, torture, political corruption, use of child soldiers, and persecution of women and LGBTQ persons.

The Trump administration has imposed sanctions and tariffs on a number of countries. Some of these, like targeted sanctions against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, arguably serve a purpose, while others, like tariffs on Canada, make no sense.

Autocratic regimes facing sanctions, however, have stepped up their lobbying efforts to fight back, and per The Independent, they have been spurred "by the willingness projected by Mr Trump and his team to make deals around sanctions and tariffs exemptions."

The worry is that while previous administrations had career officials following strict guidelines to review foreign lobbying efforts free of political concerns, this president and his officials are uniquely responsive to personal gain. Trump has dragged his feet on condemning the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia, a country whose royal family is heavily invested in his real estate empire. And it is increasingly looking like one of Trump's motivations for his close ties to Russia was his desire to build real estate in Moscow.

The American people, and the whole international order, deserve assurances that the Trump administration is not going to decide how strongly to pursue human rights issues based on the flattery and perks offered his team by lobbyists.

==

trump inc broadcast, many connections to russia, armenian geoncide and manafort client cty

==

https://www.alternet.org/one-biggest-fraud-cases-ever-trump-biographer-david-cay-johnston-uncovers-rudy-giulianis-alleged

...

human rights organization has asked Dutch prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into multi-billion dollar money laundering schemes that they say were aided by Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his old law firm.

This story first appeared at DC Report.

The complaint is clearly aimed at examining how much money stolen from a former Soviet satellite ended up benefitting Trump. He is named 16 times in the complaint’s footnotes.

The complaint describes “one of the biggest fraud cases ever” in which “some of these money flows ultimately ended up in the Netherlands” because “Dutch service providers helped to cover up the money laundering acts."

"The money laundering network started in Kazakhstan, where a figure of up to USD 10 billion was purportedly embezzled,” the complaint asserts. “This money was subsequently circulated by two Kazakh oligarch families via a worldwide network of shell companies. A number of these companies were established in the Netherlands. The money was subsequently invested in real estate projects in the United States and Europe, after which it was paid out as ‘profits’ via – once again – a network of shell companies.”

Netherlands banks and other firms play a significant role in illicit flows of cash around the world through sophisticated techniques to hide income and corporate profits. Many of these techniques appear to push the envelope on legal tax avoidance. When money laundering is involved these aggressive techniques could cross a line into aiding and abetting criminal tax evasion.

The complaint asserts that a small slice of the missing billions was run through Dutch shell corporations with help from Rudy Giuliani’s old law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani. Until 2016, Giuliani was a partner in the 470-lawyer firm.

Neither Giuliani nor anyone at his firm Giuliani Security & Safety LLC responded to requests for his side of the story. Multiple requests for comment prompted no response from Greg M. Bopp, managing partner of what was then Bracewell & Giuliani but is now called only Bracewell.

The complaint was filed by Avaaz, a global human rights organization in Washington which claims 48 million members. It has issued an open call to prosecutors around the world to investigate “the giant web of corruption” that it says propelled Trump’s rise.

Avaaz says it has approximately 290,000 members in the Netherlands. The complaint was filed Oct. 22 with J.J.M. van Dis-Setz of the Dutch Public Prosecution Service by Barbara van Straaten, a lawyer in Amsterdam.

The complaint filed with the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service in Amsterdam relies on court records from several countries that were dug up by investigative journalists, including James S. Henry, the investigative economics editor of DCReport.

The Dutch television program Zembla aired an investigative piece on Trump and his Russian associates in 2017. It followed up with an expose of a Trump business partner’s role in a Dutch money laundering scheme.

The complaint is aimed at uncovering the full details of Russian money flowing to various Trump projects using so-called anonymous wealth companies. Those are shell companies created to hide the identities of the owners. Trump and his family are known to have received vast sums from shell companies and have bragged about how much of it came from people in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet empire. Trump contends the deals were all lawful and he has no knowledge of any money laundering.

A criminal investigation by Dutch prosecutors could help that country avoid banking sanctions and loss of reputation by showing that Amsterdam enforces its own laws and respects laws on transnational crimes.

Roughly $10 billion was stolen from Kazakhstan, a former Soviet satellite located in Central Asia. The current Kazakh government is in court in Switzerland and elsewhere trying to recover the money and prosecute members of two families it says stole the money and laundered it in the West. Other lawsuits connected to the stolen money are being litigated in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

The $10 billion theft was uncovered by PricewaterhouseCoopers during its 2009 audit of BTA Bank, the largest in Kazakhstan. In addition, there is about $300 million missing from Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan.

Court documents identify the suspected thieves as Viktor Khrapunov and Mukhtar Ablyazov, oligarchs whose families are bound not just by extensive business ties, but also by marriage. Khrapunov is the former mayor of Almaty. His son Illyas is married to Ablyazov’s daughter.

“There are strong indications that the revenues of these crimes were probably mixed via a complex money-laundering network, and there was a great deal of mutual overlap” between the companies and people suspected of the crimes, the complaint states.

Both Khrapunov and Ablyazov are fugitives.

Khrapunov, who was tried in absentia in Kazakhstan, has been convicted of corruption.

Ablyazov, who was president of the looted bank, had his worldwide assets with an estimated value of $4.9 billion frozen six years ago by a British High Court.

Trump has done business since 1983 with Russian oligarchs and wealthy former officials and business people in former Soviet satellites, including Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan. A number of mobsters – American, Russian and others – live in Trump Tower apartments. The building has long been known to local, federal and international law enforcement as a nest of criminal residences.

In 1987 the Kremlin, then still a communist state, provided Trump and his first wife Ivana with a luxury trip to Russia.

While a number of journalistic investigations have looked into Trump’s dealings with oligarchs and their money using public records and sources they were limited to public records, which are often scant. Dutch prosecutors, however, have the power to subpoena banking and other records, forcing their disclosure to prosecutors and, potentially, the public.

Trump is known to have done deals with some of those mentioned in the complaint, including Felix Sater, a violent Long Island felon who was born in Russia. For years Sater traveled extensively with Trump working on deals named in the complaint and handing out his Trump Organization business card. Despite these long ties and both videos and still photos showing the men together, Trump claimed during the presidential campaign that he would not recognize Sater if they were in the same room.

Sater is believed to be cooperating with Robert Mueller, the American special prosecutor investigating Trump.

In one deal involving Sater, millions of dollars from the Trump SoHo hotel and apartment tower disappeared into an Icelandic bank that was under the control of a Russian oligarch. That bank was part of a multi-billion-dollar scheme to defraud Dutch and British pension funds. Trump has testified that he was due 18% of profits from the building.

The faux gold letters bearing the name, under an agreement reached a year ago, have been pried from the building façade.

Just three weeks before the 2016 election, a massive expose of Trump’s role in helping Kazakh oligarchs hide their illicit money appeared in The Financial Times, a British business newspaper.

“Dirty Money: Trump and the Kazakh Connection” described “evidence a Trump venture has links to alleged laundering network.”

The newspaper said its investigation found that Trump had “assembled an eclectic collection of backers and collaborators. Some had chequered pasts, with links to organized crime or fraud schemes. But perhaps the biggest risk for Mr. Trump’s complex, often opaque, business empire was that it might be used for a purpose US officials fear is rife in the country’s real estate sector: laundering dirty money.”

Trump’s SoHo project “has multiple ties to an alleged international money laundering network. Title deeds, bank records and correspondence show that a Kazakh family accused of laundering hundreds of millions of stolen dollars bought luxury apartments in a Manhattan tower part-owned by Mr. Trump and embarked on major business ventures with one of the tycoon’s partners,” the British newspaper The Financial Timesreported after an extensive investigation.

Trump and his partners, the FT asserted, engaged in condo sales that appear to have violated the Patriot Act, the post 9/11 law that requires banks, developers and others to know who their customers are and the sources of their money.

Investigations to identify anonymous buyers of luxury apartments in New York and Florida to determine the extent of any money laundering were announced in January 2016 by the federal government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Three months later the FinCEN director, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, spoke about her years of work on transnational Russian organized crime networks. Much of her work involved Russian crime families “laundering their funds through the U.S. financial system. Often, this involved the suspected purchase of personal residences with criminal proceeds.”

In July 2016, the month the GOP nominated Trump, FinCen announced it would be investigating sales of luxury apartments beyond New York and Florida because of its growing concern about flows of illicit cash disguised in real estate deals.

While Giuliani calls himself Trump’s personal lawyer, his role is primarily to spread Trumpian disinformation about Special Prosecutor Mueller’s investigations into Russian collusion and related matters concerning Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign. Because Giuliani appears on so many cable and other television shows, but not in court, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell calls the former New York City mayor “Trump’s TV lawyer."

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rudy-giulianis-repeated-travel-russia-and-former-soviet-countries-while-serving

Giuliani has had many identities in his time on the public stage. A crusading federal prosecutor who struck terror in mobsters and Wall Street titans alike. A sometimes-cantankerous New York City mayor who became a national hero for his stirring leadership after the 9/11 attacks. And, currently, President Donald Trump’s unpaid attorney in the Russia collusion investigation being led by Robert Mueller.

In this week’s episode of “Trump, Inc.,” we’re digging into a part of Giuliani’s work that has occurred largely outside of the spotlight: He has often traveled to Russia or other former Soviet states as guests of powerful players there. And since Trump was elected, he appears to have stepped up the frequency of those trips.

Just last week, for example, Giuliani appeared in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, which has close trade ties with Russia. He was invited, according to local press accounts, by Ara Abramyan, an Armenian businessman who lives in Russia. Abramyan once helped reconstruct the Kremlin and also received a medal for “merit to the fatherland” from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Giuliani said he was in Armenia as a private citizen, but on a local TV news show, Abramyan implied that he expected Giuliani to carry a message for him to Trump. (The conversation was in Armenian, so it’s not clear whether Giuliani understood what Abramyan was saying.)

...

==

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/exclusive-senators-are-demanding-information-about-giulianis-opioid-lobbying/

many docs

More than a decade ago, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma approached Rudy Giuliani, then fresh off a stint as the lauded mayor of New York City, asking for help: The little-known pharmaceutical company needed a trusted lawyer to help fight growing public relations and legal battles. It was 2002, and Purdue was facing its first lawsuits accusing the company of underplaying the addictive effects of its signature drug. By the time Purdue sought Giuliani’s guidance, he was reportedly helping raise money for a museum dedicated to the Drug Enforcement Administration and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, was consulting the Justice Department on reorganizing its major drug investigations.

Recent developments cast a new light on the arrangement: Today, Giuliani serves as President Donald Trump’s lawyer, and Purdue Pharma is largely viewed as responsible for helping sow the seeds of the current overdose epidemic, which killed roughly 72,000 Americans last year. Purdue employed Giuliani Partners for years, clad with its founder’s shiny post-9/11 reputation and political connections. When a federal investigation in the mid-2000s threatened company executives with the prospect of felonies and jail time, the firm helped Purdue’s top brass get off with misdemeanor “misbranding” convictions and community service in 2007. Purdue Pharma’s parent company, Purdue Frederick, pleaded guilty to a misbranding felony that cost it $600 million, but Giuliani helped strike a deal that enabled Purdue Pharma to continue selling its blockbuster painkiller OxyContin. “Among Mr. Giuliani’s missions was the job of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him,” as the New York Times put it that year.

On Wednesday, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration requesting information on the respective agencies’ contact with Giuliani Partners. The letters, shared with Mother Jones, draw heavily on a recent New York Times investigation finding that federal prosecutors knew about OxyContin’s widespread abuse and originally recommended that Purdue executives be charged with felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. But top Justice Department officials in the George W. Bush administration pushed back—deciding instead to settle the case in 2007 rather than take it to trial. The letters also cite investigations suggesting that Giuliani used his political connections to influence the relatively lenient outcome of the federal suit, as well as the lax approach the Drug Enforcement Administration took in curbing misuse of the drug.

In addition to asking for documentation of communications between the federal agencies and Giuliani Partners, the letters ask pointed questions about Giuliani himself, such as “What steps were taken to ensure that Giuliani’s other relationships with DOJ and its components did not improperly influence plea negotiations?”

In recent years, dozens of states and municipalities have filed lawsuits against opioid makers and distributors including Purdue, alleging that the overdose epidemic has caused a strain on public resources. Last week, Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to bring a separate, “major lawsuit” against opioid companies.

“Given that Mr. Giuliani has emerged as one of the President’s closest advisors, it’s important that we determine whether his past work on behalf of Purdue, a company that misled prescribers and patients alike about the addictive nature of its drug OxyContin, will influence this administration’s actions in terms of holding Purdue accountable for the devastating impact of its aggressive marketing of this drug,” wrote Ricki Eshman, Hassan’s press secretary.

Read the full letters below:...

==

am 1st

another question from February, as shown in the above screenshot from one of the group's reports, respondents were reminded that large companies had given out employee bonuses before they were asked if they agreed with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's comment that worker bonuses were "crumbs" compared with corporate windfalls. The results were surprising: A plurality of voters agreed with Pelosi, despite the lopsided question. This would suggest that for Republicans, using the "crumbs" comment as an attack line against Democrats in 2018 campaigns, which Trump has suggested they do, may not be a good idea.

Over the past six months, CNBC monitored America First Policies' website and found hundreds of pages of polling and research paid for by donors whose names are permitted to be kept secret. Much of this polling has since been removed from the site, but a portion of the removed documents are still available online.

America First Policies is not the first nonprofit group created to advance a president's priorities, nor is it the first to conduct intensive polling. Two Obama-linked groups, Priorities USA and Organizing for Action, did the same thing. Priorities USA did not disclose its donors, but OFA did voluntarily, releasing quarterly donor lists.

But by hiring the Trump campaign's pollsters to conduct such a large and secretive Trump-focused data operation, and paying for it with dark money, America First Policies is going well beyond what previous outside nonprofit groups have done.

While a political committee such as the RNC is designed and expected to collect information that helps to win elections, a nonprofit group such as America First Policies — permitted to operate tax-free and accept unlimited donations from donors whose names can be kept secret — is not.

"So you have a situation where large donors are contributing to America First Policies with the understanding that their secret donations are going to be seen as valuable by the president, because this group appears to work so closely with the White House," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "And because these donors are secret, the public and Congress will never know if the White House later took action to advance a donor's interests."

In addition to a slew of senior advisors with ties to Trump, America First Policies has three board members, all of whom are also close to the Trump White House. Its chairman, Tommy Hicks Jr., is the son of a billionaire and a good friend of Donald Trump Jr. He has also reportedly brokered White House introductions for companies seeking business with the Trump administration.

Another board member, Dallas financial executive Roy Bailey, serves as managing director and founding partner of Giuliani Partners LLC, along with former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. The newest board member is Harold Hamm, a shale oil billionaire who was Trump's top pick for energy secretary but reportedly turned down the job.

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bunch of stuff i missed?

==

old prutt nom

Industry representatives expressed satisfaction with the choice Wednesday. "The office he headed was present and accounted for in the battle to keep EPA faithful to its statutory authority and respectful of the role of the states in our system of cooperative federalism," said Scott Segal, head of the policy group at the lobbying and legal firm Bracewell. "Given that we are almost two decades overdue for an overhaul of the Clean Air Act, there is interest on both sides of the aisle to look at that statute."

==

https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained

escalator

no many lnx

Spygate: How Right-Wing Media Creates a Conspiracy Theory Out of Thin Air

BY JAY WILLIS

This is how conservative media transformed a small news item into a full-blown conspiracy theory that the president (apparently) believes to be true.

The plot goes like this: During the summer of 2016, on the clandestine orders of then-president Barack Obama, the FBI and CIA hatched an ambitious plan to topple the Trump campaign from the inside. In a scandal of unprecedented scope, Democratic politicians commandeered American counterintelligence resources to spy on their primary political opponent and boost Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the election. The Russia investigation that has dominated headlines for nearly two years is, in fact, a desperate smokescreen conjured up by terrified Deep State actors to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing, and to frame the president for heinous crimes he didn't commit.

On May 8, The Washington Post reported on the White House's decision to back the Justice Department's withholding of information from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, on the grounds that disclosure would expose the identity of "a U.S. citizen who has provided information to the FBI and CIA." The authors added, though, that the individual had been a source of information used by the special counsel's office—and that it was unclear whether Trump knew this "key fact" when his administration chose to side with law enforcement.

It didn't take long for him to find out. Almost immediately, the right-wing-media ecosystem began laundering and repackaging this news item, weaving its constituent elements together with Trumpian talking points until a full-blown conspiracy theory worthy of the president's tweets emerged on the other side. This metamorphosis is what would happen if a word cloud sourced from a Trump rally were used in a giant game of telephone—but one in which the gibberish end result were then broadcast as news to hundreds of millions of recipients.

How did this happen?

May 10

Two days after the initial report, citing "the Washington Post's unnamed law-enforcement leakers," The Wall Street Journal publishes an analysis by conservative commentator Kim Strassel. "[W]e might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign." Such a development, she writes, "would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting." Strassel continues (all emphasis mine):

[W]hen precisely was this human source operating? Because if it was prior to that infamous Papadopoulos tip, then the FBI isn’t being straight. It would mean the bureau was spying on the Trump campaign prior to that moment. And that in turn would mean that the FBI had been spurred to act on the basis of something other than a junior campaign aide’s loose lips.

This is at once cautious and bold, introducing the salacious vocabulary of espionage to a detail about an intelligence source—but only, she clarifies, if the allegations are true. Strassel does not offer a reason for entertaining her hypothetical, other than her characterization of the players' accounts of the investigation as "suspiciously vague."She is, in the classic style of well-compensated public intellectuals filling up column inches, just asking questions.

That night, other journalists are happy to offer answers. On Sean Hannity's Fox News show, journalist Sara Carter, citing Strassel, tells listeners of “concern that the FBI actually had a spy within the Trump campaign.” Hannity is dumbfounded: “What? What?” he splutters. "Yes," replies Carter. Blogs like Gateway Pundit kick off the breathless hyperbole category. "Now we know why the Deep State has been working so hard to take down President Trump and the republic," said the post, linking to and block-quoting Strassel. "OBAMA DEEP STATE HAD A SPY INSIDE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN!"

May 11

The baton is passed to Fox News, which syndicates Strassel's article and changes the headline from “About that FBI ‘source’” to “Did the FBI place a mole inside the 2016 Trump campaign?” On Fox & Friends, the president's morning program of choice, Pete Hegseth weighs in, hesitantly at first. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign? Just asking the question. There’s an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it." Ainsley Earhardt quotes at length from the column before positing that it means the FBI and DOJ had someone "paid to go and spy on President Trump."

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picks up the thread, encouraging the conflation of the FBI and President Obama. Strassel's article mentions Obama only once, and only in passing. But this is Rush Limbaugh, not a major newspaper; he can say things like this without fear of repercussions.

When I say “the FBI,” I mean the Obama administration. They infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy, and while they had that spy implanted, they were unmasking and leaking and obtaining FISA spying warrants and conducting criminal investigations of Trump advisers. This is a big deal...For our purposes, folks, the important thing is that the Obama administration infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy.

The buzz grows louder online. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign?" asks Andrew McCarthy, praising Strassel's column as "essential reporting," in a National Review article that published early the next morning. Right-wing blog ZeroHedge makes an affirmative statement—“WSJ: The FBI Hid a Mole in the Trump Campaign”—out of his question. Also citing Strassel, Tucker Carlson refers to a "government spy" and a "mole" sent by "the Obama administration." His guest, NRATV personality Dan Bongino, reveals that he believes there to have been more than one spy, referring to "reporting." He does not elaborate on-air.

May 14

The week begins with lawmakers joining the fray. On Fox & Friends, GOP congressman Ron DeSantis calls for a follow-up investigation into the matter. "I know that we’re actively trying to get the underlying documents that would tell us: Did they spy on the Trump campaign or not?” he asks, implicitly treating the premises of that query as if they were beyond dispute. To Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Network, Matt Gaetz expresses unease with "reports" he'd heard "about potential human intelligence being collected on a rival presidential campaign."

These men are egged on by, among others, Rush Limbaugh, who asserts he knows the identity of the spy that the FBI "put in the Trump campaign," and Hannity, whose radio guest David Limbaugh—Rush's younger brother—opines that "an official policy inserting a confidential source into a presidential campaign" would be "unprecedented" and "worse than Watergate." Like DeSantis, he includes a soft qualifier, though: "If it happened! We have to get to the bottom of it."

May 15

Nunes appears on the Fox & Friends set, hinting that the campaign might have been "set up" by the FBI. “I believe they never should have opened a counterintelligence investigation into a political party,” he explains. And although he at first avoids using the word "spy," his hosts are happy to put it in his mouth. Steve Doocy suggests that Nunes's narrative implies that Trump was "framed," while Earhardt adds that "it makes it sound like there was a spy."

Some 12 hours later, Hannity is again agape at the "possibility of an FBI mole that was inside the Trump campaign." He runs snippets of the "stunning" Nunes interview, scarcely able to believe his ears. "The powerful tools of intelligence used to spy on an opposition party candidate, and those powerful tools used against Americans?" he muses. "No, that can't happen here."

May 16

On Laura Ingraham's show, Rudy Giuliani at once broaches the subject of the FBI "possibly placing a spy in the Trump campaign" while admitting that he doesn't know if the gossip is true. The next morning, on Fox & Friends, he’ll again dip his toes in the water before retreating to solid ground. "That would be the biggest scandal in the history of this town—at least, involving law enforcement," Giuliani warns.

He's intrigued by the possibility, though. "Maybe two spies!" he wonders aloud.

Meanwhile, outside the MAGAsphere, a New York Times article helps breathe new life into the conspiracy theory. The authors of that report—an account of the 2016 law-enforcement inquiry into the Trump campaign—note that “at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos.” Referring to the preceding week of innuendo, they characterize this detail as a “politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”

As noted by USA Today's Brad Heath, FBI guidelines allow agents to use informants, among many other methods of information-gathering, when assessing whether a matter warrants a full criminal investigation. The Bureau's partial reliance on a "source" here isn't especially remarkable.

Furthermore, given their knowledge of the Kremlin's election-meddling efforts, it isn't difficult to understand why the intelligence community might have an interest in a campaign's ties to Russia, regardless of the candidate's political affiliation. Marco Rubio—a man not known for being fond of Hillary Clinton—said as much after reviewing the underlying evidence along with the rest of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found no secret political motivation for opening the inquiry. “There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he reasoned in comments cited by the Times. “That’s what they did.”

