Month: October 2019

A bipartisan group of Senators says Giuliani and Barr are full of crap

by digby

My Salon columnn this morning:

Even by the hyperactive standards of the Trump era, this week was a bit of a news overload. The White House “declared war” on the House of Representatives by declaring that impeachment is unconstitutional. The President impulsively gave the green light to Turkey to slaughter America’s Kurdish allies. And the Southern District of New York arrested two of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian business partners and political associates as they tried to leave the country on a one-way ticket. There were at least half a dozen other stories of White House palace intrigue, members of the administration quitting and more and more details emerging that implicate the president, the vice president, the attorney general and the secretary of state in various aspects of the burgeoning Ukraine scandal.

So, perhaps it’s not surprising that a significant story with serious political ramifications got overlooked. It wasn’t sexy or exciting and it didn’t contain a lot of new facts, but it stands out because it reflects a rare bipartisan congressional effort at executive oversight. I’m speaking of the second report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election.

Unfortunately for all the conspiracy theorists, like every single investigation that came before, this one found that Russia’s infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.” This must have come as no surprise to Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, who found exactly the same thing and even indicted 12 Russian operatives for these crimes.

After two years of investigation, hundreds of interviews and a massive search of documents, this is the second piece of what is expected to be a five-part report about the full implications of the Russian effort in 2016. The first report found that the Russian government had launched a sophisticated disinformation campaign and a plan to attack the elections systems in various states. It too concluded that these efforts were designed to hurt Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s. This report was about the Russian project to sow chaos and discord through social media.

There were no dissenters from the report’s conclusions, even among the Trump supporters on the committee like Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has vociferously defended the president against those who say he abused his power in his call for the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Another Republican on the panel, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, has said that Trump was joking when he called for China to do the same — but he signed the report as well.

The committee offered a number of recommendations that will obviously be ignored by Republicans, who seem to believe that foreign interference will accrue to their benefit, which is probably true. First of all, the report says the Trump administration should “reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election,” which literally made me laugh out loud. The most serious purveyor of disinformation, propaganda and the sowing of division is the president himself. The Russians surely take their lead from him.

As Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., put it, “It’s time for Trump to stop using Twitter to play into our adversaries’ hands. With every deranged tweet, he advances foreign interests by dividing Americans.” That would be a feature, not a bug, for this administration.

The Senate report also calls for campaigns to be on the alert for propaganda and be cautious about what they share on social media. It recommends that the administration create an interagency task force to deter and monitor any online interference from foreign actors. Unsurprisingly, they did not endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repeated offer to form a joint U.S.-Russia cybersecurity partnership, a prospect that seemed to make Trump very excited.

This report couldn’t come at a worse time for Trump and his top consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, who has been traveling the globe seeking to prove that the “Deep State” spied on the Trump campaign without a “proper predicate.” This stems from several right-wing theories claiming that the CIA and allied agencies engaged in a series of elaborate traps to frame Trump and the Russian government for the 2016 election interference.

There are a number of fringe right-wing figures who have made a tidy profit from spreading this theory, in various permutations, for the last couple of years. But the main popularizer is Trump’s crazy sidekick, Rudy Giuliani, mostly in order to cast doubt on the Mueller investigation. This crackpot notion has been rattling around for a while, but once the Mueller report was released Giuliani went into overdrive, adding the embellishment that Ukraine was part of the conspiracy, likely because he was already working with the two goofballs arrested this week for campaign finance violations. In his usual restrained fashion, Trump now calls this “one of the biggest political scandals in history.”

Judging from his congressional testimony and subsequent designation of another special prosecutor to investigate this “Spygate” conspiracy, Bill Barr is apparently a believer. He is now personally leading the investigation, with some assistance from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Barr reportedly met privately with Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch in New York on Thursday, with no explanation why. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Trump railed against Fox News polling that morning.)

Unfortunately for Barr — and for his overlord — just as the Mueller report laid out a trail of evidence that could not quite be ignored, this Senate Intelligence Committee Report does the same and reaches exactly the same conclusion. The 2016 campaign sabotage was a Russian government operation, and Donald Trump was the beneficiary. Rudy Giuliani’s three-ring conspiracy circus couldn’t convince a bipartisan Senate committee otherwise, and for good reason. It’s nonsense.

