Who is paying these people?
by digby
Martin Longman at the Washington Monthly made note of a strange little nugget in today’s testimony of NSC officerCatherine M. Croft. It’s about former congressman Bob Livingstone of Lousiana, who is remembered mostly for being Newt Gingrich’s brief successor after the impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired and the GOP lost dozens of House seats. Livingstone, you may recall, only lasted a matter of days once it came out that the man who’d been calling for the smelling salts over Clinton’s affair was himself engaged in an extramarital affair of his own.
Well, he’s baaaack. Longman explains that Livingstone has been making big bucks as a lobbyist for foreign countries such as Egypt and Turkey. And now he’s turned up in this mess:
He’s in the news now because everyone will soon want to know who was paying him to seek the ouster of American ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch as early as mid-2017.
Robert Livingston, the former Republican congressman turned lobbyist, repeatedly told a foreign service officer assigned to the White House that the American ambassador to Ukraine should be fired because of her association with Democrats, the officer plans to tell impeachment investigators on Wednesday.
The officer, Catherine M. Croft, will testify that she “documented” multiple calls from Mr. Livingston about the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, while she was working at the National Security Council from mid-2017 to mid-2018. She plans to say she informed two other officials — Fiona Hill, then the senior director for Europe and Russia at the council, and George P. Kent, a Ukraine expert at the State Department — about them at the time.
“He characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” she will say, referring to the billionaire liberal philanthropist, according to a copy of Ms. Croft’s opening statement reviewed by The New York Times. “It was not clear to me at the time — or now — at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”
The direction and expense to oust Ms. Yovanovitch could very possibly have come directly from the Kremlin. If not directly, perhaps it came in a more roundabout fashion.
Let’s look at a different nexus. This one involves Rudy Giuliani, Bob Livingston and George Soros. This is from a Washington Post article Emily Tamkin published on September 30, 2019:
Last week, when Laura Ingraham of Fox News Channel asked Giuliani why he, and not the FBI and the Justice Department, had been sent to [Ukraine to] investigate alleged corruption, the former New York mayor said that it was because he is Trump’s personal lawyer. This, of course, prompted another question. How does investigating former vice president Joe Biden involve defending Trump? In response, Giuliani claimed that Biden had called for the firing of a prosecutor who was involved in the investigation of “an organization that was collecting false information about Donald Trump, about Paul Manafort, and feeding it to the Democratic National Committee.” If that sounds improbably complex, all you really need to know is the name he shouted out next: “That organization,” he said, “was run by George Soros.”
Giuliani repeated the claim on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “November of 2016, [the Ukrainians] first came to me, and they said, ‘We have shocking evidence that the collusion that they claim happened in Russia, which didn’t happen, happened in Ukraine, and it happened with Hillary Clinton. George Soros was behind it. George Soros’s company was funding it.’”
Needless to say, this is Kremlin disinformation that Giuliani has been spouting. It looks like Robert Livingston began promulgating these lies even earlier than Giuliani. The difference is that Giuliani has ostensibly been working on behalf of the president while Livingston very clearly makes his career serving foreign clients.
As Longman concludes, “it looks like this is a distinction without a difference.”
Who are these people working for?
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