It doesn't matter. One little opening is all it takes. Breitbart, mentioning the May 8 Post story and Strassel's follow-up, proclaims that the Times report "confirmed" that the FBI ran a "spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps." (The article itself mentions only the FISA warrant on Page, but the headline's plural form—"wiretaps"—does its job of making things sound especially ominous.)

May 17

Other right-wing outlets aggregating the Times report draw the same conclusions Breitbart did. “FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign,” blares The Federalist, which justifies its assertion with a helpful explanatory aside.

This paragraph [in the Times report] is noteworthy for the way it describes spying on the campaign—“at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos”—before suggesting that might not be spying. The definition of spying is to secretly collect information, so it’s not really in dispute whether a government informant fits the bill.”

Note that the write-up does not actually suggest that the FBI "planted" anyone in the campaign. But by setting out an expansive definition of "spying," articles like this one allow other publications—ones that might not so carefully define their terms—to use the word in that more specific (and more nefarious) context.

It is the National Review's coverage—assisted by cable news—that finally allows this story to reach the hallways of the Executive Residence. "With the blessing of the Obama White House," writes Andrew McCarthy, again attributing the actions of law-enforcement officials to affirmative decisions of the then-president, the FBI "took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans—Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries."He continues:

Obviously, Russia was trying to meddle in the election, mainly through cyber-espionage—hacking. There would, then, have been nothing inappropriate about the FBI’s opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible not to do so. That’s what counterintelligence powers are for.

But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.

This is the thrust of his argument, and it is nonsensical. McCarthy seems to assume that counterintelligence investigations "against Russia" and counterintelligence investigations "against the Trump campaign" must be mutually exclusive propositions, and that under no circumstances could a Russia-related intelligence probe look at the activities of Russia-related Trump officials. (His analysis is aided by a gross oversimplification of a key provision of FISA.) It would be "irresponsible," he urges, not to investigate what Russia may have been doing. But by virtue of their affiliation with a politician, everyone on the campaign should be insulated from any attendant scrutiny.

Before his column publishes, McCarthy hops on Fox & Friends to promote it. “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign,” he says in a strange moment of confidence and timidity. (In a fun, incestuous right-wing-media aside, while listing McCarthy's credentials, F&F co-host Brian Kilmeade adds, "Hopefully a Fox News contributor soon.") Not long afterward, Trump takes to Twitter to express his outrage, shouting out McCarthy by name for a job well done.

Donald J. Trump

?

@realDonaldTrump

Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate!

...

Law-enforcement pushback begins in earnest. Sources tell CNN that, no, the source was not placed within the Trump campaign. The Times provides even more details about the timeline, affirming that the informant spoke to campaign members only after the FBI learned of their dubious contacts with Russia. "No evidence has emerged," it reiterates, "that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal."

It's too late. Because Donald Trump is president of the United States, the content of his tweets becomes breaking news regardless of its accuracy. "Trump: Justice Department planted spy in 2016 campaign," declares an AP headline that runs, among other places, in The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. The body text notes that Trump's "own lawyer" has said that the allegation "might not be true." But for readers inclined to believe what Donald Trump says, or for those who only saw the headline as they scrolled through their social feeds, it might as well have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Epilogue: May 18–20

The next day, the president tweets again, and again, with grateful acknowledgements for the hard work put in by Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs, David Asman, and Gregg Jarrett.

==

==

sorta meltdown disaster on cohen reimbursment

Greenberg Traurig big bush2 donor, jack a raised $ too

5/18 dumps rudy g

==

https://www.alternet.org/rudy-giuliani-and-few-hard-questions-james-comey

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particulate holocaust:

The top-billed witness scheduled to provide testimony at the House hearing on Tuesday is a lawyer named Jeffrey Holmstead, who has has worked to block the EPA’s efforts to limit mercury pollution while representing coal companies including Duke Energy, Progress Energy, and Southern Company. Meanwhile, Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican chair of the House Science Committee who has been zealously promoting the“secret science” bill, is also in the pocket of the energy companies. Though he’s also received funding from Koch Industries and iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications), Smith’s biggest contributors are oil and gas companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Also testifying on Tuesday will be Kimberly White of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group.

This bald industry bid to subvert public health-based regulations that can cut into profit isn’t new. What’s new is that this upside-down environmental attack, in which those who benefit directly from polluting industries are policing the independent scientists who can show the harms of their products, could now succeed. Although the House passed the secret science bill in 2014 and 2015, it never made it to the Senate floor. After it passed the House in 2015, Barbara Boxer called the bill “insane,” Bernie Sanders called it “laughable,” and President Obama promised to veto it. This time, it’s not a joke. With a Republican majority in both houses and Trump in the White House, the secret science act could easily become law

The small group of lawyers and PR strategists orchestrating the secret science effort are closely tied to those attacking the EPA from within. All have connections to either big tobacco, oil, or both — and almost all have been affiliated with a small, right-wing group called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. It’s interesting that E&E should fixate on transparency since the group has gone to great lengths to conceal its donors. Nevertheless, public records document some of the group’s ties to big coal companies, including the now bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources, Peabody Coal, and Arch Coal.

E&E senior policy fellow Steve Milloy, a former tobacco industry attorney, has perhaps written the most — at least publicly — about the secret science strategy, both in an ebook and for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. Milloy calls Myron Ebell, who oversaw Trump’s EPA transition team, his “friend and hero.” In the late 1990s, Milloy and Ebell were both members of the American Petroleum Institute’s Global Climate Science Communications Team, which laid out the oil industry’s strategy to undermine the science of global warming. Meanwhile, three of Milloy’s colleagues from E&E are also members of the EPA landing team. Among them are David Schnare, E&E’s general counsel, who is perhaps best known for harassing Michael Mann and other environmental scientists with FOIA requests, and Amy Oliver Cooke, an energy industry think tanker who created MILF, Mothers In Love with Fracking.

[vid]:amy Oliver Cooke describes her love for fracking.

Two other E&E associates have been wrapped up in the secret science strategy for years. The first is Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at both E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is also a member of Trump’s EPA landing team. Back in the 1990s, Horner worked for Bracewell LLP, the law firm (formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani)supplying the top witness at Tuesday’s hearing. The dawning awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke was putting tobacco companies on the defensive, including Horner’s client, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In a 1996 memo, which seems to be the earliest known reference to the secret science strategy, Horner laid out a plan to fight back.

---

Trump’s Manhattan properties and business partners, including former Soviet Union-connected oligarchs, were involved in a larger international money-laundering scheme involving upward of $1 billion, according to Dutch filmmakers whose third installment in an investigative series aired on public TV in Holland Wednesday.

“We wanted to know in depth how money was transferred from Kazakhstan to the United States and how this could relate to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and Trump’s real estate,” said Sander Rietveld, director of The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump, Part III: The Multibillion-Dollar Fraud, broadcast on Zembla, a program of the VARA Broadcasting Association.

The documentary was produced based on a three-month collaborationbetween Zembla, The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)—known for the Panama Papers, and McClatchy newspaper's Washington bureau (including Kevin Hall, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Panama papers).

“We investigated hundreds of company records, court documents in the U.S., Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Belize, etc., and interviewed dozens of sources,” he said. “The result is a follow-the-money documentary revealing the connections between several people in Trump’s orbit and an alleged multibillion-dollar fraud. Also the pivotal role of the Netherlands as an offshore haven gets attention. With Dutch help, Kazakh oligarchs allegedly were able to divert and launder huge amounts of money.”

One of the international financiers profiled went to court in the Netherlands on Tuesday to stop the documentary from airing on public TV, but lost, Rietveld said: “Kazakh multimillion[aire] businessman-oligarch Ilyas Khrapunov tried to block this broadcast in court yesterday (Monday). Judge turned down his request and allowed airing documentary.”

[vid]

The filmmakers found that money taken out of Kazakhstan by energy oligarchs was used to buy some of Trump’s high-end Manhattan apartments and was also used to create the business partnership, called Bayrock, for Trump’s SoHo Tower project, said James Henry, a financial industry investigative reporter and editor at DCReport.org who worked with Rietveld’s team and appears in the documentary.

“The significant thing is they have got the Kazakh government saying that Bayrock was a money launderer for these guys,” Henry told AlterNet. “What is interesting, if [special counsel Robert] Mueller wants to take a look at this, is we have [Trump’s mob-connected business partner] Felix Sater laundering criminal money.”

U.S. laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act make it a crime to launder money tied to prior illegal acts, Henry said. The documentary, whose reporting was also developed in collaboration with McClatchy News’ Washington office, traces how investing in Trump’s Soho Tower included concealing illegal money-laundering activities. Trump did not tell other investors about any of this, as required under U.S. financial law, he said, “a continuing cover-up of money laundering.”

The program is the third installment in the series profiling Trump’s business deals with international investors that appear to have violated U.S. and foreign financial laws. The first installment focused on Trump’s Russian investors. Installment two looked at Trump family links to Kremlin-connected diamond dealers. The third installment returns to Trump’s partners in his downtown New York City project, according to its online summary.

“Will Donald Trump go down due to his dubious ties to the former Soviet Union?” Zembla's summary says, recapping the filmmakers’ previous findings. “The president seems to be getting in deeper and deeper. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating if Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the elections, is also digging into Trump’s past as a businessman. In that past, one of Donald Trump’s business partners plays a crucial role: Felix Sater, a convicted felon who has ties with the Russian mafia. Last May, Zembla disclosed how an American real estate company, run by Sater, used Dutch mailbox companies within a network, which has been suspected of laundering money. Allegedly $1.5 million had been diverted. Donald Trump developed hotels and apartment complexes with this suspicious company.”

“In the last few months Zembla received indications of a greater fraud,” it continued. “A billion-dollar fraud. And here Sater, Trump’s questionable business partner shows up, as well. The money trail leads to Kazakhstan, to real estate projects in New York and again to the Netherlands. Zembla investigates: How compromising is this case for the current president of America?”

The Dutch documentary raises questions most American TV networks have not broached, Henry said. For one, what was the role of Trump ally and ex-New York City mayorRudolph Giuliani, who represented Sater and raised money for his presidential campaign in Kazakhstan?

Another intriguing question involved others in Trump’s orbit as a real estate magnate and president. Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, was vice-chairman of a bank based on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus favored by Russian oligarchs, Henry has reported. “I’m saying, ‘Let’s see Mueller do his job,'” he said. “Here’s more leads.”

---

==

Trump's inner circle has gotten rich, really rich in some cases, thanks to foreign connections. A front-runner for secretary of state, Rudy Giuliani, came under scrutiny when he ran for president over his own foreign entanglements. In a disastrous "Meet the Press" interview, Giuliani squirmed and dodged as the late Tim Russert grilled him on ties to Qatar:

MR. RUSSERT: And here's an article that was written by The Wall Street Journal. "Giuliani could face questions about his business ties if he wins his party's nomination. The Qatar contract offers a window into the" political "potential complications. While Qatar is a U.S. ally, it has drawn scrutiny for its involvement in the U.S. effort to combat terrorism. In " '96, "the FBI went to Qatar to arrest al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, then under indictment in New York for a plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners. But Mr. Mohammad slipped away, apparently tipped off by an al-Qaeda sympathizer in the Qatari government, U.S. officials told the bipartisan" September 11th "commission. Mr. Mohammad went on to mastermind the September 11th, 2001 attacks."

Salon.com asked you this question: "Are you aware that the interior minister appointed in 2001 and reappointed this year by the emir of Qatar is Abdullah al-Thani, the former minister of Islamic affairs and a strict Wahhabi Muslim who has been identified in U.S. press and government reports as a protector of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?"

Are you?

MR. GIULIANI: Am I aware of it?

MR. RUSSERT: Yes.

MR. GIULIANI: I-I'm, I'm aware of it now.

MR. RUSSERT: Why would you do business with people who helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?

MR. GIULIANI: The reality is that Qatar is an ally of the United States. There are a significant number of American troops that are stationed in Qatar. What we did for them and do for them is security for their facilities. And this is a country that is an ally of ours in the, in the, in the Middle East to the extent that it has a very significant number of American troops stationed there.

Russert marched Giuliani through the list of shady characters with whom he and/or his law firm had done business — Hugo Chávez, a "Las Vegas developer that you worked with who had a close partnership with Hong Kong billionaire who was close to Kim Jong Il," etc.

Perhaps Giuliani, who famously recommended Bernie Kerik for homeland security (Kerik never made it and instead was convicted for corruption) and was ensnared in allegations about misuse of public money (when he was having an affair with his then-mistress, now current wife), makes it through the nomination process. Republicans seem all too ready to roll over for the new administration. But isn't Giuliani precisely the sort of character Trump and Bannon would rail against? Isn't he the model for the American operator who would get rich from dealings with America's foes?

Add in the crew of advisers who've made money off of Russian ties (e.g. Ret. Gen. Mike Flynn), and you begin to see a pattern among Trump and his closest advisers: While they dabble in conspiracy theories, give comfort to the alt-right and cozy up to the national-front parties in Europe (which are invariably pro-Vladimir Putin), their own portfolios are rife with shady connections and their views run counter to long-standing American interests. Maybe Hillary Clinton should have run against all that.

==

The documentary shows how Trump not only helped hide the identity of his mobster business partner, prompting an ongoing lawsuit accusing Trump of criminal racketeering, but also how Trump used that internal company crisis to demand more money. It goes on to show how Russian oligarchs saw Trump's properties as a way to get their money out of Russia, and describes the international financial networks that are akin to a pyramid scheme for money laundering. It also notes how the law firm of Trump's political adviser, former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani, helped set up a money-laundering account in the Netherlands used by Bayrock.

==

8/16

see main for older and lobby co

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http://www.alternet.org/giuliani-seeks-rescue-irans-money-man

nce upon a time, Rudy Giuiani was tough on Iran.

Last August, when the Obama administration returned $440 million from frozen Iranian bank accounts to Iran as part of the international deal to shutter Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Giuliani said, “I call that trading with the enemy."

Now Guiliani is defending in U.S. federal court a wealthy Turkish businessman who sought to flout U.S. and international sanctions on behalf of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Last month Giuliani joined the legal defense team of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian dual national who is under indictment for, you guessed it, trading with the enemy.

Zarrab, who is being held in New York, has pleaded not guilty to four counts of conspiring to process hundreds of millions of dollars in financial transactions for Iranian businesses or Iran’s government from 2010 to 2015.

Iran's Money Man

According to the indictment, Zarrab's staff drafted a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in 2013, praising him for “neutralizing" U.S. sanctions. The letter expressed the hope that “the efforts and cooperation of the zealous children of Islamic Iran will result in an upward increase in the progress of our dear nation in all international and financial arenas.”

Zarrab and his network of companies sold gold to the Iranians and generated phony invoices for food and medicine. The transactions enabled the Iranians to evade international sanctions and move large amounts of money in and out of the country, ostensibly for its nuclear program, according to a Turkish prosecutor’s brief reviewed by Reuters.

Zarrab was first arrested in Turkey in December 2013 and charged with bribing cabinet ministers, triggering a national scandal. Zarrab’s commercial ventures reportedly generate over $11 billion annually.

Turkish president Recep Erdogan denounced the charges as a baseless conspiracy of his rivals. He fired the police and prosecutors who brought the case. Though charges against Zarrab and 13 other defendants were dropped, three ministers in Erdogan’s government had to resign. Erdogan and his family were personally implicated in Zarrab’s operation.

With a national referendum on Erdogan's powers coming up for a vote on April 16, the Zarrab affair remains a vulnerability for the incumbent strongman. Getting the charges against Zarrab dismissed before April 16 would fortify his regime.

Giuliani for the Defense

Zarrab thought he was untouchable until his arrest at Miami International Airport on March 19, 2016 as he took his pop star wife and daughter on vacation to Disneyland.

You might think Rudy Giuliani, the Iran hawk, would support U.S. law enforcement efforts to bring Zarrab to justice and expose the mechanism Iran used to evade sanctions on its nuclear program....

==

energizer bunny of gop?

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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/13/headlines/trump_names_rudy_giuliani_to_cybersecurity_post_despite_conflicts

Donald Trump has named former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as his administration’s top cybersecurity adviser. Giuliani said Thursday he will accept the position but won’t step down as CEO of his security consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. He also plans to remain chair of the cybersecurity practice at the law firm Greenberg Traurig. Speaking to Politico on Thursday, Giuliani acknowledged that he will be connecting business associates with President Trump, but denied that presents a conflict of interest. Because Giuliani will serve as a volunteer rather than a federal employee, his position won’t be subject to federal ethics laws.

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no link

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/rudy-giuliani-cyber-security-trump.html

ASHINGTON — For a brief moment, it looked as if America’s mayor just might become America’s diplomat.

But for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the bombastic former mayor of New York City, a wild year of being one of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s most passionate surrogates did not, in the end, land him the high-profile administration job he has long coveted.

Instead, Mr. Trump announced on Thursday that he would enlist Mr. Giuliani to share his “expertise and insight as a trusted friend” on the issue of cybersecurity. Mr. Giuliani, who has spent the last 16 years as a private security consultant, will “from time to time” assemble meetings between Mr. Trump and corporate executives who face cyberthreats, the transition team said.

“We’ve let our defense fall behind,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters on Thursday during a conference call. “Our offense is way ahead of our defense.”

Mr. Giuliani put on a happy face during the call, declaring it a “great privilege” to be taking on the role.

But the announcement — almost an afterthought, coming the day after lawmakers grilled Rex W. Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, in his confirmation hearing — reflected how far Mr. Giuliani had fallen in the Trump universe.

He remains a close friend of Mr. Trump’s, according to associates. But he will not be moving to Washington, as he once hoped, and instead of having his political career rejuvenated after his failed run for president in 2008, he will continue to run his consulting firm.

From the start of Mr. Trump’s campaign, Mr. Giuliani was there: loudly defending the candidate against scandals, attacking Hillary Clinton and President Obama, lashing out at the news media, and boldly asserting that Mr. Trump would be the solution to the nation’s problems on race, terrorism, the economy, gender issues, health care and just about everything else.

At the Republican National Convention, where Mr. Trump secured his party’s nomination, Mr. Giuliani waved his arms, shouted, clenched his fists and thundered against Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent. “Hillary Clinton is for open borders,” Mr. Giuliani claimed, warning ominously of “operatives who are terrorists, who are going to come to Western Europe and here and kill us.”

It was a classic Giuliani performance that lit up the crowd in Cleveland at a high point for Mr. Trump. And months later, when the release of an “Access Hollywood” tape revealed Mr. Trump speaking graphically about assaulting women, Mr. Giuliani was one of the few people to publicly defend the candidate.

Mr. Trump rewarded that loyalty by seriously considering Mr. Giuliani for a series of posts in the administration. Transition officials informally discussed with Mr. Giuliani the positions of attorney general, secretary of homeland security, and director of national intelligence. Mr. Giuliani wanted none of them.

What he did want was secretary of state, and his decision to make that plain as day to anyone who asked might have helped scuttle his chances. Some transition officials were also concerned that Mr. Giuliani, 72, might not have the stamina for the globe-trotting job.

In the end, Mr. Giuliani removed his name from consideration in mid-December after the drawn-out public audition, shortly before Mr. Trump announced he had chosen Mr. Tillerson.

Now, the ill-defined cybersecurity post may be Mr. Giuliani’s best hope of adding some Trump administration luster to his private security business. But his previous forays into the national and international security arena have been less than a success.

After leaving the mayor’s office, he received a multimillion-dollar signing bonus to join a Houston-based law firm with oil industry connections, but spent a majority of his time working on a fast-growing international security business called Giuliani Partners.

In 2004, Mr. Giuliani pushed President George W. Bush to choose Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner and an associate at Giuliani Partners, as homeland security secretary. Mr. Kerik’s nomination was abruptly pulled after it was revealed that he had employed an unauthorized immigrant as a nanny. Mr. Giuliani’s influence with the Bush team evaporated, and Mr. Kerik was later sentenced to four years in prison on federal tax charges.

==

Trump told Fox News that former New York City mayor and failed presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani might be his choice to head up a commission to review his proposal for a temporary Muslim ban.

What You Need To Know

Giuliani has a long history of anti-Muslim comments and statements. He argued in favor of Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) idea that one way to fight terrorism is to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods,” said sexual assault in Germany proved that “these [Syrian] refugees are inherently a problem,” and praised Rep. Peter King (R-NY) for holding anti-Muslim hearings in Congress.

Speaking before Trump at a campaign rally, Giuliani said, “Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” omitting the September 11, 2001, attacks. PolitiFact rated this claim “false.”

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alec stooge BS

President-elect Trump just namedformer New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as the chair of a White House cybersecurity task force. Given the mayor’s private sector experience as chair of a law firm’s cybersecurity and privacy practice group, along with his experience as a security consultant, his selection by the president-elect is good.

Giuliani well-equipped to lead the White House on cybersecurity

BY JONATHON HAUENSCHILD, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 01/13/17 01:10 PM EST

==

http://gizmodo.com/rudy-giuliani-is-forming-a-cybersecurity-team-for-trump-1791109633

Noted Tech Genius Rudy Giuliani to Form Trump's Cybersecurity Team

mo link img

Matt Novak

Rudy Guiliani on Fox & Friends talking about the plan to form a cybersecurity team of private sector companies for the Trump administration

Silicon Valley has always had close ties with the US government. But it appears the Trump administration would like to make those ties even more explicit: This morning, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that he’s forming a new cybersecurity team for President-elect Trump, comprised of various private tech companies.

The team’s precise role in the new administration is still unclear, but the move will reportedly be formally announced later this morning.

“The President-elect decided that he wanted to bring in, on a regular basis, the people in the private sector, the corporate leaders in particular, the thought leaders, who were working on security for cyber,” Rudy Giuliani said this morning on Fox & Friends. “Because we’re so far behind.”

“It’s his belief, which I share, that a lot of the solutions are out there, we’re just not sharing them. It’s like cancer. You know, there’s cancer research going on all over the place—you’d almost wish they’d get together in one room and maybe we’d find a cure,” Giuliani said, with clearly no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

Previously, it had been assumed that Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and a billionaire with some rather strange beliefs about the world, was leading the charge in this area as a member of Trump’s transition team. (Thiel is the founder of his own company that’s deeply enmeshed in government cybersecurity contracts, Palantir.) So it’s a bit odd that Giuliani would be spearheading something like this. And as we’ve noted before, he’s not exactly the best choice.

“So the idea here is to bring together corporate leaders and their technological people. The president will meet with them on an ongoing basis as well as anybody else in the administration,” he said, explaining that he would be coordinating the new initiative.