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“Trey Gowdy doesn’t know shit”

by digby

Oh my goodness. It looks like there is some serious dissension in the ranks…

The president’s decision to bulk up his legal team with former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy amid a widening impeachment inquiry is drawing criticism from one of his high-profile supporters.

On Wednesday morning, the day after news leaked that Gowdy was set to serve as outside counsel to the president, Victoria Toensing, a veteran Washington lawyer who has been working with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, expressed concern and disbelief that the onetime advocate for congressional oversight would be coming onboard.

“Trey Gowdy doesn’t know s***,” she said.

Toensing argued that Gowdy mishandled the select committee that investigated Democrat Hillary Clinton’s handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. She also took issue with comments Gowdy made last year in which he urged Trump to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s role in Russian attempts to intervene in the 2016 presidential race.

“He screwed up the Benghazi hearings, and he came out with the advice to Trump, ‘Well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, just talk to Bob Mueller.’”

Toensing and her husband, Joe diGenova, work with Giuliani though they are not officially on Trump’s legal team. The pair, who are close with the president, are regulars on the conservative cable network Fox News. Last month, the channel reported they were “working off the books” with Giuliani to help get opposition research on former Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently mounting a White House bid.

In March of last year, it was announced that Toensing and DiGenova were set to formally join the team of lawyers working for the president on the Mueller probe. However, days later, Jay Sekulow, who works as Trump’s personal attorney along with Giuliani, said the pair could not come onboard due to conflicts. “Those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters,” Sekulow said.

After issuing her scathing critique of Gowdy, Toensing went on to suggest that other lawyers working for the president shared her opinion.

“He’s not on the team. Trey Gowdy is not on the team. Who told you Trey Gowdy? Not to my knowledge, not to Rudy’s knowledge, not Joe’s knowledge,” said Toensing, who had not heard of the move at the time of her interview with Yahoo News on Wednesday morning. “I have to check that with Rudy because that would be a joke, because we all don’t think much of him,” she said of Gowdy, adding, “Are you kidding? … Trey is a joke among us.”

However, by Wednesday evening, Sekulow officially announced Gowdy’s appointment.

“I am pleased to announce that former Congressman Trey Gowdy is joining our team as counsel to the president,” Sekulow said. “I have known Trey for years and worked with him when he served in Congress. His legal skills and his advocacy will serve the president well. Trey’s command of the law is well known and his service on Capitol Hill will be a great asset as a member of our team.”

Neither Gowdy nor Sekulow responded to a request for comment about Toensing’s misgivings.

Gowdy’s addition to the legal team comes as the president faces a widening impeachment inquiry focusing on a July phone call he had with Ukraine’s newly elected leader during which he asked the government in Kiev to investigate Biden’s son. Last month, following news of a whistleblower complaint about the call and evidence that Trump had withheld a $400 million aid package to Ukraine, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. That inquiry is being led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and two other committee chairs.

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor who plays a dual role of legal adviser and media surrogate for the president, defended Gowdy when asked about Toensing’s criticisms. Specifically, he suggested Gowdy’s experience on Capitol Hill would be an asset to Trump.

“My opinion would be he would be an excellent addition, filling a gap that is getting to be more and more important because, frankly, Schiff is off the rails,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani also discussed how Toensing and diGenova work with him and Sekulow.

“The president is being represented in his personal capacity — because he’s still an American citizen with all the rights of an American citizen — by Jay and me,” Giuliani told Yahoo News. “Joe and Vicky are not representing the president. They are … representing some people that have information that could be very valuable to us.”

Giuliani did not specify who those people were, however.

For her part, Toensing described the role she and diGenova play with regard to Trump and the president’s lawyers as unofficial.

“Joe and I are very informal, and we work with Rudy a lot, and we think the world of Jay,” Toensing said. “We do what we do.”

Will Joe, Vicki and Rudy win this? Or will Trey Gowdy prevail?

And who is paying all these sad D-list has-beens?

