The president’s personal lawyer, ladies and gentlemen… what a guy
by digby
As I pointed out earlier, Lindsey Graham is out there desperately signaling for Rudy to STFU. And for good reason. He’s losing it. And he was already pretty far gone:
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has accused the Democrats of trying to have him arrested and executed over his role in the president’s Ukraine strategy.
Giuliani has become a central figure in Trump’s impeachment, having allegedly fronted the president’s parallel Ukraine program, bypassing and even co-opting State Department officials in his efforts to bolster Trump’s personal political fortunes.
Once the president’s main attack dog, Giuliani has recently avoided speaking publicly on the ongoing effort to remove Trump from office over his alleged abuses of power regarding Ukraine.
But at a Turning Point USA event in West Palm Beach on Thursday, Giuliani told conservative students that he and the president are being unfairly victimized.
“This coup and this impeachment is about…taking our Constitution and tearing it up,” Giuliani said, according to the Sun Sentinel. “It’s illegal, it’s immoral, and it’s unconstitutional,” he added, CBS 12 News reported.
“There is no such high crime or misdemeanor called abuse of power. They made it up!” he claimed.
“I saw for America today, and for some time, has had a double standard,” Giuliani told the student crowd, according to The Palm Beach Post. “A Republican leader is treated differently than a Democratic leader.” He added, “The biggest obstruction of Congress is Nancy Pelosi.”
Giuliani rejected all suggestions of his own wrongdoing. “I assure you I have never committed a crime,” he said. Regardless, he claimed that the Democrats ” want to put [Attorney General Bill] Barr in prison, and they want to execute me.”
“I have been a prosecutor all my life,” Giuliani added. “You can go read about the people I put in prison…I am being investigated by the office that I ran and probably was the most successful United States attorney in the last hundred years. They are very jealous of that.”
Trump also wanted the government to investigate a conspiracy theory alleging that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the 2016 election. In exchange, Trump supposedly offered to release hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen military aid.
On Thursday, Guiliani repeated the debunked allegations against the Bidens and the Ukraine meddling conspiracy theory.
The former New York mayor claimed there are “five witnesses, three tapes, 35 documents” showing Biden’s guilt. “I could prosecute that case in three weeks and if I didn’t get a conviction I’d resign from practicing law. He’s so guilty it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s outrageous. It’s un-American,” he said of Biden not facing prosecution. “And until we fix that we do not have equal justice under the law.”
Giuliani is also linked to two Soviet-born Americans—Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—who are accused of funnelling foreign money into U.S. elections. Parnas and Fruman are believed to have attended meetings with Giuliani and former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin.
Shokin—who was thought to be soft on prosecuting political corruption—was fired from his position in 2016 at the urging of the then Vice President Biden and U.S. allies.
Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are obviously very worried that something very bad about Ukraine is going to come down before they get the chance to sweep the impeachment under the rug, putting their vulnerable senators in a terrible bind.
This story is live and they can’t get Rudy to keep his mouth shut.
Stay tuned.
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