From Google to Palantir to Oracle (which started as a CIA project), the private sector has always found deep pockets in Washington to spend on technology. But some high profile members of Silicon Valley have been rather reluctant to work with the incoming administration, given the nouveau fascistic flavor that Trump seems to give everything. This is the guy, after all, who has proposed building a registry for all Muslims.

But much like Republicans who were skeptical of Trump at first, it wouldn’t be a great shock if Silicon Valley fell in line. The heads of companies like Apple are obliged to care little about anything outside of making money. And the new administration has plenty of cash to throw their way in any number of ways.

It’s pretty clear that if the new administration wanted to build a “Muslim registry,” it wouldn’t really need to build anything new at all. They’d just need the cooperation of a few private companies that already know virtually everything about what you watch, what you buy, and where you go.

Update, 9:48am: The Transition team just sent out an official statement on the matter. As it notes, Guiliani is the head of “Greenberg Traurig and the Chairman and CEO of Giuliani Partners, an international security consulting firm.”

President-elect Trump is very pleased to announce former Mayor Rudy Giuliani will be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend concerning private sector cyber security problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector. This is a rapidly evolving field both as to intrusions and solutions and it is critically important to get timely information from all sources.

In addition, from time to time because of the changing nature of this problem, it is contemplated that the President-elect will be hosting a series of meetings with senior corporate executives from companies which have faced or are facing challenges similar to those facing the government and public entities today, such as hacking, intrusions, disruptions, manipulations, theft of data and identities, and securing information technology infrastructure.

The President-elect’s intent is to obtain experiential and anecdotal information from each executive on challenges faced by his/her company, how the company met the challenges, approaches which were productive or successful, and those which were not. The attendees may or may not change from session to session, but the specific agenda subjects will likely change because of the rapidly evolving field of cyber security, and frequent developments, both positive and negative. No consensus advice or recommendations resulting from group deliberations or interaction is expected or will be solicited.

Cyber intrusion is the fastest growing crime in the United States and much of the world. Its impact is felt from the individual citizen whose identity is stolen to the large private and government entities that have seen their confidential information seriously compromised. It is also a major threat to our national security.

As the use of modern communications and technology has moved forward at unparalleled speed the necessary defenses have lagged behind. The President-elect recognizes that this needs immediate attention and input from private sector leaders to help the government plan to make us more secure.

Mr. Giuliani was asked to initiate this process because of his long and very successful government career in law enforcement and his now sixteen years of work providing security solutions in the private sector.

Mr. Giuliani is the chairman of the global cyber security practice at Greenberg Traurig and the Chairman and CEO of Giuliani Partners, an international security consulting firm.

Matt Novaknovak@gizmodo.com@paleofuture

Matt Novak is the editor of Gizmodo's Paleofuture blog

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THREE

see BLT

rudy tag 918 congrats feck on opioids

money launder gold iran  turkey? trump tower soho Khazak?!

see g and bracewell for older, lots of coal polluters

promoted 11/9  CCA trump pal atty gen'l?

capt 920

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trump’s latest conspiracy theory seems to echo Facebook ‘antifa panic’ — and Rudy Giuliani’s BLM paranoia

Roger Sollenberger / Salon September 2, 2020

President Trump pushed a baseless and bizarre conspiracy theory on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” was sent to disrupt the Republican National Convention, a claim that appears almost identical to a rumor…

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no lnx vid twt pix

Rudy Giuliani Flew Into Ukraine On A Budget Flight. He Left On A Private Jet.

The private jet used by Giuliani is connected to some of Ukraine’s most controversial figures — and costs $3,300 per hour.

Christopher Miller

BuzzFeed Contributor

Posted on December 18, 2019

Rudy Giuliani flew to Kyiv on a budget airline when he visited earlier this month — but he left in style, on a private jet.

It was the afternoon of Dec. 4 when Giuliani flew to the Ukrainian capital from Hungary with low-cost commercial carrier WizzAir. He was there to film a three-part video series for the staunchly pro-Trump OAN channel, which framed the trip as a mission to “destroy” the Democrats’ impeachment narrative.

Flying WizzAir, which demands that customers pay for everything à la carte and forces them to fight for unassigned seats and overhead bin space, often feels like a particularly chaotic Black Friday at Best Buy.

After experiencing that, it’s no wonder Giuliani wanted to fly out of Kyiv on a private jet.

According to flight data, videos, and photographs analyzed by BuzzFeed News, and confirmed by a Giuliani associate who joined him, the former mayor of New York left on a flight from Kyiv to Vienna on the night of Dec. 6, aboard a Beechcraft Premier 1A light business aircraft with tail number T7-UTS.

That number ties the jet to ICS Aero, a company that’s registered in the tiny state of San Marino, famous for its corrupt business practices, but operates out of Kyiv. Ukrainian media have reported that the company’s owner is Alexander Rovt, a Ukrainian American. The logo of another Rovt company, IBE Trade Corp, which adorns the tails of the company’s jets, provides further evidence of Rovt’s ownership.

OAN / Via youtube.com

A screenshot from the OAN show about Ukraine.

Rovt has done business in the past with Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with ties to organized crime and the Kremlin who is currently under house arrest in Vienna and is fighting extradition to the US, where he faces federal bribery charges. While those charges are unrelated to the House impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Firtash has been at the nexus of Trump and Giuliani’s effort to undermine their enemies.

On Tuesday, prosecutors said in court that a lawyer for Firtash paid $1 million to one of Giuliani’s Ukraine campaign cohorts, Lev Parnas, and Parnas’s wife. In an interview with Reuters published on Wednesday, the Firtash lawyer, Ralph Isenegger, said he loaned the Parnases the money to purchase a home in Florida.

Parnas and another Giuliani associate, Igor Fruman, have been charged with funneling illegal contributions to a member of Congress, whose help they sought during their back-channel Ukraine campaign to remove former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch from her post in Kyiv.

Giuliani’s use of the private jet raises questions about how he is funding his back-channel Ukraine campaign to dig up dirt on Trump’s political rivals. And it is likely to come under scrutiny from congressional Democrats who back Trump’s impeachment and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who are reportedly investigating whether Giuliani broke lobbying laws in conducting his back-channel Ukraine campaign, including his efforts to undermine Yovanovitch, who was recalled in April.

Neither Giuliani nor his spokesperson responded to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comments. Rovt didn’t respond to an emailed request, nor did the communications offices of ICS Aero and OAN.

Rovt, a towering New York real estate investor with Ukrainian roots, made his billions in producing and trading fertilizer. In 2011, he sold his overseas fertilizer assets to Firtash in a deal that involved a Russian chemical conglomerate, according to Bloomberg.

But Rovt appears to have retained close ties to powerful elites in Ukraine. In 2016, then-president Petro Poroshenko awarded him the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for distinguished services to the state and the people of Ukraine, according to a decree published on the presidential website.

Rovt, a pro-Trumper, reportedly tried to donate $10,000 to the president’s campaign on Election Day but had all but the legal $2,700 maximum returned. He’s also connected to a $3.5 million mortgage loan to former Trump campaign chair and convicted financial fraudster Paul Manafort, through a real estate investment firm founded by a former Trump business partner.

Joining Giuliani was his spokesperson Allen, OAN host Chanel Rion, an OAN camera operator, and a former Ukrainian diplomat by the name of Andriy Telizhenkowhom Trumpworld has held up as a “whistleblower” of its own.

In Kyiv, the group met with several controversial Ukrainian political figures, including former prosecutors general Viktor Shokin and Yuriy Lutsenko, both of whom have peddled disinformation to Giuliani for months. Giuliani’s visit sent Kyiv into a frenzy, with Zelensky’s office working hard to avoid and ignore the former New York mayor and journalists running around trying to find him.

Shortly after the visit, OAN released video footage of Giuliani’s trip. BuzzFeed News was able to identify the jet he flew out on by matching the one in the OAN video and a tweet from Allen when the group was on board with publicly available photographs that showed similar stripes, logos, and interior. Telizhenko then confirmed the plane information by phone from Kyiv.

Asked how the plane was booked for the group, Telizhenko said: “We had a company that we use book the flight and that’s it. The guy you’re talking about [Rovt], I didn’t even know who owned the plane. We got it through a third company. I heard about that guy before and he has a lot of planes all over Europe, so that’s why it’s convenient."

Telizhenko said that Vienna was the chosen destination because its airport offered more flight options to Washington than the alternative offered by the charter company, Warsaw.

“It wasn’t Vienna because it was Vienna,” Telizhenko said when asked if the destination had anything to do with possibly meeting Firtash in the Austrian capital. “It was a transfer. The next morning [Giuliani] flew out [to the US]. I can guarantee you that no meetings of that kind [with Firtash] happened.”

“Plus it’s not expensive because it was a group of people with bags and everything else," he added. "It was the same price to use a charter as to buy tickets for everybody [on a commercial flight only a few hours in advance].”

The Beechcraft appears to have been booked through VipSky, a Kyiv-based charter company. Its website lists the Beechcraft Premier 1A as costing $3,300 per hour.

While it’s not clear who paid for the flight, Telizhenko said he believed that “Mr. Giuliani paid for [the flight] himself.”

“If OAN reimbursed him or not, I don’t know. But I know he paid for himself and that’s it,” he added.

The jet departed from Kyiv at about 12 a.m. local time and landed in Vienna at 12:56 a.m. local time, according to publicly available flight trackers. That would mean the flight lasted around two hours, for a cost of at least $6,600.

City Of Kharkiv / Via city.kharkov.ua

Giuliani steps off a plane adorned with the IBE Trade logo in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2017.

This appears to be the second time Giuliani has used a jet owned by Rovt’s ICS Aero. Giuliani flew on another one adorned with the IBE Trade logo from London to the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in 2017, flight data and photographs published by the city of Kharkiv show. Giuliani visited Kharkiv to consult with the city on security issues, according to a press release at the time.

Flying the luxurious private skies is indicative of the way Ukraine’s elite travel to and from Western Europe. ICS Aero planes adorned with Rovt’s IBE Trade logo have been used by several prominent Ukrainian figures, including former president Poroshenko, his scandal-plagued business partner, and a former Ukrainian lawmaker who once boasted about having his own private militia to assassinate an unarmed pro-Russian separatist.

Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

Contact Christopher Miller at christopher.miller@buzzfeed.com.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/19/journalists-blast-one-america-news-series-giuliani-087893

MICHAEL CALDERONE

12/19/2019

Upstart conservative network One America News’ decision to turn over three hours this week to Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy theories gleaned from his trip to Ukraine found a receptive audience in the White House — less so in major newsrooms and TV studios.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Wednesday that Giuliani brought back “dirt of questionable credibility” from his trip with a reporter from a “far-right fringe cable channel.” On MSNBC, national security correspondent Ken Dilanian said Giuliani floated a “bogus conspiracy theory” about Joe Biden on OAN, a network “which makes Fox News look like PBS.” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake labeled the OAN series “a stunning piece of propaganda."

charles Herring, president of One America News, shot back in an email to POLITICO. “We recognize that some ‘media’ outlets won’t acknowledge proven facts and won’t do their own time consuming and costly investigate work if the facts don’t fit their narrative,” he wrote. “This is simply a part of our media landscape today.”

But for much of the media world, OAN’s decision to give Giuliani a direct role in preparing its Ukraine report presents a troubling ethical development in the media landscape. Where once opinion shows began supplanting traditional news, now openly partisan content — presented largely unfiltered by the president’s personal attorney — is seeking to supplant content that’s opinionated but still independent.

Trump has celebrated OAN’s willingness to take his largely unfiltered line, retweeting several clips from the three-part OAN series this week in making his public case against impeachment. That’s come as he continues to carp at Fox News over its polling and bookings and suggested that only its “pro Trump Fox shows do well.”

Trump has displayed no similar frustrations with OAN, which promised in the three-hour series to dismantle House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff’s impeachment case, and, like the president, framed the proceedings as a hoax. [some gop rep at rnc called it "illegal"?] But while the series features many of the storytelling attributes of a news documentary, media experts say it departs from traditional journalism in giving such a prominent role to the president’s personal attorney.

“I think this completely crosses a line,” said professor Kathleen Culver, director for journalism ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“I would define one of the central characteristics of journalism as independence and here there is no independence. It is taking a source and bringing that source into the actual information gathering,” she said. “By making Giuliani a central figure in the gathering of information,” she added, “I think they’ve moved out of the realm of journalism and into the realm of advocacy."

mark Lukasiewicz, dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, said “the advocate is in the driver’s seat” in the OAN series, with Giuliani bringing forth documents on screen and helping conduct interviews. “The role typically played by an investigative journalist is played by Rudy Giuliani,” he said.

Herring did not respond directly to a question about about OAN’s independence with regard to Giuliani’s involvement in the project. But OAN correspondent Chanel Rion told viewers why her team took Trump’s attorney along to Ukraine and Budapest.

“His hundreds of hours and months of research into what he calls the great political scandal of our time made him the only person to go with us on this trip,” she said of Giuliani. Rion told viewers that their findings would “both astound and enrage” and offer a side kept from viewers by a “complacent media.”

The Herring family, which made a fortune printing circuit boards, is a fairly new entrant to the media business. The company launched lifestyle channel Wealth TV, later renamed AWE, in 2004, and created One America News in 2013. The San Diego-based network, which is reportedly available in about 35 million homes — compared with at least 90 million for Fox News — generally covers the major headlines of the day without excessive punditry and turns to conservative hosts at night.

But OAN's pro-Trump leanings became apparent during the 2016 election, as it turned to his rallies live, and have continued into the presidency. The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reported in a 2017 profile of OAN that CEO and founder Robert Herring “directed his channel to push Trump’s candidacy” and “steer away from the new president’s troubles.”

Charles Herring disputed the notion that his father takes such a heavy hand in news coverage. “News anchors are not allowed to express opinions,” he told the Post. “They simply deliver the news and we leave it up to the viewers to decide. It’s not our family’s mission to determine the news.”

On Twitter, Robert Herring’s views are clear. “Our ratings are going up because we treat you like you are the President of the United States,” Herring responded to Trump when touting OAN’s ratings. “Your ratings are going up because you are doing a great job. Let’s keep it up!”

As Trump visited San Diego in September, Herring pointed out to the president that OAN “ran a 30-minute special report detailing the accomplishments you have made."

The network’s official Twitter account, however, once called “bullshit” when Trump didn’t mention OAN among his media boosters. “President Trump recently gave a speech, thanking his supporters in the media. Not a single mention of One America News — one of his GREATEST supporters,” read the tweet, which, according to a Guardian report, was sent by Robert Herring. Earlier this month, he tweeted: “If you are upset about the Democrats trying to impeach President Trump, let everyone know by putting an @OANN sticker on your car!”

Trump has returned the affection. He tweeted in October that OAN “is appreciated by many people trying so hard to find a new, consistent and powerful VOICE!” and last month lauded the network for “seeking the facts and the truth.” Trump retweeted at least five clips from the OAN series this past week.

Charles Herring told POLITICO that OAN is “very appreciative of all our viewers and the support and encouragement they extend to us via comments on our feedback page and tweets/retweets — including from a special viewer in the White House.”

The testimony of current and former officials, along with Trump’s own words, has shown that he urged Ukraine’s president to launch investigations into the Bidens and a 2016 election conspiracy theory as the U.S. withheld aid to Ukraine. The allegations from an unnamed whistleblower, which ignited the scandal, have been largely confirmed, as PolitiFact concluded Monday in giving Trump its “Lie of the Year” award.

Rion told viewers OAN was holding "our own hearing" where they'd be the jury. The OAN team and Giuliani, she said, will present a side “that not only destroys Adam Schiff’s case for impeachment, but uncovers what may be one of the greatest cover-ups of our time."

in the series, Giuliani makes the unsubstantiated allegation that Biden committed “bribery” in calling for the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin because his son Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Biden’s request at the time was the view of the Obama administration, which, like several Western nations and international organizations, saw Shokin as not aggressively prosecuting corruption cases.

rion and Giuliani traveled abroad to interview Shokin, as well as Yuriy Lutsenko, whom The New Yorker dubbed in an extensive profile this week as a key Giuliani contact. They also met in a studio with Ukrainian “witnesses” alleging corruption involving Democrats. (The Daily Beast’s Anna Nemtsova wrote the OAN investigation features “some of Kyiv’s most dubious characters”).

Herring said over email that “One America News is seeking the truth regarding Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election” and that “the best way to determine what happened in Ukraine is via interviews with first hand witnesses and a thorough review of the support documentation.” He suggested that “there is an effort to keep the ‘lid on the jar’ regarding corruption that traces back to the United States.”

“We appreciate the efforts by others to shed light on the facts, including first hand witnesses, other investigative reporters and media outlets, and politicians,” he added.

One prominent senator indicated Sunday that he’s interested in hearing about Giuliani’s Ukraine trip. On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Lindsey Graham said, "Rudy, if you want to come and tell us what you found I'd be glad to talk to you.”

FILED UNDER: MEDIA, RUDY GIULIANI, UKRAINE, NEWS ON TRUMP IMPEACHMENT

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-rudy-giuliani-became-the-shadow-secretary-of-state-with-shady-ties-sprawling-far-beyond-ukraine/

no lnx

How Rudy Giuliani became the shadow secretary of state — with shady ties sprawling far beyond Ukraine

President Donald J. Trump recognizes former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani prior to signing H.R. 1327; an act to permanently authorize the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Monday, July 29, 2019, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Bob Dreyfuss / TomDispatch March 6, 2020

Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.

Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.

That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.

Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.

Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.

During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)

As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.

You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also endorse John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)

Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.

In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”

At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.

To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.

How to Become a Shadow Secretary of State

Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.

Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract in Qatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government.

Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project. Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.

The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”

In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.

Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.

And Then There Was Ukraine

It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.

Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.

The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)

Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”

According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.

As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”

And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:

“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.

“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”

Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy charges and, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”

Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular, is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Bob Dreyfuss

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/giuliani-trump-corruption/

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Rudy Giuliani

Donald Trump

Corruption

Giuliani and Trump: Bound by Corruption From the Beginning?

To understand how the onetime odd couple became partners in political crime, you have to go back to 1980s New York and a tale of money laundering, mortgage fraud, and, yes, an election.

By Tom Robbins

October 11, 2019

Then-President-elect Donald Trump poses with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in New Jersey on November 20, 2016. (AP / Carolyn Kaster, File)

It is a musty notion from a bygone era, but once upon a time the idea that Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump could be a tag team in search of political dirt on common enemies was as foreign as the Ukrainian soil they now till.

In the New York of the 1980s, when both rose to prominence, they were at opposite poles of the civic landscape.

One was a swaggering crime-buster taking down Mafia bosses, Wall Street predators, and corrupt politicians. The other was a rules-bending real estate tycoon, a shiny emblem of the age of Greed Is Good, bent on success at any cost.

Yet both reveled in public brazenness. Giuliani walked stockbrokers off the trading floor in handcuffs. Trump ripped down precious landmarks to make way for his buildings. Both were also fluent in the language spoken among the elite of New York deal-makers, where favors are traded, punches are pulled, and the public interest always finishes a dismal last.

And as laughingly obvious as it is today, those of us back then who cheered on the prosecutor, while raking the muck on the developer, eventually learned the hard way that these two were cut from the same cloth, destined for a partnership far more enduring than their many marriages.

The first glimmerings of that lesson surfaced one night in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village as Jack Newfield, the legendary investigative digger, and I dined with a federal agent named Tony Lombardi.

Although technically employed by the Internal Revenue Service, Lombardi’s only apparent duties were to serve as the trusted special investigator for Giuliani, then the hard-charging United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

While Giuliani had at his beck and call a squad of FBI agents and other investigators, he preferred Lombardi for sensitive assignments. It was Lombardi, a dapper man given to double-breasted suits and pocket hankies, who was asked to look afte the unstable daughter of a judge facing corruption charges, who had been persuaded to provide testimony for the prosecution against her own mother. It was Lombardi who was detailed to work on an investigation into city contracts granted to a health consultant rumored to have been the lover of Mayor Ed Koch, against whom Giuliani was then pondering a campaign.

Along with a bevy of other local reporters, we knew that Tony Lombardi was, as our friend and Village Voice colleague Wayne Barrett dubbed him, “the eyes, ears and mouth of Rudy Giuliani.”

That night, amid the opening pleasantries, Lombardi shot the French cuffs from his suit jacket, leaned forward on the table, and announced: “I have another year or so to go with the department, and then I’m going to be head of security for Donald.”

No last name was needed to explain this promising exit plan from public service. This was 1988, and Donald Trump had forced himself into public consciousness like the car alarms that blared mercilessly without stop. He had already put his name on a soaring tower in midtown, repaired an ailing city skating rink in Central Park, launched casinos in Atlantic City, and publicly toyed with the idea of running for president.

Lombardi’s comment was decidedly off-kilter with what was on the menu that evening. Two years earlier, Giuliani had won convictions against a ring of scoundrels who had been happily looting city coffers under the nose of the Koch administration. Most prominent among his scalps was that of Stanley Friedman, the goateed Democratic Party chieftain from the Bronx who had been nailed while attempting a flimflam worth millions on the city’s transportation department.

A former deputy mayor, Friedman had been a partner in the law firm of Roy Cohn: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Iago, a master of the legal dark arts, and lawyer to some of the biggest mobsters Giuliani was simultaneously pursuing. While Friedman had worked from the top floor of Cohn’s East Side townhouse and law office, Cohn had been on the ground floor offering lessons in the use of bluster, bravado, and outright lies to his prize client and pupil, Donald Trump.

If Rudy Giuliani was the anti-corruption scourge of New York, Cohn’s budding protégé should have been a likely suspect, even a prized quarry.

At the table, Lombardi offered no details about how his richly rewarding job offer had arisen. In the course of business, he said, he had come to know Trump. The two had grown friendly. The discussion then moved on to more pressing matters.

It wasn’t until several years later, thanks to the steady drilling of Barrett and fellow Voice reporter William Bastone, that we learned the back story: At the time of our meeting, Lombardi had recently finished a quiet inquiry on behalf of his boss into allegations that organized crime figures had laundered hefty sums of cash as they bought apartments in Trump Tower, the flagship of the developer’s then-growing empire.

The charge had come froma mob-tied financial consultant facing a federal tax fraud indictment looking to help himself by offering to tell a far more interesting story. The consultant said he had helped the underworld figures—most notoriously, Robert Hopkins, a numbers kingpin working for the Luchese crime family—buy the apartments at Trump’s complex with fraudulent mortgages. The developer himself, the consultant alleged, had been present as suitcases of cash had changed hands at Hopkins’s closing.