Update: Looks like Joe and Vickie won — at least for now

Trump, on the South Lawn, says Trey Gowdy can't start representing him until January because of "lobbying rules." The team announced last night that he was joining.— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) October 10, 2019

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You’re all in or you’re out
by Tom Sullivan

A senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has resigned, the Washington Post reported Thursday night. Michael McKinley had served as ambassador to Peru, Colombia, and Afghanistan as well as Brazil, most recently, over his three decades with the department. McKinley declined comment but is thought to have resigned over “rising dissatisfaction and plummeting morale inside the State Department over what is seen as Pompeo’s failure to support personnel ensnared in the Ukraine controversy.”

McKinley joins a “wider exodus” of career diplomats from the department during the Trump administration. When one of the department’s science envoys, Daniel Kammen, resigned in August 2017, he encoded the word IMPEACH into his resignation letter excoriating Trump’s attacks on “the core values of the United States.”

These officials left voluntarily. Others have been driven out.

The Post revealed Thursday that at least four national security officials raised concerns with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg before Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky:

At the time, the officials were unnerved by the removal in May of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by subsequent efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to promote Ukraine-related conspiracies, as well as by signals in meetings at the White House that Trump wanted the new government in Kiev to deliver material that might be politically damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Seasoned Professionals Unwanted

Reports confirm U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was removed for being an obstacle to a scheme by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to find or fabricate such material for Trump’s reelection campaign. Federal authorities arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two of Giuliani’s colleagues in the Ukraine effort, for campaign finance violations as they attempted on Wednesday to leave the country on one-way tickets. The pair were working with Giuliani and others to see Yovanovitch removed as part of a shadow foreign policy to advance Trump’s agenda. Removing seasoned policy professionals from decision-making in favor of Trump loyalists is a feature, not a bug, in the Trump White House.

The Wall Street Journal reports the White House sidelined career staffers at the Office of Management and Budget who questioned the legality of holding up Ukraine aid approved by Congress. Via Daily Beast:

After facing probing questions from career staff at the Office of Management and Budget, the White House shifted the authority to withhold nearly $400 million in aid to the Ukraine to a politically appointed official, The Wall Street Journal reports. OMB career civil servants are typically responsible for apportionment, the process of approving and releasing government funds; but the White House reportedly bucked this tradition, according to the newspaper, and instead gave the authority over funds earmarked for Ukraine to Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs in OMB. The shift to Duffey, previously a high-ranking Pentagon official and the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, was unusual, according to several former OMB officials.

The shift of authority to a political appointee provoked a Sept. 27 letter to OMB from House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), calling the move “unusual and seemingly unprecedented.” A senior administration official told Politico the acting head of OMB can delegate authority to anyone in the agency. Trump has bypassed the normal approval process for agency heads by appointing them in an acting capacity for lengthy periods. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, however, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February 2017.

Career professionals with experience and commitment to established, legal procedures are just sand in the gears of a White House that runs on presidential whims and one-way loyalty to the amateur-in-chief.

“Oh, sorry,” the woman told me. “He was talking to the TV.”

by digby

Rudy’s having a bad day:

Rudy Giuliani lunched with two associates at the Trump International Hotel in Washington on Wednesday just hours before the duo was arrested at a Washington-area airport, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are business associates of Giuliani who had been working with the former New York mayor on his efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden. A person who saw the trio eating at the Trump hotel spoke to the Journal for the story.

Parnas and Fruman were arrested at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia on Wednesday and on Thursday were indicted for allegedly funneling foreign money into US elections. A law enforcement source told CNN they were booked on a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, to connect to another flight.

And how about this?

Last night, when Rudy Giuliani told me he couldn’t get together for an interview, his reason made sense: As with many nights of late, he was due to appear on Hannity. When I suggested this evening instead, his response was a bit more curious. We would have to aim for lunch, Giuliani told me, because he was planning to fly to Vienna, Austria, at night. He didn’t offer any details beyond that.

