What was Rudy up to?
by digby
There’s a lot going on right now with Giuliani, Devin Nunes, the Ukrainian-American frick and Frack, Donald Trump and Ukraine. It’s very hard to keep it straight or figure out the big picture to understand exactly what seems to have gone on. Josh Marshall does a nice job of synthesizing all that for you:
We already knew that Giuliani was visiting Ukraine looking for anyone who would claim or manufacture evidence helpful to Donald Trump and use it to intervene in the 2020 election. This came in two forms: manufacturing evidence either against the Biden Family or claims about Ukraine being the guilty party in the 2016 election.
Giuliani and his associates (DiGenova, Toensing, Solomon, Parnas, et al.) had the most luck with Dmitry Firtash, the exiled oligarch trying to escape deportation to the United States to face bribery charges. Giuliani brought in DiGenova and Toensing to plead Firtash’s case to Bill Barr and Firtash helped generate accusations against the Biden’s. Firtash was the source of affidavit in which the corrupt prosecutor Shokin made his accusations against the Bidens.
Firtash has strong ties to the Kremlin. But it’s not clear that that is the driving factor here. He needs those US charges dropped and the American President’s confidant seems like a good shot at getting that done.
We also knew that Giuliani tried to cut a similar deal with another oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. But that approach didn’t go well and even led to a legal fight between Kolomoisky and Parnas and Fruman. As Kovensky reported earlier this month, it was a meeting tied to that fight that Parnas and Fruman were en route to when they were arrested at Dulles Airport. The Times has a piece out this morning with lots of details about the Firtash and Kolomoisky angles the Giuliani group pursued.
Then there’s this report from Bloomberg News. Giuliani also sought work with a Ukrainian bank called Privatbank seeking to recoup lost assets from its previous owner, Igor Kolomoisky.
This requires a brief history lesson. Kolomoisky’s rise was fueled by his ownership and looting of Privatbank. Cleaning this up was part of the US anti-corruption in the country. The problem was that Privatbank was so massive in the Ukraine economy it was too big to fail. So they ended up nationalizing the bank and taking most but not all of Kolomoisky’s corrupt gains. This is when he went into exile in Israel. He only returned when Zelensky became President. He is seen as a backer of Zelensky in part because Zelensky’s TV show ran on a channel owned by Kolomoisky. The question of whether or not Zelensky will bend to the will of his perceived patron or stick to his anti-corruption promises is a central question hovering over his presidency. (Here’s more detail on this part of the story.)
As I said, it gets very complicated. But here is where it’s important to step a few paces back to see the big picture. Giuliani was going to various oligarchs looking for help for President Trump and intervention in the 2020 election. In each of these cases the oligarchs had interests and in most cases legal trouble in the US. This was the basis of working together. The oligarch manufactures dirt and election assistance for President Trump and Giuliani tries to make their US legal problems go away. But at each stage Giuliani was also trying to hawk his own ‘legal services’ or more accurately trying to set up his own personal revenue stream, whether it’s with Firtash or the gas concessions Parnas and Fruman were trying to arrange or the battle between Privatbank and Kolomoisky.
On multiple levels US foreign policy was being subverted to serve the personal legal ends of Donald Trump, the cash hunger of Rudy Giuliani and those of various corrupt oligarchs and public officials in Ukraine. As Fiona Hill said last week in her congressional testimony, she believed there was a “subversion of US foreign policy to push these people’s personal interests.”
Trump was getting legal and political help. Rudy Giuliani was getting money. They were both in exchange for changes to US foreign policy to assist indicted and/or corrupt officials in Ukraine. The key with Giuliani is that it is hard, probably impossible to disentangle which things were specifically to help Donald Trump and which were for payoffs to Rudy Giuliani. He probably lost track.
I’m reminded of the butt-dial we heard about the other day:
Giuliani can be heard telling the man that he’s “got to call Robert again tomorrow.”
“Is Robert around?” Giuliani asks.
“He’s in Turkey,” the man responds.
Giuliani replies instantly. “The problem is we need some money.”
The two men then go silent. Nine seconds pass. No word is spoken. Then Giuliani chimes in again.
“We need a few hundred thousand,” he says.
It’s unclear what the two men were talking about. But Giuliani is known to have worked with a Robert who has ties to Turkey.
His name is Robert Mangas, and he’s a lawyer at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, as well as a registered agent of the Turkish government.
This is just how he operates, combining his access, his job as the president’s personal attorney, political dirty tricks and ratfucking and making piles of money. It’s his business.
By the way, there’s new reporting that SDNY is looking very closely at this “business” aka “a very long list of serious crimes.”
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