The purchase landed Hopkins two apartments worth $2 million on the upper floors of Trump Tower. That’s where the Manhattan DA found him when he was arrested in 1986, charged with orchestrating a mob hit. Hopkins’s defense lawyer? Another partner of Roy Cohn.

This was potentially rich Giuliani territory: the Mafia, bank fraud, and a possibly complicit high-profile figure. But the investigation ended before it even began. Instead of building a case by working his way through knowledgeable witnesses and records, Lombardi went straight to Trump himself with the allegation. He was quickly won over. As the agent later told Barrett in a 1993 Voice story about the episode, he was so impressed with Trump’s openness and honesty that he decided there was nothing to investigate. “The guy met me without an attorney,” Lombardi said. “He answered all my questions. There was never any hesitation.”

All of this, Lombardi insisted, was done with the approval of higher-ups at the US Attorney’s office. “[E]veryone that should have known about this thing knew,” he said.

There was another possible reason for the sudden lack of prosecutorial interest. That spring, Trump began touting Giuliani as a would-be mayor, claiming he could raise $2 million in a half hour if the US Attorney decided to run.

Of course, that was just Trump spin. He did briefly back Giuliani and raised a few thousand for his failed 1989 race, but by 1993 Trump was hedging his bets, hoping for approvals by David Dinkins, the sitting mayor, for his pending projects.

Things didn’t work out for Tony Lombardi in the end. An internal investigation by the IRS faulted him for engaging in prohibited fundraising for Giuliani and abusing his authority with sources. He wound up jilted by Trump, who gave the security job to someone else, and by Giuliani, who never offered him even a nominal post in City Hall. Lombardi died in 2015.

Giuliani now works feverishly on behalf of the man he once investigated. Eyes bulging, waving his phone with McCarthy-like flair as he insists it holds all the damning information he has discovered, he thunders away on the talk shows. Once-loyal fans say they hardly recognize that man. But he’s not the one who has changed. He is the same zealous, win-at-any-cost inquisitor he always was, a genuine “Made in New York” schemer. Just like his client.

Tom Robbins has been investigative journalist in residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY since February 2011. He has been a columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and The New York Observer.

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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/rudy-giuliani-southern-district-us-attorney/

gIULIANI SECURED a dubious distinction earlier this month when he became the second known ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York to face investigation by his former office.

The news followed a succession of incriminating allegations against Giuliani. The sources of these leaks are not public, but the information behind them comes from the U.S. Attorney’s office, where Giuliani himself introduced the media leak as one of the most devastating tools in a prosecutor’s arsenal.

The fact that Giuliani — who has advocated a distinct brand of lawlessness as President Donald Trump’s TV lawyer — merits the attention of federal investigators only emphasizes the through-the-looking-glass quality of Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice. The only other Southern District U.S. Attorney to be implicated in a potential crime by his own office was Morton S. Robson, who was accused of receiving a bribe from Roy Cohn to drop a case. (The prosecutor was never charged and Cohn was acquitted.)

More recently, New York City’s most famous former mayor has provided the president legal advocacy that suggests a contempt for the laws he once enforced. There was the time he said that alleged campaign finance violations are “not a big crime” because “nobody got robbed. Nobody got killed.” Or when he confessed Trump’s role in a conspiracy that involved “funneling” $130,000 through a law firm to pay off Stormy Daniels, the porn star with whom Trump allegedly had an affair. Or the times he floated pardons for Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.

Indeed, Giuliani’s entire post-government life has provided a case study in ethical adventurism, if not actual criminal conduct. Among the many clients for whom he did political consulting was Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, whose father, a previous Peruvian president, was convicted of ordering the extrajudicial execution of 15 people. Fujimori lost both her campaigns for the presidency; she was named in the Panama Papers as a client of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the document leak, and accused of funding her political career through money laundering and bribes.

Giuliani also consulted for Aleksandar Vucic, a mayoral candidate in Belgrade, Serbia, who once served as the information minister to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. Vucic eventually won the Serbian presidency and the Trump White House sent a delegation to attend his inauguration. Last year, Vucic’s political party opened an office on the site of Staro Sajmiste, a concentration and extermination camp run by the Nazis during their World War II occupation of Belgrade. (In 1989, a Holocaust survivor charged by Giuliani’s prosecutors was placed opposite a blackboard inside the U.S. Attorney’s office with the slogan “arbeit macht frei.” The man was acquitted, and the judge in the case did not find evidence of Giuliani’s involvement in what the suspect described as an effort to pressure him to cooperate with federal investigators.)

Giuliani’s post-government work eventually brought him into direct conflict with Southern District prosecutors when he represented Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader charged with evading U.S. sanctions. The case raised immediate diplomatic issues, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressing both the Obama and Trump administrations to release Zarrab. Giuliani did not intend to appear for his client at trial, according to his co-counsel; his role was to pursue an outside resolution to the case. That ultimately involved Trump seeking to enlist then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to ask the Justice Department to drop charges against Zarrab, as Bloomberg first reported last week. To break that down: Giuliani sought help for a Turkish-backed client accused of violating Iranian sanctions from a president who has a one-word policy for dealing with Tehran: sanctions. In the end, Zarrab pleaded guilty. After Erdogan embarrassed Trump last week by attacking Kurdish-held northern Syria, the Southern District announced new charges against a Turkish state-owned bank connected to the gold trader.

But it was Giuliani’s work in Ukraine that crossed whatever invisible line had existed between the former U.S. attorney and federal investigators in the Southern District and placed him at the center of the House impeachment inquiry. The rapidly unspooling narrative connects Giuliani to efforts to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, as well as, oust former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a career diplomat. Yovanovitch testified before the House earlier this month that “individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

She was presumably referring to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were recently indicted on the very same charges that Giuliani once called “not a big crime”: campaign finance violations stemming from their alleged efforts to funnel foreign cash into U.S. campaign coffers. Giuliani acknowledged receiving $500,000 in payments from a company called Fraud Guarantee, where Parnas serves as CEO. Federal investigators have also subpoenaed former Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, for information related to his involvement with Giuliani. Sessions reportedly received a campaign contribution from the Ukrainians and shortly after meeting the men, sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling for Yovanovitch to be removed from her post. Giuliani, for his part, defied a subpoena from House investigators working the impeachment inquiry.

The volume and speed of the revelations about Giuliani can be daunting to follow. Yet it is worth considering the source. In the Southern District, authorized releases of information on the target of a criminal investigation make for reliable plot points in high-profile cases. It is somewhat ironic that Giuliani now finds himself on the opposite end of such leaks. When he served as Manhattan’s top prosecutor, he changed the tight-lipped culture of the office to one that actively shapes the narrative surrounding investigations. He made such frequent use of fortuitous leaks that judges repeatedly admonished him for talking to the media. As U.S. attorney, Giuliani’s use of the media soured the environment to such an extent that the judge overseeing Giuliani’s final prosecution — of Bronx Democratic boss Stanley Friedman and others as part of a bribery and fraud scandal involving the Parking Violations Bureau — moved the trial to New Haven because of the publicity surrounding it. When former FBI Director James Comey worked under Giuliani as a junior prosecutor in the 1990s, he learned quickly that “the most dangerous place in New York is between Rudy and a microphone.”

Giuliani’s reliance on leaks didn’t stop when he left the Justice Department. In the days leading up to the 2016 election, he relied on leaks originating from the FBI that agents had discovered emails relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Those leaks prompted an inquiry by the Justice Department inspector general.

But the leaks surrounding Giuliani’s conduct have so far prompted an incurious response. There is little discussion of their origins or what’s driving them. Former Southern District prosecutors have achieved something of regulatory capture on cable news, podcasts, and in print. Networks rely on these former civil servants to interpret each revelation emanating from their former office’s work in real time. These are some of the same pundits whose laudatory and uncritical appraisal of special counsel Robert Mueller’s capabilities as a federal prosecutor failed to probe the limits of his authority under Justice Department policy, his decision not to depose the president, or the shortcomings of his performance before Congress.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District now faces challenges to be seen as impartial. Many of the line prosecutors in the office served under Preet Bharara, who has emerged as a vocal critic of both Trump and Giuliani. And the office won a conviction against Michael Cohen, demonstrating that one way to adhere to Justice Department policy against charging a sitting president is by pursuing his attorney instead. The office recently filed — and lost — a motion to protect Trump’s tax returns from a state subpoena. Many Southern District alumni expressed outrage, saying that the decision to do so marked a fatal breach of the office’s storied independence. But if you read the fine print, you saw that no attorneys from the Southern District signed the filing.

Federal judges in the Southern District may not fare much better when it comes to being viewed as impartial with regard to Giuliani. When Comey briefly held Giuliani’s job as U.S. attorney, he found that “Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. Attorney’s office.”

If the investigation into Giuliani does take on an outwardly political character, he may ultimately bear historical responsibility for politicizing the prosecutorial culture in the Southern District. The capstone of his tenure as a federal prosecutor was a targeted attack on corruption in the city’s Democratic machine, which many saw as the overture to his political career. Neither Giuliani nor the U.S. Attorney’s office responded to requests for comment.

Giuliani closed his final trial with an appeal to the jury that resonates today.

“The people who know best about what was going on inside a cesspool of corruption like this one are the people who were wallowing in it,” he said. “If you don’t get your evidence from them, it keeps going on and on and on, and this kind of corruption will never end.”

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rudy-giuliani-paul-manafort-ukraine-black-ledger-894242/

Rolling Stone

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OCTOBER 3, 2019

Who Would Be the Worst Possible Person to Help You Avoid Ukraine-Related Crimes?

Rudy Giuliani is consulting with Paul Manafort. What could go wrong?

By RYAN BORT

Rudy Giuliani has consulted with Paul Manafort “several times” in recent months as he quests to smear Joe Biden and boost a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine and Democrats — not Russia — were the ones who did the real malfeasance ahead of the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

This isn’t exactly a great look for Trump’s personal lawyer-turned-global conspiracy theory propagator, as Manafort is currently in prison for a smorgasbord of financial crimes, many related to his dealings in Ukraine. So why exactly was Rudy seeking guidance from Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager? It’s complicated.

Giuliani has been in touch with Trump’s former campaign manager (through a lawyer) because of their shared interest in discrediting the Mueller investigation, which led to Manafort’s imprisonment, and the role a controversial “black ledger” could play in proving the probe was a hoax — just as Trump, Hannity, and the rest of the GOP’s crackpot crew has been saying all along.

The ledger, which was obtained by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, contained evidence of Manafort receiving over $12 million in off-the-books payments from the political party of Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-friendly former Ukrainian president whom Manafort helped get elected. Manafort resigned as Trump’s campaign manager after the existence of the ledger was reported by the New York Times in August 2016, and now Giuliani is out to prove the ledger was fraudulent and part of a joint effort by Ukraine and the Democratic Party to to sink Trump’s campaign.

[RELATED

Lev Parnas arrives to court in New York, . Parnas and Igor Fruman, close associates to U.S. President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, were arrested last month at an airport outside Washington while trying to board a flight to Europe with one-way tickets. They were later indicted by federal prosecutors on charges of conspiracy, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission and falsification of recordsTrump Impeachment, New York, USA - 02 Dec 2019

New Impeachment Evidence: 'The Biden Case Will Be Investigated'

Top Democrats React to Unredacted Emails: 'What Else Is Trump Hiding?']

Manafort is, not surprisingly, happy to offer his assistance. “I said, ‘Was there really a black book? If there wasn’t, I really need to know. Please tell him I’ve got to know,’” Giuliani told the Post of his conversations with Manafort’s lawyer. “He came back and said there wasn’t a black book.”

The only problem is that there is no actual evidence the ledger is fraudulent. If there was, as the Post points out, it probably would have been brought up by Manafort’s defense team when he was on trial last year, and before he admitted to receiving $60 million in payments for his work in Ukraine, $30 million of which he laundered. As Ukrainian journalist Serhiy Leschenko, who played a central role in exposing the ledger, wrote for the Post in September, the idea the ledger is fake is nothing more than a scam meant to muddy the waters and raise suspicion. “Giuliani’s entire approach is built on disinformation and the manipulation of facts,” he wrote. “Giuliani has developed a conspiracy theory in which he depicts my revelations about Manafort as an intervention in the 2016 U.S. election in favor of the Democratic Party.”

Sadly, Giuliani’s efforts have indeed raised suspicion in some Senate Republicans, who have added some kindling to the conspiracy theory in the form of a congressional inquiry. “Ukrainian efforts, abetted by a U.S. political party, to interfere in the 2016 election should not be ignored,” wrote Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) of their new investigation into the matter. “Such allegations of corruption deserve due scrutiny, and the American people have a right to know when foreign forces attempt to undermine our democratic processes,” the senators wrote in the letter.

In other words, this conspiracy theory probably isn’t going away anytime soon. After all, Republicans don’t have much left to cling onto as they try to position themselves on the side of the president.

Despite having no official government role, Giuliani has emerged as one of the central figures in the scandal surrounding Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into interfering in the 2020 election. He’s long been in contact with a host of shadowy Ukrainian figures, and his name was mentioned several times in both the whistleblower complaint and the president’s July 25th call to Ukrainian President Zelensky. “Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy,” Trump told Zelensky, according to a partial readout of the call released by the White House. “If you could speak to him that would be great.”

On Monday, House Democrats subpoenaed Giuliani for documents related to his efforts in Ukraine, going back to early 2017. “Our inquiry includes an investigation of credible allegations that you acted as an agent of the president in a scheme to advance his personal political interests by abusing the power of the office of the president,” Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to the former mayor.

Giuliani likened the request to McCarthyism. “We’re getting really close to, if we haven’t met, the standard of the McCarthy hearings where nobody seems to care about things like attorney-client privilege,” he told the Times. Though Giuliani has not said explicitly that he won’t comply with the subpoena, it doesn’t appear he’s going to. On Tuesday, he hired former Watergate prosecutor Jon Sale to represent him.

In This Article: Paul Manafort, Rudy Giuliani, Ukraine

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/damning-parnas-docs-are-what-trump-has-been-afraid-of-and-demolish-his-3-key-impeachment-defenses-former-acting-solicitor-general

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‘Damning’ Parnas docs are ‘what Trump has been afraid of’ — and demolish his 3 key impeachment defenses: former acting solicitor general

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story January 15, 2020

In a column for the Washington Post, ex-acting solicitor general Neil Katyal and former Justice Department official Joshua A. Geltzer, stated that the Tuesday afternoon document dump of notes and texts by Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas is exactly what President Donald Trump worried might happen if he didn’t get his Senate impeachment trial wrapped up as soon as possible.

“Americans who have been wondering why President Trump has taken the extraordinary step of trying to block every document from being released to Congress in his impeachment need wonder no longer. The new documents released Tuesday evening by the House Intelligence Committee were devastating to Trump’s continuing — if shifting — defense of his Ukraine extortion scandal, just days before his impeachment trial is likely to begin in the Senate,” the two lawyers wrote. “These new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging.”

As the New York Times reported, “One of the new documents shows Mr. Giuliani saying that he had Mr. Trump’s blessing to seek a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president-elect, last spring, potential new evidence on the eve of the president’s impeachment trial,” adding that “In a separate series of cryptic text messages, Mr. Parnas communicated with another man who appeared to be monitoring the movements of [Ukraine ambassador] Ms. Yovanovitch. The texts, exchanged in March on WhatsApp, indicated that the second man, Robert F. Hyde, was in touch with people in Ukraine who were watching Ms. Yovanovitch.”

According to Katyal and Geltzer, “The documents released Tuesday now show what Trump has been so afraid of. For starters, they prove that Trump’s already-eyebrow-raising claim to have been fighting corruption in Ukraine was bogus. Notes taken by Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas — now facing federal criminal charges — show what his and Giuliani’s mission was when they got in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘get Zalensky [sic] to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.’”

“One of those documents shows just how important it might be to have such witnesses testify before the Senate. The document is a letter from Giuliani to Zelensky when he was Ukraine’s president-elect. It begins: ‘I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump. Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.’ The letter then requested a meeting with Zelensky.” they wrote. “This letter is a devastating indication of what’s been clear to many all along: that Trump’s pursuit of an announcement that Ukraine was looking into Biden was an abuse of his public office for personal gain. That’s what this letter sure seems to be saying. And it makes clear that what was afoot had nothing to do with law enforcement or Biden’s corruption — it wasn’t a request from the official ‘President of the United States’ but rather one from a ‘private citizen.’”

“It’s so damning to Trump that we can foresee the president claiming during impeachment that Giuliani was lying — back then, and even still today. That’s where Senate testimony can prove crucial,” they continued. “All told, the documents help to explain Trump’s consistent push to bury the evidence against himself. Every week, it becomes clearer why Trump has withheld documents from Congress, blocked executive branch officials and even private citizens from testifying before Congress, and overall, well, obstructed Congress, as the second article of impeachment rightly describes it. It’s because Trump is a man with something to hide. Let’s see what else he’s hiding — in front of the Senate next week, in a good, old-fashioned American trial for all to see.”

You can read the whole piece here.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/damning-parnas-docs-are-what-trump-has-been-afraid-of-and-demolish-his-3-key-impeachment-defenses-former-acting-solicitor-general

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/here-are-7-stunning-new-pieces-of-impeachment-evidence-just-released-by-the-house/

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Here are 7 stunning new pieces of impeachment evidence just released by the House

Written by Cody Fenwick January 14, 2020

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, dropped a new slate of deeply revealing evidence Tuesday night in the impeachment case against President Donald Trump.

Though the evidence doesn’t change the basic narrative of the case against Trump — that he and a group of his cronies used the administration in various ways to put pressure on Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals as the 2020 campaign heated up — it adds more color and detail to the story and should make the president’s culpability in a disturbing plot even harder for his Republican allies to deny.

Here are seven stunning new facts the new evidence revealed:

  1. Rudy Giuliani told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he’s working with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.”

Writing to Zelensky on May 10, when Giuliani was trying to plan a trip to Ukraine to pressure the country into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, the president’s lawyer wrote that he is acting with Trump’s “knowledge and consent.” This claim fundamentally undercuts the argument some defenders of the president have been inclined to make that Giuliani was operating as a rogue agent.

  1. In the same letter, Giuliani says he is acting in his “capacity as personal counsel to President Trump.”

“I am private counsel to President Donald J. Trump,” Giuliani wrote. “Just to be precise, I represent him as a private citizen, not as President of the United States.”

This confirms, as many have argued repeatedly, that Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine were clearly for Trump’s personal benefit, not the country’s. That’s part of the reason why it was so grossly wrong, and indeed impeachable, for him to use the powers of his office to induce Ukraine to announce an investigation into Biden and other political opponents.

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

Replying to @kyledcheney

The House released 50 pages of the evidence here, but it’s just a portion of the materials: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-hpsci_transmittal_letter_to_hjc_-new_evidence_attachment.pdf …https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20200114_-_parnas_excerpts_translated_slide_deck.pdf …

Kyle Cheney

@kyledcheney

AMONG THE EVIDENCE: A letter from Giuliani to Zelensky seeking a May meeting which he says has Trump's "knowledge and consent."

  1. Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow gave John Dowd, another attorney, permission from the president to defend Igor Furman and Lev Parnas, two of Giuliani’s associates who have been indicted on campaign finance charges, in part, for their Ukraine-related work.

Trump has claimed he doesn’t know who Furman and Parnas are, even though he has appeared in pictures with them. This evidence makes it harder to believe this is true and raises more questions about why he was trying to conceal his dealings with them.

  1. Parnas wrote notes on Ritz-Carlton stationery suggesting he was directly involved with the Ukraine scheme.

“get Zalensky [sic] to Annonce [sic] that the Biden case will Be Investigated,” he wrote.

In a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, Schiff said Parnas’ lawyer confirmed that he wrote the note.

  1. Parnas texted with a man named Robert F. Hyde, believed to be the same person who is running for a House seat in Connecticut, about removing former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Schiff explained:

In response to some articles, tweets, and videos accusing the Ambassador of being disloyal to President Trump, Mr. Hyde wrote “Wow. Can’t believe Trumo [sic] hasn’t fired this bitch. I’ll get right in that. Mr. Hyde then sent a series of text messages suggesting that he had Ambassador Yovanovitch under physical surveillance in Kyiv and that “They are willing to help if we/you would like a price.”

  1. Parnas was also communicating with Ukrainian officials which, Schiff argued, demonstrated “that Mr.

Parnas served as a direct channel between President Trump’s agent, Mr. Giuliani, and individuals close to President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Parnas tried to set up a meeting for Giuliani and Zelenksy in May 2019 via senior aides to the Ukrainian president, the texts show.

  1. Giuliani tried to get a visa approved for a disgraced former Ukrainian prosecutor.

Parnas told Giuliani that former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has been feeding the unsupported allegations against Biden, was denied a visa to the U.S. Giuliani said in response: “I can revive it,” despite having no formal role at the State Department.

Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

==

==

WaPo: Giuliani Held Back-Channel Call with Maduro

---

Trump’s lawyer, the Texas Congressman and the Venezuelan president: How Giuliani got involved in back-channel talks with Maduro

The international call came in September 2018, after months of rising tension between the United States and Venezuela, a key strategic player in South America. On one end of the line was Venezuela’s socialist president, the pariah leader of a disintegrating economy whom President Trump’s administration was seeking to isolate. On the other end: the U.S. president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.).

Both were part of a shadow diplomatic effort, backed in part by private interests, aimed at engineering a negotiated exit to ease President Nicolás Maduro from power and reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business, according to people familiar with the endeavor. Sessions had served as emissary in the back-channel effort, visiting Maduro in Caracas that spring. The phone call, which Giuliani joined, was a follow-up to that visit, Sessions’s spokesman Matt Mackowiak told The Washington Post. The phone conversation involving the Venezuelan president and Trump’s personal lawyer, which has not been previously reported, provides another example of how Giuliani used his private role to insert himself into foreign diplomacy, alarming administration officials confused about whose interests he was representing. Giuliani operated a similar campaign this year in Ukraine, where he pressured officials to announce investigations to benefit Trump — an endeavor that led to the president’s impeachment this month.

==

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/30/giuliani-reportedly-made-a-back-channel-call-with-venezuelan-president-maduro.html

Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, called Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro late last year in an attempt to oust him from the presidency, The Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the endeavor.

The call is another instance of Giuliani’s involvement in U.S. diplomatic policy. The former New York mayor has come under intense scrutiny for his continuing efforts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine. Trump’s request for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce investigations into the Bidens, along with a conspiracy theory about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 presidential election, are at the center of the charges in the president’s impeachment in Congress.