Giuliani called me at 6:22 p.m. last night—around the same time that two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles Airport while waiting to board an international flight with one-way tickets. As The Wall Street Journal reported this afternoon, the two men were bound for Vienna. The Florida businessmen, who are reported to have assisted Giuliani in his alleged efforts to investigate Joe Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election, were charged with campaign-finance violations, with prosecutors alleging that they had conspired to funnel money from a Russian donor into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

But Giuliani, when confirming today that Parnas and Fruman were heading to Vienna on matters “related to their business,” told the Journal that he himself only had plans to meet with them when they returned to Washington. By this logic, Giuliani was also planning to fly to Vienna within roughly 24 hours of his business associates, but do no business with them while all three were there.

This morning, Giuliani told me he’d have to reschedule our lunch. I’ve tried to reach him since then, to discuss Parnas’s and Fruman’s arrests, among other things, to no avail. When I called at 3 p.m. ET to ask about his Vienna trip, a woman claiming to be his communications director answered the phone. I have called him more than 100 times over the past year, and this is the first time that has ever happened. She said she’d have to get back to me. As we spoke, I could hear a voice that resembled Giuliani’s shout “asshole” in the background. “Oh, sorry,” the woman told me. “He was talking to the TV.”

Why were Parnas and Fruman bound for Vienna? Why was Giuliani—if what he told me was true—planning to be in the same city a day later?

Lol. Coincidence I’m sure.

The legal beagles and ex-cops on my TV say the indictment against Rudy’s Ukrainians appears to show there was some kind of surveillance on these guys. That could be a problem.

This guy too:

Trump’s rationale for being in photos with two Giuliani associates who have been charged with campaign-finance crimes is that he’s in photos with everyone, so none of them are actually incriminating pic.twitter.com/tZFRFr5PV2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2019

Yeah, he knows them:

And so does Don Jr:

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When crazy meets stupid

by digby

Also known as the Trump and Rudy show. Read this to get a good overview of all the Ukrainian craziness:

If you’re struggling to make sense of Republican President Donald Trump’s obsession with Ukraine, the best place to look is inside the mind of a lawyer working for him, Rudy Giuliani. Deep in those soupy depths, you’ll find the closest thing to a cohesive explanation for Trump’s almost monomaniacal obsession with the conspiracy theory that Democrats who conspired to frame his campaign for collusion themselves colluded with Ukrainian nationals to delegitimize his 2016 presidential win.

Like a number of recent Trumpian narratives, this one too is founded in internet nonsense and defies both fact and Senate Intelligence Committee reports. And now, thanks to congressional testimony from the former special envoy to Ukraine, we can track its beginnings to the former mayor of New York City and the near-constant stream of Spygate fanfiction he’s been spewing online for the last six months.

“Spygate,” for those of you just joining us, is the name for a loose collection of unsubstantiated claims and right-wing social media theories that coalesced around a May 23, 2018, Trump tweet touting “one of the biggest political scandals in history.” Spygate’s central (false) claim is that the Obama administration embedded a spy in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for political purposes. Depending on the blog or message board you’re reading, it can include allegations of a “deep state” plot or even a demonic global cabal of left-wing pedophiles. This is the petri dish in which Giuliani has been growing his ongoing investigation.

While Giuliani’s fixation on Ukraine dates back to 2017 and he spent the spring of 2018 using Spygate talking points to discredit the former FBI director Robert Mueller’s probe, he didn’t really start his anti-Ukraine social media campaign until March 22 of this year — the day Mueller submitted his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General Bill Barr. Giuliani most likely resurrected it as a tool to disparage Mueller’s resulting report. This time, he began to focus heavily on a Ukrainian connection.

This is the petri dish in which Giuliani has been growing his ongoing investigation.

“Pay attention to [Dan Bongino] for an analysis of some real collusion between Hillary, Kerry and Biden people colluding with Ukrainian operatives to make money and affect 2016 election,” Giuliani tweeted.

Bongino, a far-right radio host and former secret service agent, made a name for himself as a conservative commentator around Spygate. He wrote a book about the conspiracy in October 2018 and has made it the focus of his website, podcast, and Twitter account. In September 2018, Matt Palumbo, a writer who works with Bongino, created a Spygate “character” chart, which spread across Reddit and 4chan.

