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And the media gives Rudy a little kiss

Published by digby on May 2, 2019

And the media gives Rudy a little kiss

by digby

The New York Times has a big story today ostensibly about Joe Biden’s son’s activities in Ukraine. It’s very hard to follow and it’s hard to understand why it merits a big story at this point.

Until you get many paragraphs down:

[T]he renewed scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s experience in Ukraine has also been fanned by allies of Mr. Trump. They have been eager to publicize and even encourage the investigation, as well as other Ukrainian inquiries that serve Mr. Trump’s political ends, underscoring the Trump campaign’s concern about the electoral threat from the former vice president’s presidential campaign.

The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.

Mr. Giuliani has discussed the Burisma investigation, and its intersection with the Bidens, with the ousted Ukrainian prosecutor general and the current prosecutor. He met with the current prosecutor multiple times in New York this year. The current prosecutor general later told associates that, during one of the meetings, Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Trump excitedly to brief him on his findings, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Giuliani declined to comment on any such phone call with Mr. Trump, but acknowledged that he has discussed the matter with the president on multiple occasions. Mr. Trump, in turn, recently suggested he would like Attorney General William P. Barr to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors — echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work and other connections between Ukraine and the United States.

Mr. Giuliani said he got involved because he was seeking to counter the Mueller investigation with evidence that Democrats conspired with sympathetic Ukrainians to help initiate what became the special counsel’s inquiry.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, called for investigations into the Bidens’ connections with Ukraine.CreditJoshua Roberts/Reuters

“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” Mr. Giuliani said. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated, but without the prejudgments that infected the collusion story.”

This is the lede but they didn’t frame it that way.

This is an early warning that it’s highly likely the press is going to to be running right-wing propaganda again.

Update: Brian Beutler points out that this is actually a harbinger of something even worse:

Donald Trump is still the president today, and absent any meaningful effort to penalize him for what he’s already done, he won’t walk away from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation chastened. He will instead, as I wrote after watching House Democrats’ horrifying response to the Mueller report, fill the void of accountability with autocratic ambition—including by seeking revenge against the people who began the investigation in the first place, and encouraging foreign autocrats to sabotage his Democratic presidential challengers.

Both of those dangers have already begun to materialize—but there are others as well.

Buried several paragraphs into this New York Times story about the work Joe Biden’s son Hunter did for a Ukrainian energy company while his father was Vice President, we learn that Trump’s own criminal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has engaged that country’s prosecutors to investigate the Bidens, and Trump himself has asked his loyalist attorney general, William Barr, “to look into the material gathered by the Ukrainian prosecutors—echoing repeated calls from Mr. Giuliani for the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens’ Ukrainian work.”

Through this reporting we can infer why (or one of the reasons why) a cat got Barr’s tongue at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked him if “anyone at the White House had asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone.”

Barr isn’t just Trump’s cover up artist. In his last stint as attorney general he completed the Iran-Contra coverup, and, in the waning days of the George H.W. Bush administration, he pressured federal prosecutors in Little Rock, AR, to build a case against associates of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in the hope of ensnaring them in a scandal that might save his boss’s presidency.

In the intervening decades, Barr has only grown more conspiratorial and contemptuous of the rule of law. Two years ago he emailed New York Times reporter Peter Baker, “I have long believed that the predicate for investigating the [Uranium One] deal, as well as the [Clinton] foundation, is far stronger than any basis for investigating so-called ‘collusion,’” exposing the psyche of a man steeped in the authoritarian language of right-wing propaganda. If Trump wants the Justice Department to investigate the Bidens on the basis of whatever Giuliani cooked up with Ukrainian prosecutors, Barr is precisely the kind of attorney general who will make it happen. If that turns into a dead end, he will find something else. Other Trump loyalists—including Peter Schweizer, who cooked up the Uranium One conspiracy theory ahead of the last election—would like DOJ to investigate whether the Chinese government has leverage over the Bidens. Any port in the storm.

All of these developments form the backdrop of a scheme to knock out the Democratic candidate Trump is known to fear the most. Trump associates have been unusually frank, without seeming coy, about their concern that Biden could defeat Trump in the general election, and they would apparently like to neutralize the threat by embroiling Biden in a politically motivated criminal investigation.

This isn’t a clever strategy, but it is blunt and chilling, and, if successful, can and will be repeated to hobble whichever Democrat Trump fears second most, and ultimately on whichever Democrat wins the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

It so nice of the New York Times to help out.

Again.

Remember:

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Published inUncategorized