In September 2018, Giuliani and former Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, called Maduro as part of a back-channel effort to broker a negotiated exit for the embattled Venezuelan leader, according to the Post.

Sessions’ spokesman Matt Mackowiak confirmed the Post’s report to CNBC.

“Congressman Sessions traveled to Caracas in April 2018 to conduct direct negotiations with President Maduro on a diplomatic mission that was coordinated by the highest levels of the State Department,” Mackowiak said in an emailed statement.

“The goal was to arrange Maduro’s peaceful exit to allow a transition to a democratically elected government. Several months later a conference call was held with several participants, including Congressman Sessions and Mayor Giuliani,” he said.

People familiar with the State Department told the Post that officials there did not organize or participate in Sessions’ communications with Maduro. The newspaper reported that several U.S. officials disputed that the government backed Sessions’ trip.

The White House declined CNBC’s request for comment on the Post’s report.

The U.S. has challenged Maduro’s legitimacy to lead Venezuela and has joined an international coalition pressuring him to cede power to Juan Guaido, whom they have recognized as the country’s acting president.

The call was made without approval from White House officials, who did not know why Giuliani was involved once they found out about his actions, one former senior administration official told the Post.

The back-channel attempt to deal with Maduro defied the official U.S. policy led by then-national security advisor John Bolton, which involved a campaign of tightening sanctions on the Venezuelan regime, the newspaper reported. Giuliani’s Ukraine involvement also was outside of official U.S. policy.

Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani who played a role in his Ukraine dealings, was also involved in the shadow diplomacy effort with Venezuela, according to the Post.

Mackowiak told the Post that Sessions met Parnas on Capitol Hill in May, and that Parnas wanted to talk about a proposal to sell liquefied natural gas in Ukraine. That meeting came about five weeks after Sessions traveled to Caracas intending to spur progress in Venezuela, according to his comments to the Dallas Morning News in 2018.

In August 2018, Parnas met with Giuliani and two American executives with business investments in Venezuela to talk about the back channel to Maduro, the Post reported.

Parnas was arrested in October on charges of violating federal campaign finance laws. His indictment alleges that he and another associate made illegal donations to a then-sitting U.S. congressman, speculated to be Sessions, and that Parnas had asked that congressman for assistance in getting the U.S. to remove its ambassador to Ukraine.

Sessions sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a letter urging that ambassador’s removal on May 9 — the same day Parnas posted photos of his meeting with Sessions on social media, the Post reported.

Mackowiak told the Post that Sessions did not act at Parnas’ request, but rather wrote the letter after hearing concerns about the ambassador from other members of Congress.

Last month, Parnas’ lawyer Joseph Bondy said Parnas was willing to testify before Congress as part of an ongoing impeachment proceeding against Trump.

Read the Post’s full report here.

==

==

1219 kos

those still blissfully unaware, One America News is a conspiracy-laced, heavily Dear Leader-premised pro-Trump "news" channel that came out of nowhere in recent years to land a spot as one of Donald J. Trump's most-favored allies. It is also now directly involved in Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump's Ukrainian plot.

As House impeachment hearings unfolded, it was OAN that accompanied Rudy Giuliani on a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, for the purposes of taping "interviews" with the same disgraced Ukrainian officials who had assisted Giuliani in ousting the anti-corruption U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and in peddling increasingly weird and categorically false smears against potential Trump political rival Joe Biden. Now The Daily Beast reports that the OAN efforts have been going even farther than even that.

Last week, German law enforcement officials arrested former Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandr Onyshchenko on a warrant from Ukrainian prosecutors. Onyshchenko, a multimillionaire, was wanted in Ukraine for embezzlement, stealing multimillions from Ukraine's state-owned natural gas company. It is part of the current Ukrainian government's efforts to clean up the rampant national corruption of past years, the same (frequently pro-Russian and/or Russian-tied) corruption that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort involved himself in, and is currently in prison for, and which Giuliani is continuing to stump for in his collaborations with those same corrupt ex-officials.

But German officials might have at least temporarily missed Onyshchenko had they waited any longer, because at the time of his arrest, OAN was attempting to secure him a visa to travel to the United States. And the OAN network president confirmed to Daily Beast that the company is currently attempting to get American visas for other former Ukrainian officials—all apparently part of the Giuliani-helmed "investigation" that claims that disgraced Ukrainian embezzlers and crooked officials are the good guys battling the "corruption" of their declared enemies and that the current anti-corruption Ukrainian government and its American allies are actually the crooked ones.

That's a common-to-the-point-of-parody claim by arrested criminals and fleeing crooked government officials the world over, mind you, but both Rudy Giuliani and OAN have decided, for the purposes of benefiting Dear Leader, to attach themselves to this one. In Rudy's case, we know he has both solicited and received cash for his strange alliances in the country, though the details remain murky. OAN, however, appears to be spending its cash solely for the purposes of furthering an anti-Biden, anti-Ukraine, anti-U.S.-government propaganda video.

There doesn't seem to be much shame at OAN at being caught trying to help a wanted Ukrainian fugitive pop over to the United States to spread propaganda notions of his own innocence and something-something Joe Biden before law enforcement caught up with him. OAN also isn't revealing the identities of the other Ukrainian ex-officials it is still trying to obtain visas for. Fox News may be the most prominent propaganda outlet for Trump and Trump's preferred conspiracies, but it looks like OAN is trying to position itself as the preferred network of the Ukrainian mob.

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/prosecutors-say-giuliani-associate-got-1-million-from-russia-in-september/

Prosecutors say Giuliani associate got $1 million from Russia in September

by 1DmkIIN https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Written by Cody Fenwick December 12, 2019

30

Lev Parnas, the associate of Rudy Giuliani who has been indicted as part of an alleged campaign finance scheme, misled the government in his bail proceedings and hid the fact that he recently received $1 million from a Russian bank, prosecutors said Wednesday in a new court filing.

The prosecutors asked that Parnas have his bail revoked and that he enter the government’s custody, arguing that he poses a serious flight risk.

In addition to omitting the money he allegedly received from Russia, prosecutors said Parnas failed to reveal either the full payment amount he recently received from a law firm or the money he had in an escrow account, tied to a $4.5 million property he intended on buying.

They said with regard to the Russian funds, “While the majority of the money appears to have been used on personal expenses and to purchase a home … some portion of that money existed in Account-1 at the time Parnas submitted his financial affidavit.”

During his work with pretrial services, the document explained, Parnas has misled officials in other ways. It said that he falsely let pretrial services to believe that the court had allowed him to leave his home every day. The filing says that such action “confirms that even stringent conditions, of the sort he is currently under, are insufficient to secure his compliance with bail.”

As for the Russian funds, it’s not clear where they came from or what if any relationship they have to Parnas’s connections to Giuliani’s work in Ukraine.

Parnas’s lawyers said they are working on a response to the government’s new claims.

“We will file a written response in the coming days,” attorney Joseph Bondy told ABC News. “We look forward to a hearing next week in court.”

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/ag-barr-warns-trump-that-giuliani-has-become-a-serious-liability-for-his-administration-report/

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

no lnx

Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That won Giuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

no lnx

Report points to Trump, ‘-1,’ as the ringleader of a global conspiracy

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board December 4, 2019

The House Intelligence Committee released its report Tuesday. In it were phone call records showing frequent contact between Rudy Giuliani and the White House. The records suggest in the most granular detail yet that the president of the United States is the leader of an international criminal conspiracy to defraud the American people.

But the call records do more than that. They offer a teachable moment. They provide an illustration, in miniature, of what a conspiracy looks like, and why it’s morally and legally wrong for the head of the world’s oldest democracy to engage in such conduct.

The House Intelligence report does not say Giuliani called Trump. Instead, it says the president’s personal attorney called a number designated as “-1.” Adam Schiff, the panel’s chairman, said his committee is investigating whether “-1” is Trump’s phone. The timing of calls and other strong circumstantial evidence, however, point to him.

Joe Biden announced his candidacy on April 25. Leading up to that date, Giuliani, Lev Parnas and John Solomon were in frequent contact, according to the call logs. Parnas was one of Giuliani’s henchmen. He’s now under federal indictment for campaign-finance violations. Solomon was a reporter for The Hill, a Washington newspaper.

As mentioned in previous editions of the Editorial Board, Parnas, under Giuliani’s direction, connected Solomon to Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko used to be Ukraine’s top prosecutor. He was hugely corrupt, because he was intimately linked to Vladimir Putin. In interviews with Solomon, Lutsenko alleged that Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, tried to shield his son, Hunter Biden, from criminal investigation in Ukraine (a lie) and that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered with the 2016 presidential election (also a lie.) Lev Parnas was deeply involved in Solomon’s “journalism.” He was present at his interviews with Yuriy Lutsenko, according to reporting in Pro Publica.

This we knew. What didn’t know was the timing.

On the same day Joe Biden announced his presidential campaign, John Solomon wrote a falsehood-laden column “alleging that Ukraine had planted Russia collusion allegations against the Trump campaign,” according to the Post. “The column also described Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor and questioned whether Biden had acted to protect his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company facing an investigation, as the fired prosecutor has alleged.”

Coincidence? Unlikely.

The very same day, April 25, Giuliani received a call from “-1” (i.e., Trump). Giuliani then called Sean Hannity at Fox. A while later, Trump appeared on Hannity’s show to comment on Solomon’s report in The Hill. “That sounds like big, big stuff,” he said.

It could have been a coincidence, but again, unlikely. As I noted last week, Parnas’ attorney said he met regularly with the “BLT Team,” a name taken from the restaurant where the group convened several times a week on the second floor of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The BLT team included Parnas, Giuliani, Solomon, attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, and US Rep. Devin Nunes’ chief aide.

Coincidence isn’t the right word to describe a president’s dirty lawyer getting a dirty prosecutor to tell a dirty reporter the president’s Democratic rival is dirty, and then getting a dirty TV host to ask the president to comment on the dirty reporter’s dirt.

The right word to describe all that is conspiracy.

Which can be criminal. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chief, is now serving time in federal prison for defrauding the United States. Legally, conspiracy doesn’t require an underlying crime. Prosecutors were only required to show Manafort conspired to “impair or obstruct the lawful function of any part of the government.”

I don’t know if the president’s conduct meets a statutory standard. I do think it meets a political one. Trump, as “-1,” is the ringleader of a global conspiracy to defraud the American people of their right to consent to his leadership. There is no such thing as legitimate consent when presidents collude with enemies foreign and domestic to obstruct the free and fair process by which all Americans exercise self-governance.

This is a giant of a scandal. It dwarfs Watergate. It boggles the mind of ordinary Americans to contemplate the wide array of seedy underworld characters involved in a vast global conspiracy. (Another side of this involves another dirty former Ukrainian prosecutor who did a favor for a Ukrainian mobster fighting extradition to the US. Dmitry Firtash, the mobster, got Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor, to say Biden was dirty. That won Giuliani’s attention. His friends diGenova and Toensing went to the US Department of Justice to plead with the US attorney general to go easy on Firtash.)

As I said, giant.

But these call logs bring the vastness of the conspiracy down to a human scale. Donald Trump talked to Giuliani, who talked to Parnas, who talked to Lutsenko, who talked to Solomon, who talked to Giuliani, who talked to Hannity, who talked to Donald Trump.

==

==

Giuliani scorched for claiming US Constitution ‘obligates’ Trump to extort Ukraine to investigate Bidens

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

==

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/giuliani-foreign-clientele-possible-conflicts-231413

giuliani took money from Qatar, Venezuela, Iranian exiles

His foreign clientele could present conflicts of interest as secretary of state.

By ISAAC ARNSDORF 11/15/2016

Rudy Giuliani's paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation's top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling.

Since leaving the New York mayor's office, Giuliani has made millions as a lawyer and consultant, including for some clients at odds with U.S. foreign policy. When some of those ties s...w those concerns have no doubt been eclipsed by Donald Trump's own web of business entanglements, which are still not completely known to the public. Giuliani's participation in Trump's transition and contention for the job of secretary of state poses a direct challenge to Trump's promises to root out Washington self-dealing and ban his administration's officials from lobbying for foreign governments.

In 2011, an exiled Iranian political party called the Mujahedin e-Khalq, known as the MEK, paid Giuliani to give a speech in Washington calling on the State Department to remove the group from its list of terrorist organizations. The MEK recruited a host of other formal officials to its cause and succeeded in reversing the terrorist designation in 2012.

A subsidiary of Giuliani's consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, advised Qatar's state-run oil company on security at a natural gas plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Qatar is a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military base but once stifled an attempt to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who went on to mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the 9/11 commission report.

The same subsidiary, Giuliani Security & Safety, provided security advice to a Singapore gambling project on behalf of a partnership that included a tycoon close to the North Korean regime who is considered an organized crime figure by the U.S., according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. "I think the person involved, if it's correct, was a 1 percent owner that had no involvement with us, we never worked for, had nothing to do with," Giuliani told NBC's Tim Russert at the time.

Giuliani Partners also advised TransCanada, which sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline that President Barack Obama rejected but Trump has said he wants to approve. And Giuliani helped the maker of the OxyContin painkiller, Purdue Pharma, settle a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with a fine.

The Houston-based law firm Giuliani joined as a named partner in 2005 lobbied in Texas for Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company then controlled by President Hugo Chavez, The New York Times reported in 2007. The firm also did work for Saudi Arabia's oil ministry, according to The Associated Press.

The law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, lobbied at the federal level during Giuliani's time there for energy companies including Southern Company, Duke Energy, Energy Future Holdings, Arch Coal, Chesapeake Energy and NuStar Energy, records show. It also represented Cornell Companies, a private prison operator that later merged with GEO Group. Giuliani never personally registered as a lobbyist. He left the firm for rival Greenberg Traurig this year, and currently is on leave.

Giuliani's assistant at Greenberg Traurig and the Trump transition didn't answer requests for comment.

The Clinton Foundation has been hounded by Republican suspicions of selling access to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and the nonprofit did accept big bucks from foreign governments. But Clinton's defenders point out there's no proof she ever made an official act to benefit a foundation donor, and, unlike Giuliani, she never personally profited from the foreign contributions to her charity.

When Giuliani ran for president, he reported assets of $18.1 million to $70.4 million.

---

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-wealthy-venezuelan-hosted-giuliani-as-he-pursued-ukraine-campaign-then-giuliani-lobbied-the-justice-department-on-his-behalf/2019/11/26/272105a2-0ec5-11ea-b0fc-62cc38411ebb_story.html

wapo no lnx

A wealthy Venezuelan hosted Giuliani as he pursued Ukraine campaign. Then Giuliani lobbied the Justice Department on his behalf.

By

Rosalind S. Helderman,

Devlin Barrett,

Matt Zapotosky and

Tom Hamburger

November 26, 2019 at 11:40 AM EST

When Rudolph W. Giuliani went to Mrid in August to confer with a top aide to the Ukrainian president and press for political investigations sought by President Trump, he also met with a previously unidentified client with very different interests.

While in Spain, Giuliani stayed at a historic estate belonging to Venezuelan energy executive Alejandro Betancourt López, who h hired Trump’s personal attorney to help him contend with a Justice Department investigation of alleged money laundering and bribery, according to people familiar with the situation.

A month later, Giuliani was one of several lawyers representing Betancourt in Washington. The lawyers met with the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division and other government attorneys to argue that the wealthy Venezuelan should not face criminal charges as part of a $1.2 billion money-laundering case filed in Florida last year, said the people, who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

Investigators scrutinize Giuliani firm and donations to Trump super PAC as part of bro probe

The criminal complaint alleges that top officials of the Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, elite business leers and bankers conspired to steal money from the company and then launder it through Miami real estate purchases and other investment schemes.

Betancourt is not one of the eight men charged in the case, a group that includes his cousin. But two people familiar with the matter said that he is referred to in the criminal complaint as a uncharged co-conspirator, as previously reported by the Miami Herald.

Giuliani’s representation of Betancourt — which has not been previously disclosed — is a striking example of how Trump’s lawyer has continued to offer his services to foreign clients with interests before the U.S. government while working on behalf of the president. And it shows how Giuliani — who says he was serving as Trump’s attorney pro bono — has used his work for paying clients to help underwrite his efforts to find political ammunition in Ukraine to benefit the president.

In response to questions about his relationship with Betancourt, Giuliani wrote in a text, “This is attorney client privilege so I will withstand whatever malicious lies or spin you put on it.”

Eric Creizman, an attorney for Giuliani, declined to comment.

Jon Sale, an attorney for Betancourt, said his client denies any wrongdoing. He declined to comment on Betancourt’s relationship with Giuliani.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the meeting. Justice Department officials were unaware of the Mrid meeting when Giuliani came to meet them, according to a senior Justice Department official who said the topic of Ukraine did not come up in the discussion.

'The whole package'

Giuliani, a former New York mayor and top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, is now under scrutiny by the U.S. attorney’s office he once led, which has filed campaign finance charges against two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Investigators are examining Giuliani’s consulting business as part of a bro probe in a raft of possible crimes, including wire fraud and foreign lobbying violations, according to people familiar with the matter.

Giuliani is also a key figure in the ongoing House impeachment inquiry into Trump, in which top government officials have testified that the president’s lawyer led a show effort to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations of Trump’s rivals in exchange for a White House meeting.

Trump h urged U.S. officials hoping to broker a good relationship between him and newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Giuliani, according to congressional testimony.

‘Talk to Rudy’: Testimony from diplomats highlights Giuliani’s central role in driving Ukraine policy

On July 25, Trump asked Zelensky to pursue the investigations of Democrats. Days later, Giuliani heed to Mrid to meet with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, to cement the deal, according to Giuliani and congressional testimony.

Giuliani told The Washington Post in September that Yermak h offered to come to the United States, but he suggested Spain. “I told him I was alrey going to be in Mrid for something else the first weekend in August, so why don’t we just meet there?” he said.

The purpose of the Aug. 2 sit-down: to spell out two specific cases Trump wanted Ukraine to pursue, Giuliani told The Post in September.

One was a probe of a Ukrainian gas tycoon who h former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on his board. Another was a claim that Democrats colluded with Ukraine to release information on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort during the 2016 election.

Yermak, according to Giuliani, indicated that the Ukrainians were open to pursuing the investigations. The aide reiterated the Ukrainians’ plea for a meeting with Trump, a summit that would be an important signal to Russia of Washington’s support for Ukraine.

“I talked to him about the whole package,” Giuliani said.

After the meeting, Yermak began circulating a draft of a statement the Ukrainians were considering issuing regarding their commitment to investigating corruption, according to text messages released as part of the House inquiry.

A private client

One of the main purposes of Giuliani’s travel to Spain was to meet with Betancourt, who has me a fortune in work for the Venezuelan government, according to people familiar with the trip.

Betancourt, a young member of Venezuela’s elite who attended Suffolk University in Boston, co-founded a company that was awarded $1.8 billion in government contracts to build power plants under Venezuela’s former socialist president Hugo Chávez, leing to allegations the company bilked the government, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The company, Derwick Associates, has denied paying bribes to win its contracts and said the contracts reflected the high cost of doing business in the socialist country.

Sale, Betancourt’s attorney, is a longtime friend of Giuliani’s who attended law school with him. He also briefly represented Giuliani as he responded to congressional inquiries regarding Ukraine, sending a letter to House committees explaining that Giuliani would not comply with a subpoena for documents.

Giuliani has defended his work for foreign clients, arguing that their identities and interests are “irrelevant” to his uncompensated efforts for Trump. “My other clients are paying me for the work I do for them. Nobody is paying me for a single thing I’m doing for Donald J. Trump,” he told The Post earlier this year.

Impeachment inquiry puts new focus on Giuliani’s work for prominent figures in Ukraine

He told the Daily Beast in October that he met Yermak in Mrid because he alrey planned to be in the Spanish capital for “business and vacation.”

He said it was an example of how the costs of his travel for Trump were covered by separate work he did for private clients.

“That particular trip has not been reimbursed, but about three-fourths of it would be business and one-fourth would be personal,” he said. “The Trump part would be considered personal because I don’t get paid for representing the president.”

He told Reuters in September that his expenses “were paid by I assume one client. Since I took two days off I think I paid some of that personally as well.”

During the trip, Giuliani met with Yermak at a hotel in Mrid, according to people familiar with the trip.

But he — along with Parnas and Fruman — stayed at an expansive estate belonging to Betancourt on the grounds of an ancient castle once used by Spanish royalty, the people said.

A Betancourt company purchased El Castillo del Alamín in 2011 for nearly 23 million euros, according to the Spanish news outlet El Mundo. It is about an hour southwest of Mrid.

On Aug. 3, the day after his meeting with Yermak, Giuliani tweeted images of a Spanish village, writing, “South of Mrid are beautiful small towns and lovely countryside and very wonderful people.”

South of Mrid are beautiful small towns and lovely countryside and very wonderful people. pic.twitter.com/vrnsNM8aS6

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) August 3, 2019

Joseph A. Bondy, an attorney for Parnas, declined to comment. Todd Blanche, an attorney for Fruman, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department meeting

A month later, Giuliani joined a number of lawyers representing Betancourt at a meeting at Justice Department hequarters with Brian Benczkowski, the he of the criminal division, according to people familiar with the session.

At the time, federal prosecutors in Manhattan were pursuing the case against Giuliani’s associates, Parnas and Fruman.

When the New York Times reported in October that Giuliani met with the criminal-division chief about one of his clients, the Justice Department said Benczkowski was not aware of the New York case at the time.

“When Mr. Benczkowski and fraud section lawyers met with Mr. Giuliani, they were not aware of any investigation of Mr. Giuliani’s associates in the Southern District of New York and would not have met with him h they known,” Peter Carr, a department spokesman, said at the time.

The client who was the subject of the meeting has not been previously reported.

Giuliani has cast his efforts to dig up damaging information about Democrats in Ukraine as a strategy to assist his client, Trump, but also motivated by a lifelong commitment to fighting corruption.

“I’ve been doing this for 50 years of my life,” he told conservative brocaster Glenn Beck on Nov. 20. “I’ve never h a complaint. I think people understand that I have a very, very great passion for corruption, and I’ve probably uncovered some of the biggest crimes and disrupted some of the biggest crime organizations in our history.”

However, his involvement with the Betancourt case puts him at odds with a long-running effort by federal prosecutors to crack down on corruption in Venezuela.

The United States has been aggressively pursuing bribery, embezzlement and money laundering cases against Venezuela’s elite, arguing the corruption has helped collapse the country’s economy and caused civil unrest.

Federal prosecutors in Miami have said in court filings that billions have been looted from Venezuela’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, which has faced particularly dire economic consequences.