About a week after he name-dropped Bongino, Giuliani shared an article on Twitter from Fox News contributor Sara Carter. It was an aggregation of an opinion piece written by the Hill’s John Solomon, which has gone on to shape much of the conservative news coverage — and rattled his now-former colleagues. The Hill piece centered around allegations made by Kostiantyn Kulyk, the deputy head of Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s International Legal Cooperation Department, that claimed Ukrainian law enforcement had evidence that Democrats attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. Kulyk’s allegations, collected in a seven-page dossier, ricocheted across US media and together with lines from interviews by Ukraine’s then–prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, a bedrock of the Spygate conspiracy began to take shape.

Even though Giuliani had waited until shortly before the Mueller report’s release to start beating the Spygate drum publicly, according to notes submitted to Congress by Lutsenko this week, the two had actually already met months before, in January, when Giuliani had asked Lutsenko to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s connections to Ukraine.

It’s not clear if Lutsenko agreed, although it looks like his efforts to curry favor with Trump’s inner circle may have been part of a larger plan to oust Marie Yovanovitch, the US ambassador to Ukraine and a vocal anti-corruption critic. The Trump administration recalled Yovanovitch in May. She has agreed to give a deposition to congressional committees on Oct. 11.

Following the public release of Mueller’s report in April, the pace of Giuliani’s Spygate rhetoric spiked. He began tweeting about Ukraine almost daily, attacking the country’s alleged corruption and rumored involvement in the 2016 election on Twitter.

On April 21, Giuliani shared an article written by Jeff Carlson, a financial analyst who writes for hyperpartisan news outlet the Epoch Times, claiming that key people accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia were, themselves, colluding with Ukrainian nationals. Linked to the Falun Gong religious movement, the Epoch Times has aggressively courted Trump, dedicating countless articles in the last year and a half to the Spygate conspiracy theory. On April 27, he tweeted it again, telling his 496,000 followers, “The article below is one of a number showing a possible conspiracy (collusion) between DNC and Clinton operatives and Ukrainian officials to set up members of the Trump campaign.” He concluded the tweet with an all caps declaration: “IGNORING IT SUPPORTS BELIEF OF PRESS CORRUPTION, even among those of us who still have hope for fairness.”

Between March 1 and May 1, Giuliani extended his Spygate theories well beyond Twitter. He appeared on Fox News close to a dozen times in the two-month stretch, slamming the Clintons, attacking Mueller’s report, and demanding a Spygate-inspired counter-investigation into the Russian collusion investigation. His remarks quickly trickled down to the internet, inspiring a social media free-for-all. Giuliani was quite effective at stoking the appetite for Spygate content. There were 4chan watch parties for his TV appearances, massive Spygate Reddit threads, and an explosion of discussion on Facebook.

The top “Spygate” stories, according to BuzzSumo between March and May.

According to BuzzSumo, a March Spygate “investigation” published in the Epoch Times received 120,000 engagements. A Washington Examiner story from April that aggregated a Fox & Friends clip featuring the former mayor received 364,000 engagements. In May, a Federalist article titled “NYT Confirms Obama Admin Used Multiple Spies Against Trump in 2016” drew over 240,000 engagements. Russian media soon picked up the Spygate narrative as well — Sputnik News, a Russian government–owned broadcast service, even did a “Spygate” explainer.

As Giuliani was pushing specious claims about Ukrainian wrongdoing, a group of businesspeople and Republican donors connected to him and Trump were working to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company, Naftogaz. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, a group of Americans — including US Energy Secretary Rick Perry — spent March through May trying to install new leadership at Naftogaz in hopes of steering lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies. Yovanovitch’s ouster was a key part of that plan, according to the Associated Press.

Giuliani told the AP he played no role in the scheme, but two businessmen who were involved — Ukrainians Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — appear to be Giuliani’s clients, according to a tweet of his in May. Meanwhile, then–special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker was attempting to quell Trump’s anti-Ukraine paranoia — unsuccessfully. Released on Oct. 3, Volker’s testimony draws a thick black line between Giuliani’s edgelord-inspired Spygate blitz and escalating Ukraine-focused outrage in the White House. In his prepared remarks, Volker bemoaned the “negative narrative about Ukraine” promulgated by Giuliani and said he worried it would undermine his efforts to convince Trump that Ukraine’s new leadership was committed to helping the US.
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“After sharing my concerns with the Ukrainian leadership, an advisor to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] asked me to connect him to [Giuliani],” Volker writes. “I did so solely because I understood that the new Ukrainian leadership wanted to convince those, like [Giuliani], who believed such a negative narrative about Ukraine, that times have changed and that, under President Zelensky, Ukraine is worthy of U.S. support.”

The diplomat testified that when he met with the president on May 23, he suggested Trump invite Zelensky to the White House. But Volker said that Trump was “very skeptical” of Zelensky and that the president’s belief that the Ukrainians helped the Democrats frame him for election interference in 2016 couldn’t be shaken when it was reinforced almost daily by Giuliani.

“[Trump] said that Ukraine was a corrupt country, full of ‘terrible people.’ He said they ‘tried to take me down.’ In the course of that conversation, he referenced conversations with Mayor Giuliani,” Volker testified. “He was clearly receiving other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing him to retain this negative view.”

“He was clearly receiving other information from other sources, including Mayor Giuliani, that was more negative, causing him to retain this negative view.”

By July, Ukrainian nationals colluding with the DNC was canon in Trump’s inner circle. Volker said in his testimony that he was shocked to discover that Giuliani still wanted Ukrainian officials to investigate conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 US presidential election, even though he acknowledged Lutsenko was “not credible” and was “acting in a self-serving capacity.”

Which brings us to July 25, the day Trump and Zelensky finally spoke on the phone and the president, gorged on months of Giuliani’s Ukraine conspiracism, made the remarks that would fast-track the impeachment inquiry.

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people,” the president said, according to a non-verbatim transcript of the call.

“Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation,” Zelensky replied. “We are ready to open a new page on cooperation relations between the United States and Ukraine.”

As the impeachment inquiry zeroes in on just what exactly Trump and his allies have been doing in Ukraine, we’re likely to learn more about how Giuliani’s Spygate narrative informed it. According to the joint US House committees’ investigation, he’s had meetings in Ukraine dating back to 2017. Last May, Giuliani met with Ukraine’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, and a former Ukrainian diplomat named Andriy Telizhenko — both reportedly Lutsenko allies.

The Trump reelection campaign is currently running a 30-second video ad on Facebook accusing Biden of offering Ukraine $1 billion in aid if the prosecutor investigating a company tied to Mr. Biden’s son were removed from office. The ad has been viewed at least 5 million times. And because Facebook does not fact-check politicians, it has said it will not be removing it.

Meanwhile, Giuliani — who has been invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee (and is expected to defy House Intelligence Committee subpoenas) — continues to spin the Spygate conspiracy theory he’s pushed into our political discourse. On Monday, he appeared on Fox News, once again demanding Biden be investigated. “This Biden stuff, I’ve known it for six months,” he said. “I started this investigation long before he was a candidate. I started it in November of 2018 solely for one single purpose: because I’m [Trump’s] defense lawyer and it exonerates him.”

As he spoke, Giuliani waved a handful of papers at the camera, claiming they were affidavits from Ukrainian officials that would prove there was Democrat collusion. But they weren’t. They were pages printed from Hopelessly Partisan, an obscure right-wing conspiracy theory website.

And today, as you know, Giuliani’s Ukrainian handlers were arrested.

Oh my.

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Republicans believe Democrats are unpatriotic.

by digby

New Pew poll:

Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to view members of the opposing party as unpatriotic. A 63% majority of Republicans say that, compared with other Americans, Democrats are “more unpatriotic.” Just 23% of Democrats say the same about Republicans.

Wow. The people who unconditionally back a president who welcomed the election interference in his favor from an adversary, crudely insults American allies and cozies up to dictators and just sold out a group that fought alongside American troops sending them to their deaths, think their political rivals are more unpatriotic.

Of course, if you think Donald Trump is the embodiment of America and the personification of American values then perhaps that makes sense.

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I’m Beginning to Think The Russian Prostitute Video Tape Has to be Real 

by tristero

The assumption has been that the tape, if it existed, couldn’t be nearly enough, that the leverage Putin holds on Trump has to be about money.