Betancourt was not named in the July 2018 criminal complaint, but the case’s lead defendant, Francisco Convit Guruceaga, is his cousin and sat on the board of Betancourt’s company. Convit is considered a fugitive by the U.S. government, according to court records.

While Giuliani’s representation of Betancourt h not been previously disclosed, Venezuela has surfaced as a topic in the House impeachment inquiry.

In a closed-door deposition given to congressional investigators on Oct. 14, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill alluded to the possibility of a Venezuela tie to the ongoing Ukraine saga.

“I was told that by the directors working on the Western Hemisphere. I didn’t have a chance to look into this in any way. I was told that the same individuals who h been indicted h been interested at different points in energy investments in Venezuela and that this was quite well known,” she said, referring to Parnas and Fruman, according to a transcript later released.

She did not detail the information she h been given, only that she h learned the two were “notorious in Florida” and involved with “strange things in Venezuela.”

“Well, I was extremely concerned that whatever it was that Mr. Giuliani was doing might not be legal, especially after, you know, people h raised with me these two gentlemen, Parnas and Fruman,” she said.

Josh Dawsey, Aaron Davis, Anne Gearan and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

==

==

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/rudy-giuliani-has-a-long-shady-history-with-ukraine/

mojo

In March 2018, Rudy Giuliani met in Manhattan with a delegation of lawmakers from Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million in eastern Ukraine. Giuliani, who joined President Donald Trump’s legal team a few weeks later, was at this gathering because, Giuliani says, his security firm agreed in 2017 to help the city improve its emergency services and seek foreign investment.

But the deal had a murkier element. Giuliani later conceded that he wasn’t just working for Kharkiv and that for at least some of the work he was paid by Pavel Fuks, a Kharkiv-born business executive who became a prominent real estate developer in Moscow in the 2000s and who has said that he negotiated directly with Trump between 2004 and 2010 about building a Trump-branded tower in Moscow. Fuks was one of several Ukrainians with Russian ties whose attendance at Trump’s presidential inauguration was investigated by former special counsel Robert Mueller. So at the start of Trump’s presidency, Giuliani was hobnobbing with at least one Ukrainian player who would be tainted by scandal.

Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine exploded into public view this month, with the revelation that Trump pressured the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to work with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and information to discredit Mueller’s probe. A complaint filed by an intelligence community whistleblower that triggered this new Trump scandal depicted Giuliani as a Trump henchman prowling Ukraine for negative material Trump could use against Biden. But the former New York mayor’s involvement in Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries has been more extensive and even more sketchy than these disclosures indicate.

The New York meeting and an earlier trip Giuliani trip took to Kharkiv in November 2017 were arranged by TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, the firm says on its website. TriGlobal, which claims to have offices in New York, Moscow, and Kiev, sells itself as an international business consultancy that does public relations work for clients in Russia and Ukraine. The firm also brags that it has worked with Giuliani since 2004, arranging trips for him to former Soviet states. Last October, Giuliani took a break from his work representing Trump to speak about cybersecurity at a conference TriGlobal organized in Armenia to promote a Russia-led economic bloc, the Eurasian Economic Union. Giuliani appeared at the event alongside a Russian official, Sergey Glazyev, who was sanctioned in March 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea and who has been accused of advancing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Ukraine, an accusation he’s denied. Giuliani was reportedly invited to a conference by Russian Armenian multimillionaire Ara Abramyan, a member of TriGlobal’s board, who reportedly suggested at the time that he expected Giuliani to deliver a message for him to Trump.

On Friday, the Washington Post reported that Giuliani planned to participate in a panel led by Glazyev at the same conference in Armenia this year. Giuliani canceled his plans to attend after the Post‘s report. He said he decided not to attend after learning that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned to go. “If Putin’s going it’s easy,” he said in a text.

These gigs form part of Giuliani’s lucrative post-mayoral career as a roving international security consultant and high-priced lawyer. That career has continued, even after Trump brought Giuliani onto his personal legal team with a mandate to take a combative approach against Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani provides not only pro-bono legal assistance for Trump, but, he says, political advice, and reportedly he acts as somewhat of a personal emissary for the president. All the while, Giuliani has shrugged off questions of whether clients, including foreign interests, are paying him and his firm as he functions as Trump’s consigliere. And he has refused to comprehensively identify his clients. He claims that he does not need to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—which would require him to disclose details of his work for overseas clients—because he does no lobbying in the United States for foreign entities and instead merely provides security advice to any client he has abroad.

But at least one former client disputes Giuliani’s claims about his work. “I would call him the lobbyist for Kharkiv and Ukraine—this is stated in the contract,” Fuks told the New York Times in March. “It is very important for me that such person as Giuliani tells people that we are a good country, that people can do business with us. That’s what we would like to bring to America’s leaders.” Neither Giuliani nor Fuks has made their contract public. Giuliani has declined to say what he and his firm were paid for the work.

Seven Senate Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), pressed the Justice Department this week to investigate whether Giuliani is violating foreign lobbying law. “Like any other American, Mr. Giuliani has legal obligations to report his work on behalf of foreign clients,” they wrote, “and the Department of Justice should not give him preferential treatment or exempt him from his obligation just because he is the President’s personal attorney.”

Giuliani conducted other business in Ukraine while working for Kharkiv and Fuks. In June 2017, Giuliani traveled to Kiev where he reportedly met with then-President Petro Poroshenko, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, and other government officials. Giuliani also spoke on “democracy” and the “rule of law” at a conference organized by the foundation of Ukrainian metals magnate, Victor Pinchuk—an oligarch whose 2016 payment of $150,000 to Trump’s charitable foundation drew scrutiny from Mueller. Giuliani, who in 2006 reported receiving up to $200,000 per speech, has declined to say how much he he was paid for that presentation. It’s unclear if these activities had any connection to Giuliani’s deal with Fuks and Kharkiv.

In a text message Thursday, Giuliani said his work in Ukraine in 2017 was unrelated to his recently revealed activity. “My business in Ukraine ended in Dec. 2017,” he wrote. But Giuliani’s involvement in the country continued after he became Trump’s lawyer in April 2018.

In May 2018, Ukrainian officials stopped investigating payments to Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort and dropped an offer to assist with Mueller’s prosecution of him. Ukrainian officials told the New York Times they feared helping Mueller would anger Trump, potentially complicating their purchase from the United States of antitank weapons aimed at deterring Russian aggression. This week Giuliani insisted in a text message to me that he did “not know anything about” that move.

At some point in 2018—the exact date is unclear—Giuliani began working on Ukraine-related matters with two Soviet-born American business executives, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Giuliani has said they’re his clients, though his work for them appears indistinguishable from his efforts on Trump’s behalf. In a text message on Monday, Giuliani declined to comment on this work, citing attorney-client privilege. Parnas and Fruman did not respond to inquiries.

According to a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, it was Parnas and Fruman who first encouraged Giuliani’s effort to dig up dirt on Biden. Both Parnas and Fruman, who live in South Florida, became big GOP donors in 2018, giving at least $576,500 in combined donations over several months. They used the resulting access to powerful Republican figures to promote a plan to sell American liquified gas to Ukraine. In May 2018, the duo dined with the president at the Trump International Hotel and had breakfast in Beverly Hills with Donald Trump Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., who later became co-chair of the Republican National Committee, according Facebook posts by Parnas, which he later deleted. It is unclear if Giuliani was helped connect them with Trump.

According to the OCCRP/BuzzFeed News report, Parnas and Fruman organized a late 2018 Skype call between Giuliani and Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor whose firing was pushed by Biden and many European diplomats in 2016. Shokin was ousted for blocking anti-corruption probes, but Giuliani and Trump have asserted that Biden sought Shokin’s dismissal to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, from investigation. There is no evidence to support that claim.

But Shokin, not surprisingly, was apparently eager to help smear Biden. Parnas claims that he and Fruman put Giuliani in touch with Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, late last year. Giuliani and Lutsenko met in New York in January 2018 and in Poland in February, according to the OCCRP/BuzzFeed News report. Giuliani told the Washington Post that he has met with five current and former Ukrainian prosecutors overall, including Shokin and Lutsenko, since last year.

Shortly after their get-togethers, Lutsenko and Giuliani began pushing allegations in the US media about Biden and claiming Ukrainian officials interfered in the 2016 election to help the Hillary Clinton campaign. Many of these claims ended up in articles written by Hill opinion writer John Solomon, whose reports were amplified by Fox News and other conservative media and by Trump—but his reports have largely been debunked. Ukrainian anti-corruption activists claim Shokin and Lutsenko were promoting phony accusations, and Lutsenko later withdrew many of his claims. Daria Kaleniuk, the head of a Ukrainian anti-corruption group, contends that Lutsenko issued allegations to please Trump in a bid to keep his job.

“I was investigating, going back to last year, complaints that the Ukrainian people, several people in Ukraine, knew about a tremendous amount of collusion between Ukrainian officials, and Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee,” Giuliani claimed last week on CNN. These accusations promoted by Giuliani have been embraced by Trump’s Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that a probe initiated by Barr and run by a US attorney, John Durham, is “exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.” (The nature of this probe is unclear. Ukraine was not involved in the initiation of the FBI’s investigation of the Russian attack on the 2016 election and the interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia.)

According to the Washington Post, since Zelensky took office in May, Giuliani has sidelined the State Department and helped force the firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom he accused, seemingly without evidence, of “collusion” and of “working for” liberal financier George Soros. Trump’s request that Zelensky help Giuliani unearth negative information on Biden has received lots of attention. Zelensky agreeing to do so has received less notice. According to the whistleblower’s complaint, Giuliani met with a Zelenksy adviser on August 2 in Madrid to follow up on “cases” discussed in the July 25 phone call.

Giuliani’s role, particularly his work in Ukraine in 2017 and 2018, has not been fully explained. The whistleblower complaint alleges that Giuliani has been “a central figure” in Trump’s covert effort to use his power to press Ukraine to help tilt the 2020 election in his favor. An unnamed US official quoted by the Post made a similar claim: “Rudy—he did all of this,” the official said. “This shitshow that we’re in—it’s him injecting himself into the process.”

Asked about his work in Ukraine, Giuliani, in a series of texts, called the issue “bull distraction.” Not enough is publicly known yet to back up Giuliani’s this-is-a-distraction defense, or to assess whether Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine will ultimately help Trump or cause him more difficulty in a scandal that has led to an impeachment inquiry.

==

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-rudy-giuliani-mystery-trips-to-russia-armenia-and-ukraine

trump inc pod

Just last week, for example, Giuliani appeared in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, which has close trade ties with Russia. He was invited, according to local press accounts, by Ara Abramyan, an Armenian businessman who lives in Russia. Abramyan once helped reconstruct the Kremlin and also received a medal for “merit to the fatherland” from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Giuliani said he was in Armenia as a private citizen, but on a local TV news show, Abramyan implied that he expected Giuliani to carry a message for him to Trump. (The conversation was in Armenian, so it’s not clear whether Giuliani understood what Abramyan was saying.)

While in Armenia, Giuliani also attended a technology conference (one of his businesses advises on cybersecurity). The conference program listed him as appearing on a panel that also included a Russian currently on the U.S. sanctions list imposed after Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

==

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-upped-trips-to-russia-and-former-soviet-states-after-trumps-election-propublica

Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, appears to have stepped up his appearances in Russia and former Soviet states since Trump was elected. ProPublica reports that last week, Giuliani reportedly was invited to Armenia by Ara Abramyan, an Armenian businessman who lives in Russia. Giuliani said he was in Armenia as a private citizen, but on a local TV news show, Abramyan implied that he expected Giuliani to carry a message for him to Trump, according to ProPublica. Giuliani also attended a cybersecurity conference while in Armenia, where he spoke on a panel with a Russian currently on the U.S. sanctions list imposed after Russia’s invasion of Crimea. ProPublica noted that Giuliani’s work abroad doesn’t appear to break any laws or rules, but that it seems unprecedented. Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and a law professor at the University of Michigan (and a regular Daily Beast contributor) told ProPublica, “I don’t recall seeing anything like this before.”

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/massive-criminal-enterprise-new-report-claims-giuliani-sought-ukraine-business-deals-as-he-dug-up-dirt-on-biden-for-trump/

no lnx

‘Massive criminal enterprise’: New report claims Giuliani sought Ukraine business deals as he dug up dirt on Biden for Trump

Written by Jake Johnson / Salon November 28, 2019

Public optics for Rudy Giuliani continued to get worse on Wednesday after the New York Times and Washington Post both reported that President Donald Trump’s personal attorney earlier this year sought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business opportunities in Ukraine from the same government officials he was working with to uncover dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Post reported that Giuliani negotiated a contract earlier this year to represent Yuri Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s top prosecutor, for at least $200,000. The negotiations came at the same time Giuliani was working with Lutsenko to dig up damaging information on Biden for the benefit of Trump.

“The agreements were never executed, and there is no indication that Giuliani was ultimately paid by Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials,” the Post noted. “But the negotiations proceeded far enough that legal agreements were drafted under which Giuliani’s company would have received more than $200,000 to work for the Ukrainians.”

According to the Times, Giuliani and lawyers close to him were engaged in a months-long effort to take on “various Ukrainian officials or their agencies as clients.”

The Times reviewed “a proposal signed in February by Mr. Giuliani,” which “called for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice to pay his firm $300,000.”

“In return, Mr. Giuliani would help the government recover money it believed had been stolen and stashed overseas,” the Times reported. “The Times could not determine whether the documents it reviewed comprise the entirety of the efforts by Mr. Giuliani and other lawyers to represent Ukrainian government officials.”

Giuliani downplayed the talks in an interview with the Times and said he “never received a penny” from Ukrainian officials.

The new reporting was viewed by progressives and analysts as further evidence that Giuliani and Trump were pursuing corrupt ends in Ukraine while publicly claiming to be fighting corruption.

This is getting so bad for @RudyGiuliani that he’s now getting embroiled in a set of side scandals all his own. @paulwaldman1 on the latest Rudy revelations:https://t.co/PnW9dWa9fz

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) November 27, 2019

Rudy Giuliani sought a payments of $200,000 from the recently dismissed prosecutor general of Ukraine earlier this year.

So, Mr. President, about that corruption in Ukraine you said you were so worried about… https://t.co/tOQMu56ue4

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) November 27, 2019

Reflecting on the new revelations, Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote:

Why would Giuliani be simultaneously pursuing what former national security official Fiona Hill called a “domestic political errand” on Trump’s behalf — pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation that would smear former vice president Joe Biden — while simultaneously looking to cash in himself?

The better question is, why wouldn’t he?

“Trumplandia is just a massive criminal enterprise,” tweeted Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

==

==

DC rept

...

Is Rudy Giuliani a true believer or is he just working for Trump in the shadows because it is a way to make money?

I believe that Rudy Giuliani is one of the great frauds of all time. Giuliani’s father was a bandit who served time in Sing Sing prison. Giuliani surrounded himself with mobbed up people like Bernard Kerik, who he made first corrections commissioner, and then Police Commissioner. Of note: Giuliani did not try any of the mob cases ][during his time as U.S. attorney in New York.] He just took credit for them. The convictions were won by career prosecutors who did an excellent job.

When he worked for the Reagan administration, Giuliani made it clear that he is a horrible racist as shown during the Haitian refugee crisis. Giuliani is an opportunist. He’s certainly looking out for his own pocket and his own welfare. Giuliani now has this lucrative gig with Donald Trump. And Giuliani has made this claim that he’s not being paid by Donald Trump. In fact, lawyers know lots of ways to get paid. It will not surprise to me one bit if Giuliani’s alleged associates in the Ukraine scandal, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, eventually reveal that Giuliani had some side extortion scheme to make money.

==

Giuliani reveals he was feeding information to John Solomon

11/20/19 5:50 PM EST

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/new-trove-of-ukraine-docs-exposes-clear-paper-trail-from-rudy-giuliani-to-the-oval-office-to-secretary-pompeo

no lnx

New trove of Ukraine docs exposes ‘clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo’

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams November 24, 2019

A trove of State Department documents obtained late Friday by watchdog group American Oversight provided new details on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s involvement in the White House effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate President Donald Trump’s political rivals.

The documents, which the State Department turned over in compliance with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, showed that Pompeo spoke to Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani by phone at least twice earlier this year as Giuliani was pressing Ukraine to probe former Vice President Joe Biden. At least one of the calls was arranged by Trump assistant Madeleine Westerhout, the documents showed.

Giuliani in March was also orchestrating a smear campaign against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump removed from her post in May.

In April, following his calls with Giuliani, Pompeo also called Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who has been implicated in the effort to dig up dirt on Biden.

American Oversight

@weareoversight

Replying to @weareoversight

This was just the first production of documents from our first lawsuit seeking the public release of Trump administration Ukraine records. There will be more.

We also have active lawsuits for records from Perry, Mulvaney, Sondland, DOD, and more. https://www.americanoversight.org/investigation/the-trump-administrations-contacts-with-ukraine …

The Trump Administration’s Contacts with Ukraine - American Oversight

American Oversight is investigating the extent of the administration’s troubling efforts to coerce a foreign government into helping to attack the president’s perceived political enemies.

americanoversight.org

American Oversight

?

@weareoversight

We can see why Secretary Pompeo refused to release these documents to Congress: the paper trail connects him to Giuliani, showing a March 2019 call right before a call to Rep. Nunes. https://www.americanoversight.org/state-department-releases-ukraine-documents-to-american-oversight …

View image on Twitter

Pompeo, who admitted last month that he was on the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has refused to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry into Trump.

Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, said the newly released documents shed light on the reasons behind Pompeo’s reluctance to testify or hand over information requested by impeachment investigators.

“We can see why Mike Pompeo has refused to release this information to Congress,” Evers said in a statement. “It reveals a clear paper trail from Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office to Secretary Pompeo to facilitate Giuliani’s smear campaign against a U.S. ambassador.”

“The evidence is only going to get worse for the administration as its stonewall strategy collapses in the face of court orders,” added Evers. “That American Oversight could obtain these documents establishes that there is no legal basis for the administration to withhold them from Congress. That conclusively shows that the administration is engaged in obstruction of justice.”

In an interview with the New York Times last month, Giuliani acknowledged that he spoke with Pompeo about Ukraine in late March.

As the Times reported late Saturday:

In connection with one such conversation, Mr. Giuliani said he provided Mr. Pompeo a timeline listing what he considered to be key events implicating targets of Mr. Trump, including the Bidens, Ms. Yovanovitch and Ukrainians whom Mr. Giuliani said had disseminated damaging information about Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Shortly after, Mr. Pompeo “called and said, ‘Do you have any backup?'” Mr. Giuliani said in the interview.

In response, Mr. Giuliani said, he had someone hand-deliver to Mr. Pompeo’s office an envelope containing a series of memos detailing claims made by a pair of Ukrainian prosecutors in interviews conducted by Mr. Giuliani and his associates in January.

The State Department documents come just days after U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified before the House Intelligence Committee that “everyone was in the loop” on Trump’s effort to press Ukraine for an investigation into Biden.

In an interview on MSNBC Saturday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said the American Oversight documents confirm Sondland’s testimony.

“These documents show that Giuliani was not freelancing, that he was essentially talking to Secretary Pompeo,” said Lieu. “Everybody was on the same page.”

PoliticusUSA

@politicususa

Rep. @tedlieu says newly released State Department documents show that "everybody was on the same page" regarding Trump's extortion scheme. #ctl #p2

Embedded video

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-rudy-giuliani-how-americas-mayor-became-trumps-grifter/

no lnx

The rise and fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ became Trump’s grifter

Written by The Washington Monthly November 18, 2019

Rudy Giuliani was a shoo-in for attorney general or secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in a nascent Trump administration. Not only was Giuliani “America’s Mayor” following his command of the situation on 9/11, he was a former federal prosecutor, presidential candidate, and an early validator—if late endorser—of Donald J. Trump.

Life looked pretty rosy for the ambitious pol, with a clear path to power and privilege, given his expertise.

He didn’t want the jobs proffered, however. He wanted something bigger.

Whether he was done with the law or just wanted something that approximated the power and prestige of the presidency, he postured and heavily lobbied to be Trump’s secretary of state. As the former mayor of America’s most important city, he was regularly in the company of foreign dignitaries and, of course, 9/11 gave him a global stage from which to show off his leadership skills.

But translating international experience and foreign hobnobbing into policy focused on America’s global role required diplomatic skill not often associated with New York moxie. It would have been a hard sell—even to a pliant Republican-dominated U.S. Senate. After all, John McCain—and even Lindsey Graham 1.0—were actively looking out for America’s national security interests back then.

Giuliani’s jones-ing to become America’s lead diplomat seemed to have more to do with a desire for his own publicly financed jet and private traveling press corps than any real interest or ability to negotiate long, hard hours toward solutions that required uncomfortable trade-offs. He wanted the position’s perks and platform more than the work—or the extraordinarily demanding work schedule that comes with the job.

Fast forward to 2019, and the Giuliani scorned by Jared Kushner has become the roiling Rudy who plays Donald Trump’s personal attorney on TV. Giuliani has never met a Sunday news show he doesn’t like. Trump has turned to this anti-matinee idol and put personal business and state policy in the hands of a freewheeling, out-of-control—and sometimes crazed—Giuliani. His uncanny ability to stay simultaneously both on message and off—yet claim to be reliably consistent and coherent—has allowed him to play rough in all positions of Trump’s political defense and remain untouched.

Until now.

Now he’s all lawyered up, as investigators in the U.S. House release State Department officials’ closed-door testimony implicating Giuliani in Trump’s move to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Giuliani so desperately needed to play the globetrotting role of secretary of State that he got to become Trump’s “Shadow Secretary.” In that role, he used presidential proximity to guide America’s foreign activities, fire its diplomats, bully its allies, and bank on the nation’s sheer power to leverage lethal aid into forced foreign state-sponsored oppo research on 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

Biden became the target of the externally run, illicitly operated Giuliani Shadow State Department, doing the Trump-Kushner-Pompeo trio’s dirty work while operating with Oval Office assurances that his free hand and opaque operation was guarded by attorney-client privilege. This questionable privilege was also supposed to protect Michael Cohen, Trump’s previous personal attorney. Cohen is now serving a prison sentence for doing Trump’s shadowy business.

A one-man, oversight-free, power-drenched Shadow State Department is a heady thing. Giuliani recognized that he no longer had to play by the same rules as a government agency. He could operate the way Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, did with his paramilitary organization, Blackwater. Renamed Xe, Blackwater was a private entity conducting a contracted war, freed from the constraints of treaty obligations, multilateral engagement, long-standing bilateral relations, protocol, congressional oversight, budgetary limits, press access, or full transparency.