But what if the tape was really horrific? What if paying two prostitutes to perform certain activities for him was merely where the video began? What if Donald Trump did… a-and it was captured on high quality video? The mind heaves.

That could easily explain the extraordinary lengths Trump goes to help Putin — directly, via the blame-Ukraine-for-2016 shenanigans, and now with Turkey (for starters). Because if the tape is real and the activities Trump indulged in are gross enough and possibly illegal, that could — in addition to holding him up for worldwide ridicule at a level far greater than his known activities have done — seriously affect his bottom line as well.

No tapes have yet surfaced. But absence of evidence is not…

Somebody’s going to get a subpoena

by digby

Another Trump nut implicates himself — and Trump:

Michael Pillsbury, an informal White House adviser on China, said he received information about the business activities of Hunter Biden during a visit to Beijing in the same week Donald Trump urged China to probe the son of Joe Biden.

Speaking to Fox Business on Wednesday, Mr Pillsbury said he had raised the issue of the Bidens during a visit to China a week ago.

“I tried to bring up the topic in Beijing,” Mr Pillsbury said. “I’ve never seen them get so secretive in my entire life. They would discuss ICBM warheads sooner than talk about what Hunter Biden was doing in China with [former] vice-president Biden.”

Mr Trump came under heavy fire last week after publicly urging China to investigate the Bidens in a move that mirrored his request to the Ukraine’s president in a July phone call that has sparked an impeachment inquiry.

Following his appearance on Fox Business, Mr Pillsbury said he had actually been successful in obtaining information from his Chinese contacts about Hunter Biden.

“I got a quite a bit of background on Hunter Biden from the Chinese,” Mr Pillsbury told the Financial Times.

Mr Pillsbury, a China hawk who was widely seen as far from the mainstream before the Trump administration came to power, shares a similar stance on China to Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Mr Trump. At a press conference last year, Mr Trump said Mr Pillsbury was “probably the leading authority on China”.

Mr Pillsbury declined to say whether he was asked to raise the issue by the president. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Trump has continued to push what most critics say are debunked conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, in an effort to obtain dirt on the son of Joe Biden, one of the frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

The president has faced intense scrutiny about his claims in the two weeks since a CIA whistleblower said Mr Trump had pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky for personal gain, in a move that led White House officials to “lock down” the transcript.

There is no public evidence that Hunter Biden did anything illegal in his business dealings in Ukraine or China. But some critics have said his father should have done more to ensure there was not the perception of a conflict of interest when he was vice-president.

Writing in the Washington Post, Joe Biden rejected any claim of wrongdoing, saying Mr Trump was “pushing flat-out lies, debunked conspiracy theories and smears against me and my family, no doubt hoping to undermine my candidacy for the presidency”.

Asked to provide details about the information he got received from his Chinese contacts, Mr Pillsbury would only say that it related to a $1.5bn payment from the Bank of China. That figure matches the amount that Mr Trump last week claimed Hunter Biden received from China — a statement that has not been backed up with any evidence.

“Forget the myths the media created about the White House. The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand…”

by digby

They have some interesting friends:

“In their role as unofficial US envoys, Parnas and Fruman met at least 4 times with top Ukrainian prosecutors—2 of whom are steeped in corruption allegations of their own—as they pushed for investigations into Trump’s rivals” https://t.co/Zsx89wwxRm

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) September 24, 2019

Steeped in corruption:

There are two Ukrainians at the heart of US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s allegations against former US Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Both headed Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office — Viktor Shokin between 2015 and 2016, and Yuriy Lutsenko between 2016 and 2019.

A CNN analysis of multiple documents, supported by interviews in Ukraine, shows that it was Shokin and Lutsenko who supplied Giuliani’s team with a complex narrative. That narrative — a laundry list of unsupported allegations — asserted corruption by the Bidens, as well as collusion between officials in Ukraine and the Democrats in the US to publicize damaging information about Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2016.

There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Joe or Hunter Biden.

According to documents turned over to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general this week and obtained by CNN, there were long conversations in January of this year at Giuliani’s New York offices — first with Shokin by phone and then with Lutsenko in person. Lutsenko had come to New York with a small team, but not in his official capacity as Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General.