Giuliani was as free to disregard established foreign policy and practice as Prince’s locked-and-loaded organization was to end-run military rules of engagement. Bonus points: Giuliani also was able to profit as a free agent. Who was going to question his private authority when the imperial presidency, with its seemingly unchecked privilege, had his back and could dangle a potential blanket pardon?

Giuliani wanted to run the world. With a distracted and delegating president, Giuliani was not only on track to fulfill his wildest career fantasy, he was executing his capricious and cynical plan while laying the groundwork for four more Trump-Giuliani years. What nobody counted on was him getting caught. After all, the whole team has been expert at covering its tracks, hiding intentions, and burying transcripts on dark White House servers.

There is loose talk about a Deep State that is out to get Trump and overthrow his presidency. Too little attention has been paid, however, to the Shadow State and the president’s use of private contractors and legal machinations to keep this government’s questionable practices from ever seeing the light of day.

Giuliani is just one of Trump’s many bit players—albeit a big grifting one—in an operation full of self-righteous and self-aggrandizing people out to do seemingly justifiable work at the expense of sound policy supporting American interests and values.

Rudy should have stuck with the law.

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no lnx

nyt

Opinion

The Revenge of the Bureaucrats

Honesty is the best foreign policy.

By Elizabeth Drew

Ms. Drew is a journalist based in Washington who covered Watergate.

Nov. 16, 2019, 2:30 p.m. ET

The opening hearings on the Ukraine scandal demonstrated that mundane government processes and seemingly colorless bureaucrats are what keep our country going. It was these sorts of unknown public servants who maintained the executive branch functioning during Watergate — and are doing so now while our distracted president and his acolytes try to circumvent the rules.

The witnesses in the first week of open hearings were three lifelong career diplomats — on Wednesday, William Taylor, currently the chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, and George Kent, the senior State Department official on Ukraine; and on Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat whom President Trump fired as ambassador to Ukraine because she got in the way of his private schemes.

While the three witnesses came across as unusually admirable, they’re not atypical of their breed. They will endure only so much abuse or see only so much scandal around them before rising up in some way. All three testified in defiance of the president.

Mr. Trump cannot fathom such people, because they’re not interested in big money or fame. The “bureaucracy” may seem sluggish, stubborn and unimaginative at times, but it also can stand as a bulwark against assaults on the laws and the Constitution by the passers-through who inhabit the administration of the moment. Mr. Trump made a big mistake by demeaning civil servants from the outset (his awkward, self-reverential speech to the C.I.A. on his first full day in office was an embarrassment and also an omen) and then setting about trying to make them irrelevant.

The problem for presidents who, in their frustration over the limits on their power, empower extragovernmental groups to carry out their extragovernmental policies, is that it usually comes a cropper. If Richard Nixon’s “plumbers” hadn’t been such stumblebums, botching every wayward project they took on, the Nixon presidency just might have survived its attempts to determine the opposition party’s candidate for the next election.

In the case of the current scandal, the “three amigos” — Kurt Volker, a foreign policy expert who signed on as a special envoy to Ukraine; Rick Perry, the departing energy secretary who has close ties to the energy industry; and Gordon Sondland, a hotel magnate whose donations to the Trump inaugural committee helped him secure his job as ambassador to the European Union — usurped Ukraine policy from normal State Department channels, setting Mr. Trump’s private whims against the stated policies of his government. Mr. Sondland appears to have known even less about Ukraine than he did about Europe before taking that job.

The three men seem to have reported to Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a freelance provocateur. Mr. Giuliani, now under federal investigation in New York, has had his own business interests in Ukraine’s natural gas industry. Under arrest are a couple of his sidekicks, Soviet-born Americans known by their first names, Lev and Igor, with substantial Ukraine interests.

Mr. Giuliani and the three amigos were reportedly part of the president’s scheme to hold up $391 million in congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine in order to wring from the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, a public announcement that he would order an investigation of Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, who took an ill-advised membership on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies while his father was managing Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. (Numerous press investigations have turned up no actual misbehavior on the Bidens’ part.) The fragile Hunter, who lost his brother, to whom he was very close, to brain cancer and has struggled with addiction, remains a Republican political target.

Mr. Sondland inadvertently provided the only real news on the first day of the hearings, when Mr. Taylor testified that a member of his staff overheard the president talking to Mr. Sondland when the latter called him on his cellphone from a restaurant in Kiev. Mr. Trump volubly asked how things were going in getting President Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Bidens. This linked Mr. Trump directly to the pressure on Ukraine. Later, it was learned that a second person also overheard the call. Mr. Trump’s allies have also pushed Mr. Zelensky to look into the fantasy that the foreign interference in the 2016 election involved Ukraine, and not Russia.

But the hearings are less about big disclosures than about building the case, brick by brick, of why the president should be impeached. The Democrats have suggested various terms on which to charge him, and they’re not yet united on that. Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested on Thursday that the charge should be bribery, since that’s a constitutionally stated reason for impeachment, and it's a crime that people can understand. But this is a disheartening choice, because a more significant ground for impeachment is abuse of power, which isn’t in the statute books, and it would apply to Mr. Trump’s holding up the arms aid, among other offenses in this instance.

Yet, just a few days ago, Ms. Pelosi and others were talking abuses of power. A House Democrat advised me not to take too seriously the flurry of competing rationales: The Democrats haven’t actually met to decide on a unified position, he said; that may wait until the Judiciary Committee draws up the actual articles of impeachment.

The Republican strategy of the moment is apparently to seal off Mr. Trump from Mr. Giuliani and the amigos’ activities. Their attempts to engage in their specialty of disrupting hearings was swiftly shut down by the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who was firm but fair, leaving them little to dispute. They’ve found it awkward to defend Mr. Trump since they know that squeezing the Ukrainians for desperately needed military aid in their war against Russia for his own political purpose is indefensible. Moreover, Mr. Trump has complained about their focus on process issues, continuing to insist, ridiculously, that his infamous July 25 phone call to Mr. Zelensky was “perfect.” Regrettably, he may actually think it was.

...

==

trump inc pod

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-ukraine-scandal-follow-the-money

Ukraine scandal is mostly viewed through the prism of politics — an attempt by President Donald Trump to gain an advantage over a political opponent. But, as most things are, it’s also about money — and we found lots of it flowing between key players in the scandal.

On this week’s episode of “Trump, Inc.,” we follow the money.

First, Let’s Meet Our Cast of Ukraine Players

Richest among them is Dmitry Firtash, an oligarch who has been battling to avoid an extradition flight to Chicago, where he faces federal charges of bribery. The Department of Justice has described Firtash as an “upper-echelon” associate “of Russian organized crime.” (He denies the charges and says the prosecution is politically motivated.)

Firtash made his fortune as a behind-the-scenes middleman selling heavily marked-up Russian gas to Europe. So he wasn’t happy when Vice President Joe Biden pushed Ukraine to roll back corruption. After Biden gave a speech in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2015 saying the energy sector “needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles — not sweetheart deals,” Firtash called it “repulsive.”

Firtash hired attorneys Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, who frequently appear on TV defending Trump over Ukraine. The two also represent journalist John Solomon, whose stories ended up spreading Ukraine disinformation.

And then there’s Lev Parnas, who translated for Firtash’s legal team and is an associate of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. “I’m the best-paid interpreter in the world,” Parnas reportedly said.

Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman were indicted in October over allegedly funneling foreign money into U.S. elections. (They deny the charges.)

Firtash and the rest of the Ukraine players have all been busy with a flurry of intertwined business ventures. Let’s take a look:

Business Venture No. 1: Natural Gas and the Firing of an Ambassador

At the same time Parnas and Fruman were suddenly becoming big Republican donors, they were trying to leverage those new political connections to advance their needs in the natural gas industry in Ukraine. Their goals would have been very profitable for Firtash.

It didn’t work. But they did get something else they were pushing for, specifically, the firing of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. “They were interested in having a different ambassador at post, I guess for — because they wanted to have business dealings in Ukraine, or additional business dealings,” Yovanovitch testified. “I didn’t understand that, because nobody at the embassy had ever met those two individuals."

Business Venture No. 2: Submarines, Yachts, Real Estate and Other Things Rich People Like

Fruman, we’ve learned, has an interesting company, Otrada Luxury Group, that appears to be catering to those with lots of disposable income. A partial list of goods, according to the company’s brochure: jewelry and expensive watches, yachts, speedboats, private planes, high-end real estate and, of course, submarines and amphibious vehicles.

We went to the U.S. address listed on a brochure. It’s a rent-by-the-hour office. No one there seemed to know of Fruman or Otrada.

Business Venture No. 3: Cybersecurity Consulting Starring Giuliani

An intriguingly named company owned by Parnas, Fraud Guarantee, paid Giuliani $500,000 for consulting. The Wall Street Journal dug into the company and could find no actual business or customers. Giuliani said the money came from a domestic source, but he declined to say from whom.

Business Ventures No. 4 and No. 5: Giuliani’s Podcasts

Although nothing came of that effort, Giuliani is still apparently looking to get into the podcast game. He was overheard during a recent lunch discussing a potential podcast focused on the impeachment. “He is considering several options,” a Giuliani spokeswoman told CNN. “Many Americans want to hear directly from Rudy Giuliani.”As ProPublica has reported, Giuliani was also working on a podcast with The Hill, the publication that ended up passing along Ukraine disinformation. Giuliani said he was “never paid” for the work and said it was a “perfectly legitimate situation.” The Hill said it had been planning a “podcast network with a multitude of political voices from all sides.”

And Then There Is the Jewish Refugee Charity

Fruman is also at the helm of a U.S.-based nonprofit that raises money for a Jewish refugee settlement outside Kyiv. The nonprofit, American Friends of Anatevka, sponsored a trip Giuliani was planning to take to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump’s opponents. Giuliani is also the settlement’s honorary mayor. American Friends of Anatevka is currently advertising a million-dollar match for donations. Its tax returns show it had less than $1,500 in income in 2017.

Listen to it all unfold here.

==

1119 pro pub

giuliani Was Close to a Podcast Deal With the News Outlet That Spread His Ukraine Conspiracies

The president’s lawyer was negotiating a possible deal to co-produce a podcast with the publication — and The Hill’s John Solomon helped with the talks even as his articles were used in a disinformation campaign.

by Mike Spies, Jake Pearson and J. David McSwane

View Story

==

https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari/watch/-he-s-gonna-sing-giuliani-hires-3-lawyers-amid-ukraine-scandal-73089605883

no lnx

President Trump’s lawyer Giuliani hires his own lawyers, as investigations mount

By

Rosalind S. Helderman

November 6, 2019 at 6:29 PM EST

President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has hired lawyers of his own to represent him, as federal prosecutors in New York probe his interactions with two men charged with campaign finance violations.

Giuliani announced the hires on Twitter on Wednesday, indicating that he will be represented by New York lawyers Robert Costello, Eric Creizman and Melissa Madrigal.

The hires marked a shift for the former New York mayor, who had until recently insisted he did not need a defense lawyer, even as scrutiny of his interactions with the men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, has mounted.

Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani to current and former Ukrainian officials as Giuliani sought damaging information about Democrats in Ukraine.

That project is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry into Trump, after the president pressed Ukraine’s president to work with Giuliani and launch investigations involving the 2016 election and former vice president Joe Biden.

Parnas and Fruman were arrested last month at Dulles International Airport and charged with conspiring to violate campaign finance laws by funneling foreign money to various state and federal candidates. They have pleaded not guilty.

Giuliani’s interactions with the two men are being investigated by federal prosecutors in New York, according to people familiar with the matter.

Giuliani’s decision to hire defense attorneys comes as a new lawyer for Parnas indicated earlier this week that the former Giuliani associate may be willing to cooperate with Congress’s impeachment inquiry.

Transcripts from closed-door depositions with diplomats conducted as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry and released publicly this week show that Giuliani’s name has been mentioned hundreds of times in the sessions.

‘Talk to Rudy’: Testimony from diplomats highlights Giuliani’s central role in driving Ukraine policy

The diplomats have testified that they came to understand over the summer that Giuliani was telling Ukrainian officials that they needed to release a public statement promising to investigate the unsubstantiated theory that their country interfered in the 2016 election, as well as a company whose board included Biden’s son. The diplomats have described Giuliani’s efforts as a shadow diplomacy conducted outside the normal channels of U.S. policymaking.

A transcript released Wednesday shows that William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, told lawmakers that it was his “clear understanding” that U.S. military aid would not be sent to Ukraine until the Ukrainians committed to initiating the investigations that Giuliani sought.

Giuliani had said that in addition to working with Parnas and Fruman on his Ukraine research, he had also been offering paid advice to a company co-founded by Parnas. Giuliani said he was paid $500,000 for the advice he provided to the company, the Florida-based Fraud Guarantee.

In the weeks after a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s Ukraine policy became public and the impeachment inquiry began, Giuliani had been given multiple daily interviews to reporters about his activities in Ukraine and his interactions with Parnas and Fruman.

“Why do I need a lawyer? I haven’t done anything wrong,” Giuliani said in an October interview with The Washington Post, after he dismissed his first lawyer.

In recent days, he had ended his round-the-clock interviews and cut down significantly on his media contacts.

However, in a series of tweets on Wednesday, he insisted that his work on Ukraine was conducted “solely as a defense attorney to defend my client” — Trump — “against false charges, that kept changing as one after another were disproven.”

He continued that he was confident that the evidence “when revealed fully, will show that this present farce is as much a frame-up and hoax as Russian collusion, maybe worse, and will prove the president is innocent.”

He then announced the hiring of his legal team. None of the three lawyers named by Giuliani responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

One of the three, Costello, was at the center an episode involving Giuliani and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, that was documented in the report released in April by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

During the special counsel’s investigation, as Cohen faced possible indictment in New York for financial crimes, he alleged that allies of Trump dangled the possibility that he could be pardoned if he remained loyal to the president.

According to the Mueller report, Costello wrote in an April 2018 email to Cohen that he had spoken to Giuliani and that Cohen could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places.”

Cohen ultimately cooperated with prosecutors and pleaded guilty, including to campaign finance violations he said were undertaken at Trump’s direction.

Federal prosecutors in New York requested documents from Costello over his emails to Cohen, though Costello denied that there was any “hidden message” in his communications to Cohen.

Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

==

under investigation 10/17/19?

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lev and igor PAID RUDY $500K , tho he spin as his employees thus covered by exec priv /atty client priv?

rudy met w/ poro, nixed manafort prosecution?

kilimnik investigated but allowed to flee to russia

javelin missles

==

omg this could finish djt? 10/18/19

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-solomon/how-conservative-writer-john-solomon-served-conduit-rudy-giulianis-ukraine-conspiracy

At the center of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump lies a disinformation campaign led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani that was aided and abetted by conservative writer John Solomon. Through Solomon, Giuliani injected his disinformation campaign straight into the heart of conservative media -- Fox News -- with seemingly full knowledge of at least some at Fox. And eventually, Solomon landed a job at the network.

It is now known that Trump blessed Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, in which he sought information that would undermine the intelligence community's findings that Russia interfered in our 2016 election to benefit Trump. Giuliani was also trying to dig up dirt to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

Much attention has focused on Giuliani’s actions and the shady cast of characters he worked with, but less has been paid to the right-wing media figures who colluded with the president’s lawyer to make his smear campaign public -- a plan that came dangerously close to succeeding.

What follows is a case study in how right-wing media work hand in hand with Trump cronies to smear his enemies, undermine democracy, and defend the president at all costs.

Here’s how it went down.

Key Takeaways

Rudy Giuliani, working with con men and Trump cronies, pursued an “investigation” in Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.

In March, Giuliani sent the results of his investigation to the State Department to be investigated and to conservative columnist John Solomon.

The same month, Solomon began publishing a series of columns that mirrored the sourcing and claims Giuliani made in his State Department dossier.

Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine.

During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times.

Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that deep state elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump.

On October 5, John Solomon landed a job at Fox.

Key players

Rudy Giuliani -- the president’s personal attorney who has traveled around the globe attempting to dig up dirt on Democrats and discredit the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two Soviet-born con men with ties to Ukraine who worked with Giuliani to concoct the disinformation campaign and to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine fired, reportedly in the hopes of advancing their business interests in the country. The two have since been arrested for campaign finance violations related to making allegedly illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, as well as a pro-Trump super PAC. They also reportedly worked for Dmitry Firtash.

Dmitry Firtash -- a Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch and former business associate of Paul Manafort who is in Austria fighting extradition to the United States to face charges related to a bribery conspiracy. At the same time Parnas and Fruman were working with Giuliani, the two were reportedly also working on Firtash’s behalf to push for the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as part of a plan to install new leadership at Ukraine’s Naftogaz gas company. Part of this plan reportedly would have included Naftogaz paying “Firtash a debt of more than $200 million that Firtash believes he is owed by the company.” NBC reported that while this was happening, Firtash “was playing a key role in the effort by Parnas, Fruman, and Giuliani to hunt for dirt on Donald Trump's political opponents in Ukraine.”

Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova -- two attorneys closely tied to Trump who also worked with Giuliani to support his efforts in Ukraine. The duo are known for their role in bolstering conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation and at one point were considered to join Trump’s personal legal team. The two quietly represent Dmitry Firtash in fighting his extradition to the United States. They hired Parnas as an “interpreter” to work with them on the Firtash case while Parnas was also working with Giuliani.

John Solomon -- a conservative columnist who until recently was the executive vice president of The Hill. Solomon was the conduit through which Giuliani, Parnas, Toensing and diGenova planted their stories in order to spread their coordinated disinformation campaign through the media.

Sean Hannity -- Fox News host who is close to Trump and worked with Giuliani to make his show an integral part of their media strategy, providing a place where they could sow the seeds of the smear campaign against Biden. Giuliani and Hannity discussed this strategy in January, and Solomon became a staple on Hannity’s prime-time programming.

The plan

According to Parnas, his friendship with Giuliani began two years ago as they were running in similar political circles and attending the same events. In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman began connecting Giuliani to a network of disgraced former and current Ukrainian officials and prosecutors to dig up dirt on Biden and the 2016 election.

The conspiracy theory they concocted went like this: Ukrainian officials worked with Democrats to find dirt on Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort in order to damage Trump. They did so, Giuliani claimed, by fabricating the “black ledger” that showed that Manafort had received millions of dollars from the former pro-Russia Ukrainian ruling party that had been recently overthrown. The revelation of this ledger helped force Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign, and Manafort was eventually prosecuted and convicted of a wide range of crimes as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference in the 2016 election.

In addition, according to Giuliani’s conspiracy theory, the Ukrainian Embassy was working with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and in return, the American Embassy and the Obama administration actively blocked investigations in Ukraine that Giuliani claims targeted Democrats’ political allies. As with most conspiracy theories on the right, George Soros is involved in this one too. The theory posits that a Ukrainian good governance, anti-corruption group -- the Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) -- was involved in framing Manafort and was corruptly tied to an FBI agent who was investigating Manafort. Giuliani also claims that an investigation into the group was shut down due to U.S. pressure and that the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine provided Ukrainian officials with a “do not prosecute” list that included people linked to AntAC. As a bonus, through the “investigation,” Giuliani claims to have been presented with evidence that then-Vice President Biden acted corruptly by withholding U.S. aid to force the resignation of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son.

Nothing about this conspiracy theory is true. First, there’s no evidence that the infamous “black ledger” was fraudulent, and several payments listed in the document have been confirmed to be accurate. The Intercept reported: “Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist and reformist member of parliament who helped publicize the off-the-books payments” said that “Giuliani ‘is a liar’ for saying that the black ledger was a forgery. ‘It is a real document, with real signatures,’ Leshchenko said in a telephone interview, explaining that it had been examined by Ukrainian law enforcement experts.” Giuliani seems to have adopted the false claim about the ledger from Manafort, whose legal team has embraced it since 2017 and whom Guiliani has been meeting with to discuss the materials.

As for Giuliani’s claims that investigations into AntAC were dropped due to political pressure,  the State Department has called claims of a so-called “do not prosecute” list “complete poppycock.” And an investigation into the group’s handling of foreign aid money was widely believed to be politically motivated retaliation for the group’s anti-corruption work. Finally, while Biden did pressure Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was roundly criticized for blocking corruption investigations, there’s no evidence that he did so to benefit his son. In reality, the push to get the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, fired was a part of an anti-corruption effort by advocates and international supporters of Ukraine. The United States’ well-established position was that ousting Shokin was a critical aspect of anti-corruption measures. The investigation into the energy company whose board included Hunter Biden was long dormant, and Hunter Biden was never the subject of the investigation.

Nonetheless, Giuliani says he completed his “investigation” in March and sent his findings to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the understanding that Pompeo would investigate. (NBCNews.com, however, reported: “A source with knowledge of the events said ... that Pompeo never promised Rudy Giuliani that he would investigate the contents of the envelope or anything related to Ukraine.”) Giuliani also sent the materials to Solomon.

NBCNews.com obtained a copy of the documents that Giuliani sent to the State Department in March and reported that they contained “a glimpse of an intricate media strategy to spread the story including segments being placed on Fox News.” NBC said the “documents also show that Giuliani, through conservative writer John Solomon’s columns in The Hill, attempted to tie former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to the liberal donor George Soros as part of a massive conspiracy to take down Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.” The materials Giuliani sent included interview notes from interviews he conducted with then-current and former Ukrainian prosecutors that “paint the picture of the narrative that Giuliani has been pushing involving the Bidens.”

The media strategy

Giuliani and associates feed story to Solomon

Around the same time Giuliani sent his packet of materials to the State Department, he also sent the materials to Solomon, who began reporting on its contents through the opinion pages of The Hill without identifying the materials as having originated with Giuliani. Solomon’s writing for some time had focused heavily around trying to discredit the Mueller investigation and the notion that Russia meddled into the 2016 elections to help Trump. On March 20, he published the first of many scoops specifically related to Ukraine’s involvement in this effort. Over the next six months, Solomon published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which primarily focused on Ukraine.

In his reporting, Solomon spelled out Giuliani’s conspiracy theory in detail. For instance:

He reported that Ukrainian officials claimed to have “evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes,” at least some of it related to Biden.

Solomon reported that these officials tried to “deliver their evidence to Washington” but were unable because the American ambassador (Yovanovitch) “blocked” them “from obtaining a visa” to the U.S.

He weaved an elaborate story about Americans working with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign manager Manafort, in order to damage Trump.