Asked by CNN this week whether he knew of Lutsenko’s visit, Petro Poroshenko, who was Ukraine’s President at the time, said: “I would never have any information about that.”

CNN has obtained a document — translated into English — that Lutsenko prepared for the January meeting. It’s unclear whether the document was actually given to Giuliani’s team. Giuliani’s office has not responded to CNN’s multiple requests for confirmation.

Read the whole thing to understand just how idiotic our president and his henchman are. I’d say they were childlike except for their overwhelming malevolence.

In case you missed it, here’s what Trump said to the Ukraine president in his famous phone call:

Here’s the pertinent piece of the indictment from this morning:

These Ukrainians are accused of working for a foreign government. They have been manipulating Giuliani and Trump from the beginning, And keep in mind that the prosecutors who have been feeding this information are allies of Paul Manafort and are pro-Russia.

Trump and Rudy are dupes and fools, to be sure. A couple of addled old men who are way, way over their heads.
But they also betrayed their country without a second thought. There is no excuse.

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“In search of a balcony”
by Tom Sullivan

Mussolini’s Balcony – Rome, Italy. Public domain. Photo credit: unknown.

The Trump administration is not a full-fledged dictatorship. Not yet. Imperious, yes. Imperial, certainly. His best friends are dictators. He wants to be one of them. He is El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, mocks Esquire’s Charlie Pierce. But as devoted as his presidential acolytes may be, as steeped in resentments as his authoritarian followers are, there are signs the country is not prepared to tip itself over into dictatorship. Not yet.

Trump’s public admissions in documents and on camera that he tried encouraged Ukraine to investigate a political rival and his double-down invitation to China to do the same have eroded his support and triggered a full-on impeachment inquiry. He wants help ginning up evidence that foreign governments (other than Russia) criminally interfered with the 2016 elections while at the same time criminally inviting other countries to do the same in 2020. Even Fox New polling is turning sour on Trump.

That high-pitched, hissing sound is gas slowly escaping the Trump balloon.

Naturally, Trump is lashing out. At the press. At whistleblowers. At Democrats. Trump’s New York lawyers claim, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow observed, the president cannot be criminally investigated; impeachment is the only constitutional tool for removing a president. Meanwhile, his White House lawyers argue impeachment is “constitutionally invalid.”

Trump would be dictator already if he were not so bad at it.

Now Trump has given Turkey the green light to lash out at the Kurds, American allies in the fight against ISIS. He is alienating Republican allies in Congress and U.S. troops. Trump is in a hole and refuses to stop digging.

The Week’s Joel Mathis wonders aloud what I have asked before: Is there a way to get Trump leave office peaceably? Even were the Senate to convict him, Mathis suggests he might not leave unless “dragged from the Oval Office, kicking and screaming.”

Trump has long fancied himself the ultimate dealmaker, and while that reputation is almost certainly overblown, appealing to his vanity might actually benefit the republic. Given a choice between being removed from office and a deal that lets him save face — or, at least, stay out of jail — there is a good chance that Trump could take the latter option, then proclaim victory in public.

Given the growing mounds of evidence against him, however, Democrats probably won’t want to let Trump off the hook so easily. Trump’s critics will want him to pay, legally and socially, and understandably so.

But it still might be better to make a deal.

Things could get worse before they get better, Josh Marshall observes:

Green lighting a Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria is a shameful act and will lead to great bloodshed. For the US there’s another dark dimension. This was about lashing out over impeachment and the president proving he has the power to inflict harm. It’s only the beginning.— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 10, 2019

As we demand Republicans in Congress put their country before their party, those on the left ought to put the country’s survival above our need to see Trump frog-marched out the front gate of the White House.

Even if Trump pardons himself or blackmails President Pence into doing it, he will still face state charges that could bring down his commercial empire. Once he is out of office and discredited, his utility to Russia and money launderers will all but evaporate as will the value of the Trump brand. All that will remain is the hand clapping and the shouting.

But we will have dodged dictatorship, at least, with this “small man in search of a balcony,” as Jimmy Breslin once described Rudy Giuliani. The frightening part is Trump has prepared the way for someone else.