He claimed that the infamous “black ledger” that showed Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian officials was fabricated and released to damage Trump. He also suggested that in January 2016, Obama’s Department of Justice pressured Ukraine to help the department investigate Manafort in response to Trump’s rise in popularity in the Republican primary race (Manafort did not join the Trump campaign until March 2016).

He strongly suggested that the Obama State Department pressured Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a Ukrainian good governance group linked to Soros because Soros backed Clinton.

He also claimed the U.S. ambassador’s “do not prosecute” list included people related to this organization, and he strained to link the group to the Manafort investigation by claiming that an FBI agent involved in the investigation is tied to the same group.

And, of course, he claimed that Biden withheld a billion dollars worth of U.S. aid to shut down an investigation into Burisma Holdings and Biden’s son Hunter through his position on the company’s board.

Solomon’s reporting relies heavily on the sources Giuliani fed him. In an interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani named three current and former Ukrainian prosecutors as persons he interviewed, specifically former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, and Nazar Kholodnytsky, head of Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Giuliani is also known to have met with a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andrii Telizhenko and is linked to Kostiantyn Kulyk -- Lutsenko’s deputy who was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. Eight of the twelve columns Solomon wrote on the topic featured at least one of these five sources.

At least three of Solomon’s columns feature information meant to undermine the validity of the Russia investigation that may have been leaked from the Ukrainian pro-Russia oligarch Dmitry Firtash’s legal team, which included diGenova and Toensing. Toensing and diGenova have been working with Firtash since at least July -- and indeed Solomon published an entire column in July based exclusively off material and anonymous sources from Firtash’s legal team. They appear to have been involved with his case much earlier than July, though.

Included in the material Giuliani sent to the State Department is a March 26 email from Solomon -- titled “Fwd: Outline of Soros reporting, including embedded documents” -- in which Solomon forwarded a draft of his article before it was published to the same three people working with Giuliani who are also known to have been working with Firtash -- Parnas, Toensing, and diGenova. The column was the first of three that mentioned Firtash, and it attempted to tie AntAC -- and through it Soros -- “to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort.” Solomon repeated the suggestion in his August 7 column on Soros’ “secret 2016 access” to State Department officials. In a fourth column, Solomon reported on an affidavit of a former Ukrainian prosecutor that he exclusively received. The affidavit was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.”

Solomon brings the conspiracy theory to Fox

The next stage in the plan involved Solomon taking his “scoop” to Fox News, specifically to Sean Hannity. From March 20 -- when Solomon published his first story on the Ukraine conspiracy theory -- through October 2, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity, whose host dutifully promoted Solomon’s scoops and wove them into his ever-evolving conspiracy theory that “deep state” elements in the government have been plotting to overthrow Trump. Giuliani also appeared on those networks frequently, clocking in at least 64 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business during that time period. Toensing and diGenova appeared over 75 times on the two networks during this period.

The fact that they were working together on these stories, or -- in the case of Toensing and diGenova -- that they were legally representing Firtash, was certainly not transparent to viewers. In perhaps the most egregious example, on the September 26 episode of Hannity, Hannity hosted Solomon to report on an affidavit he obtained from the disgraced prosecutor Shokin, who claimed he was forced to resign to stop the investigation into the company connected to  Hunter Biden. Hannity then hosted diGenova and Toensing to discuss it, and the two hailed the affidavit as proof of their conspiracy theory and declared it would “shoot a hole in” Biden’s defense.

However, the affidavit states that it was prepared “at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash … for use in legal proceedings in Austria.” In other words, diGenova and Toensing were part of the legal team that produced the affidavit that Solomon later exclusively obtained, wrote up, and then took to Hannity -- a fact not mentioned by any of them. Giuliani has since repeatedly referenced this affidavit in numerous media appearances to support his claims about Biden’s alleged corruption.

Hannity repeatedly gave clues suggesting he knew the full range of stories Solomon would be reporting. For instance, despite the fact that Solomon’s March 20 column did not mention Biden or corruption, Hannity teased on his radio show that day that “I just happen to have a little birdie telling me in my ear that, well, Joe Biden may have an issue here that is bigger than anything ever alleged about Donald Trump.” On September 23, Hannity and Giuliani admitted to having talked about the Biden Ukraine story as early as January.

The payoff

Giuliani repeatedly touted and praised Solomon’s “blockbuster” reporting. He has at least twice opined that Solomon should “get a Pulitzer Prize” and has taken to Twitter to sing Solomon’s praises:

Hannity, too, repeatedly praised Solomon’s “great reporting” as he hyped Solomon’s columns. He regularly described Solomon as a “friend” of the program and declared that mainstream news outlets, like The New York Times, “peddled lies, conspiracy theories and hoax[es]” about the Russia investigation whereas Solomon “was right” all along. On April 25, Hannity asked Trump about Solomon’s and others' reporting around the Russia investigation, and the president replied: “These are great reporters. … These are people that should be getting Pulitzers.” Trump added, “These are the ones that should be winning. It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine.”

Solomon’s efforts paid off. On October 5, Fox News confirmed that John Solomon had joined the network as a contributor. During his first appearance on Hannity as an official Fox News employee, Hannity said: “John Solomon, welcome to the family. It’s been a long time coming, sir.”

==

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/inside-the-jaw-dropping-connection-between-trump-ousting-ukraine-ambassador-and-guilianis-busted-henchmen/

no lnx

Inside the jaw-dropping connection between Trump ousting Ukraine ambassador and Guiliani’s busted henchmen

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 11, 2019

10

Trying to wrap their arms around the flood of information that has come out in the past 24 hours about two close associates of Rudy Giuliani who attempted to flee the country before being arrested for campaign finance violations, a CNN panel drew a direct line between their actions at the behest of the former New York City mayor and President Donald Trump firing the ambassador to Ukraine.

Speaking with hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, New Yorker journalist Susan Glassner explained that ousted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch — who is expected to testify before House members on Friday — may have been a victim of the machinations of not only Giuliani but also his arrested associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

After host Berman noted there was still a question over whether the White House would attempt to stop Yovanovitch from testifying, Glassner pointed out some curious connections to the Parnas and Fruman.

“I think it’s very significant that you put Ambassador Yovanovitch up there in that graphic and the reason why is that, to me, it’s a breathtaking aspect of this unfolding scandal,” she began. ” And we still don’t know a lot of information that Giuliani teamed up with this pair, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, acting on the behest of Ukrainian officials from the former government of [Ukraine President Petor] Poroshenko.”

“Their agenda was to get this pesky U.S. ambassador who was bothering them about too much corruption in the Ukrainian government to get her out, and they tried. they went to a congressman,” she continued. “I believe that was former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions in the summer of 2018. He then produced a letter complaining about Ambassador Yovanovitch.”

“Then they teamed up with Giuliani, and who executed their plan but the president of the United States,” she added. “We know that President Trump is the one who ordered Ambassador Yovanovitch to be forced out of her position, so he is carrying out their mission essentially of getting rid of the U.S. ambassador. I find that to be an extraordinary aspect of this unfolding story and very significant.”

Watch below:

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/tip-of-the-iceberg-prosecutors-allege-vast-criminal-conspiracy-by-giuliani-associates-to-funnel-foreign-cash-to-trump-and-gop-2/

sum

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-people-rudy-giuliani-pals-around-with/

no lnx

The people Rudy Giuliani pals around with

Rudy Giuliani, Fox News

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

16

When we left this story, I had explained that two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were conduits for the conspiracy theories Rudy Giuliani has been spreading about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. On Thursday, we learned that both men were arrested at Dulles airport while trying to flee the country. Here’s the report from the Washington Post.

According to the indictment unsealed in New York, Parnas, Fruman and other defendants “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office so that the defendants could buy potential influence with the candidates, campaigns, and the candidates’ governments.”

I previously noted that a company owned by Parnas and Fruman had received a payment of $1.26 million from the client trust account of a lawyer specializing in real estate and foreign investments. Two days later, they donated $325,000 to a Trump super PAC. Perhaps the pending charges will motivate these two men to spill the beans on the source of those funds.

Meanwhile, Giuliani is getting ready to shift gears by suggesting that we should keep an eye on Romania.

TPM Livewire

@TPMLiveWire

Rudy GIuliani to Sean Hannity: "I want you to keep your eye on Romania. Just watch Romania."

Embedded video

What we’ll be hearing soon from Giuliani is that Hunter Biden advised a Romanian businessman, Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, who was sentenced to seven years in jail for fraud and corruption. But what Giuliani won’t tell us is that he used his position as Trump’s personal lawyer to lobby the Romanian government on Popoviciu’s behalf.

Back in July of 2016, Popoviciu hired the law firm of former FBI Director Louis Freeh to represent him. Then in August 2018, Politico reported that Giuliani had written a letter to the Romanian government criticizing their anti-corruption efforts.

Giuliani’s letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis appears to take sides in a fight at the top of the Romanian government over how to rein in high-level corruption.

The former New York mayor’s letter criticizes the “excesses” of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), contrary to U.S. State Department policy, which has been supportive of the agency’s efforts. Although the missive does not claim to have been sent on President Trump’s authority, Romanian politicians seeking to blunt the power of the DNA have already used it to sow doubt about the U.S. government’s position…

Giuliani calls for an amnesty to be extended “to those who have been prosecuted and convicted through the excesses of the DNA.”

In the letter, Giuliani failed to disclose that he was acting on behalf of a client. But in an attempt to combat the charges that he was using his position as Trump’s lawyer to lobby the Romanian government, he said that he was working for the very law firm that had been hired by Popoviciu.

Giuliani — who regularly appears in the media as a public representative of Trump — told POLITICO Tuesday that his letter “was based on a report I reviewed” by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who runs a global consulting firm called Freeh Group International Solutions. “They are paying my fee,” Giuliani said of the Freeh Group.

A sane person would know that pointing the finger at Hunter Biden’s work for Popoviciu would open up this whole can of worms for Giuliani, adding to the story of how he pals around with some pretty nefarious characters and completely undermining Trump’s talking point about working against government corruption. That’s why it is tempting to question the man’s sanity. But Giuliani’s apparent obsession with the former vice president might have sprung from that moment in the 2008 Democratic primary debate when Biden cleaned his clock.

Regardless of what is motivating Giuliani, it is clear that he continues to bury Trump by doing more harm than good to the president’s case. To borrow Obama’s best debate put-down of Mitt Romney, all I can say is, “Please proceed, Mayor.”

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.

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crimes?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/former-trump-attorney-reveals-men-arrested-on-campaign-finance-charges-assisted-giuliani-in-his-work-representing-trump/

no lnx

Former Trump attorney John Dowd reveals men arrested on campaign finance charges ‘assisted’ Giuliani in his work representing the president

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement October 10, 2019

19

The former lead lawyer for President Donald Trump, representing him during the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia and Trump, John Dowd, is now representing the two Ukrainian-born men arrested overnight attempting to leave the country. The two men were arrested in relation to a campaign finance investigation on charges that include conspiracy, falsifying records, and falsifying records to the FEC.

The men also worked with Giuliani to help him try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

The former lead lawyer for President Donald Trump, representing him during the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia and Trump, John Dowd, is now representing the two Ukrainian-born men arrested overnight attempting to leave the country. The two men were arrested in relation to a campaign finance investigation on charges that include conspiracy, falsifying records, and falsifying records to the FEC.

The men also worked with Giuliani to help him try to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

Dowd in a statement says his clients, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, “assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump.”

That’s huge, given the charges against them.

“Mr. Parnas and Mr. Furman,” Dowd continues, “have also been represented by Mr. Giuliani in connection with their personal and business affairs.”

“They also assisted Joseph DiGenova [sic] and Victoria Toensing in their law practice.”

Both diGenova and Toensing are Fox News regulars who defend Trump on-air. They were rumored to have been hired by the White House to assist Trump with his defense during the Mueller investigation but that appeared to have been thwarted by Trump himself.

Politico congressional reporter Kyle Cheney makes this important – and damning – observation:

@kyledcheney

IMPORTANT: Fruman and Parnas' lawyer (former Trump lawyer John Dowd) just laid out all of their connections to Trump world (in his famous Comic Sans letter).

It's not just Giuliani but DiGenova, Toensing -- and they even helped with Trump-related legal work. >>>

View image on Twitter

Kyle Cheney

?

@kyledcheney

If prosecutors are correct, this means two people who worked on legal matters for Trump were simultaneously running a straw donor scheme on behalf of foreign interests.

2,419

8:04 AM - Oct 10, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

1,055 people are talking about this

That, too, is huge.

Here’s Dowd’s statement, which was in the form of a letter sent to the House Intelligence Committee:

Kyle Cheney

?

@kyledcheney

IMPORTANT: Fruman and Parnas' lawyer (former Trump lawyer John Dowd) just laid out all of their connections to Trump world (in his famous Comic Sans letter).

It's not just Giuliani but DiGenova, Toensing -- and they even helped with Trump-related legal work. >>>

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/understanding-trumps-whackiest-conspiracy-theory-to-date/

no lnx many

Understanding Trump’s whackiest conspiracy theory to date

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon October 7, 2019

Here’s what’s OK: If we feel there’s corruption, like I feel there was in the 2016 campaign — there was tremendous corruption against me — if we feel there’s corruption, we have a right to go to a foreign country. And just so you know — just so you know, I was investigated. I was investigated. Okay? Me. Me. In my campaign — I ran, I won. I was invest- — you won’t say that, will you? I was investigated. I was investigated. And they think it could have been by U.K. They think it could have been by Australia. They think it could have been by Italy. So when you get down to it, I was investigated by the Obama administration. By the Obama administration I was investigated.

— Donald Trump, Oct. 4, 2019

Last Friday I wrote about the origins of the Joe Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory, when the same professional hitmen who pushed the “crooked Hillary” story about alleged influence-peddling with the Clinton Foundation produced a book alleging that Biden had leveraged his power as vice president to help his son’s business. (The evidence shows that not only did Biden not do that, the actions he took were actually detrimental to his son’s case.)

All that is almost hilarious in light of this AP report that broke late on Sunday night in which it was revealed that  close associates of Trump’s fixer Rudy Giuliani and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have been doing some lucrative influence-peddling of their own, trying to leverage their relationships for shares in a natural gas company in Ukraine. Trump is now trying to blame Perry for that misguided phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to the impeachment inquiry. It’s never a dull moment in this Ukraine scandal.

It’s clear, however, as the quote above shows, that while Trump was happy to tar his political rival Joe Biden, his true interest in Ukraine lies in his ongoing obsession with a daft conspiracy theory that he and Russia were both set up by the FBI, the CIA and the foreign services of several key U.S. allies, along with Ukraine, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The ostensible goal was to destroy his campaign and if that didn’t work, his presidency. Trump seems to have convinced Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and at least a few U.S. senators that this is a legitimate line of inquiry.

Barr has been running around the world, accompanied at times by the special prosecutor he assigned to investigate the matter, interviewing the heads of the intelligence services of various allies. He asked the president himself to intervene with certain heads of state to get their cooperation with the probe.

The specific aspect of the conspiracy theory that took Barr to Italy this past week was laid out in detail by Lucian K. Truscott IV in Salon on Sunday.  In a nutshell, it all revolves around onetime Trump “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious “professor” who told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton — which Papadopoulos in turn drunkenly shared with the Australian high commissioner to the U.K. in a pub a few weeks later. That led to the Aussies sounding the alarm to the U.S., which led to the FBI taking a look to see whether Russians were trying to interfere in the presidential election.

Giuliani has been running his mouth about this for months calling Mifsud a “counterintelligence operative, either Maltese or Italian” and Papadapoulos has been tweeting as if he’s a high level investigator for the Department of Justice:

George Papadopoulos

@GeorgePapa19

AG Barr has been on official travel in Italy for the past two days. As I explained months ago, on Fox and in my book, Mifsud was an Italian operative handled by the CIA. Italy holds the keys to the kingdom. Right government, right time. ????????

He’s quite the super-sleuth. It’s his wild imagination that has fueled this particular conspiracy theory, along with the bizarre 4chan storyline that suggests the security firm CrowdStrike framed Russia on behalf of the DNC. Trump mentioned that in the phone call with Zelensky, but seems to have embellished the conspiracy theory even beyond the ludicrous narrative right-wingers had previously laid out. According to NBC News, when the president said  “I guess you have one of your wealthy people. … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” people who knew the context thought that “Trump’s call felt detached from any sense of logic.” How unusual.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., seems to think this whole thing makes sense, however. He appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday and shared his thoughts on the matter:

@MeetThePress

WATCH: @SenRonJohnson is asked why he winced & brings up a "conspiracy theory."@chucktodd: "I have no idea why we're going here. ... Can we please answer the question I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you're not criticizing him?" #MTP

Embedded video

If that sounded a bit scattered, here’s Pompeo pretending that everyone in the administration is just doing their jobs:

“It is not only appropriate, but it is our duty to investigate if we think there was interference in the election of 2016,” Mr. Pompeo said in Athens. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other. And so inquiries with respect to that are completely important.”

He added: “There’s been some suggestion somehow that it would be inappropriate for the United States government to engage in that activity, and I see it just precisely the opposite. I see our duty to engage in activity that ensures that we have fair, free elections.”

Keep in mind that Pompeo was first appointed as Trump’s CIA director, and led his own investigation which found no wrongdoing by the agency.  Yet he came out and gave that sanctimonious little speech legitimizing this loony conspiracy theory. Even he has to pay homage to Trump and his consigliere Giuliani’s febrile fantasies. Frankly, he doesn’t seem to mind.

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. allies are becoming increasingly irritated by this ridiculous crusade. Barr is going outside the normal channels, riling up internal politics in their countries and basically making a hash of America’s foreign policy. He and Pompeo may just be trying to soothe Trump’s massive ego — or maybe they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid too. In the end, that doesn’t much matter. The most powerful nation on earth is clearly being run by a bunch of kooks. It’s hard to see why anyone else would ever trust us again.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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ref 4 digby

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/09/new-york-times-battered-on-msnbc-for-pushing-smear-of-hunter-biden-in-order-to-maintain-access-to-trump/

An “AM Joy” panel jumped all over the New York Times for pushing a widely debunked smear of Hunter Biden promoted by Donald Trump, saying the newspaper is more interested in maintaining their access to the Oval Office than debunking the lie.

Speaking with host Joy Reid — who noted that her producers asked for comment from the Times but were rebuffed — MSNBC regular Maria Teresa Kumar scorched the Times, as well as reporter Ken Vogel, for the uncritical parroting of the president’s smear. Pointing to Vogel’s story and noting his source was a Breitbart writer, Kumar explained, “The biggest challenge, Ken Vogel does not declare the source , that Peter Schweizer,  is underwritten by the Mercer family — the Mercer family is a neo-facist family that underwrites Steve Bannon and the Breitbart Report so it is not credible.”

“What they had done so stealthily, so well, is that they know that if they can have any type of story in an established newspaper, as is the New York Times, that it any breeds a sense of legitimacy,” she continued. “Fox News takes it and Breitbart takes it, all the ultra-rightwings take it and say, ‘Look, the New York Times is saying it, so it must be true.’ That’s a lack of due diligence.” “It’s disappointing in the New York Times, quite frankly,” she further explained. “When they try to equate something with Biden and Trump, they’re trying to make sure they continue having access to the president and that’s not the way to do it.”

With host Reid noting Vogel’s desire to not appear on her show, AM Joy regular Eric Boehlert called the Times reporting, including previous stories about Democrats and Hillary Clinton, “Timidity access journalism.”

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newsweek.com › ... › Russia › Former Soviet Union

Nov 16, 2018 - Trump Lawyer Rudy Giuliani's Mysterious Ties to Russia and Former Soviet ... Both Armenia and Kazakhstan were once part of the Soviet Union, and ... to the Pro-Putin regime of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Giuliani cancels paid appearance next week at Kremlin ...www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2019/09/27

Sep 27, 2019 - Rudy Giuliani can't stop talking Ukraine on TV ... “I didn't know Putin was going,” he said in a brief interview, adding in a text: “Discretion is ... union whose members are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

Rudy Giuliani's work for prominent figures in Ukraine comes ...www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2019/10/01

Oct 2, 2019 - Rudy Giuliani subpoenaed by House Democrats ... in Armenia, hours before appearances there by Russian President Vladimir Putin and ... In March, a Russian American energy executive who used to run a Kazakh mining ...

What does Giuliani's longtime go-between know about Rudy's ...www.nbcnews.com › trump-impeachment-inquiry › wh...

Nov 21, 2019 - WASHINGTON — In July, Rudy Giuliani was desperate for more ... in American nursing homes from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. ... Russian President Vladimir Putin are inaccurate and concerns about it overblown.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's Personal Lawyer, Pulls Out Of Kremlin ...www.rferl.org › giuliani-withdraws-kremlin-forum-yer...

Sep 27, 2019 - Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer of U.S. President Donald Trump, has abruptly ... event in Armenia that is expected to feature Russian leader Vladimir Putin. ... Kazakhstan · Kyrgyzstan · Tajikistan · Turkmenistan · Uzbekistan ... U.S. and European Union sanctions since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Why is Rudy Giuliani scheduled to speak alongside a ...archive.thinkprogress.org › why-is-rudy-giuliani-sched...

Oct 22, 2018 - Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, is scheduled to speak alongside a ... the U.S. sanctioned following Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine. ... who prides himself on his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. ... Formally founded in 2015, the group comprises Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and ...

Rudy Giuliani's speech with a sanctioned Russian official was ...archive.thinkprogress.org › rudy-giuliani-armenia-spee...

Oct 24, 2018 - Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani's speech in Armenia left heads scratching ... includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus. ... geopolitical project following Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 — although that project eventually faltered following Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Rudy Giuliani's Mystery Trips to Russia, Armenia and Ukraine ...www.propublica.org › article › trump-inc-podcast-rudy...

Oct 31, 2018 - Abramyan once helped reconstruct the Kremlin and also received a medal for “merit to the fatherland” from President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Missing: kazakhstan ?| Must include: kazakhstan

Russian Trolls Hype Coronavirus and Giuliani Conspiracieswww.thedailybeast.com › russian-trolls-hype-coronavir...

Apr 9, 2020 - A Daily Beast investigation reveals dozens of Russian accounts pushing disinformation on everything from Joe Biden to the origin of the novel ...

Will Giuliani be the Manafort of 2020? — Gaslit Nationwww.gaslitnationpod.com › episodes-transcripts-20 › w...

Jun 12, 2019 - Our special focus again is on Rudy Giuliani who multiple experts have said ... Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. ... Andrea Chalupa: Or Kherson, Ukraine's mayor, because he worked with ... by millions of Russian speakers in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

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