Today, The Washington Post reported that it wasn’t just Rudy Giuliani and his merry band of international criminals who were running U.S. policy in Ukraine. Instead, that role was also shared by Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Special Envoy Kurt Volker, and—as earlier head-scratching statements had suggested—Energy Secretary Rick Perry. And all of them were apparently assigned their roles not via direct contact … Read More
The Case Against Rudy And How Citizens United Got Us Here
Since the NYT revealed that SDNY is investigating Rudy Giuliani for what they call “lobbying” laws, Mr. Lutsenko initially asked Mr. Giuliani to represent him, according to the former mayor, who said he declined because it would have posed a conflict with his work for the president. Instead, Mr. Giuliani said, he interviewed Mr. Lutsenko for hours, then had one of his … Read More
ProPublica: Trump Businesses Lied On Finances
It’snot that we didn’t suspect this, but ProPublica has the receipts…. literally. ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. Thney compared the tax records with loan … Read More
Hill Testifies; Rudy In Deeper Trouble (And Other Impeachment Updates)
The White House did not try to block Fiona Hill from testifying yesterday, it did tell Hill’s lawyers about four areas that could potentially fall under executive privilege. Those areas involved direct communications with the president, diplomatic communications, meetings with other heads of state and staffing the president had on calls with foreign heads of state. Hill’s lawyers wrote back … Read More
Fiona Hill Testifies Today
Fiona Hill, the White House’s former top adviser on Russia, arrived on Capitol Hill this morning to testify in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s criminal enterprise currently operating out of the Oval Office. It is being reported that Hill’s testimony “has caused concern among those close to Trump because she played a central role in the administration’s Russian and Ukrainian policy.” … Read More
The President’s Joint Defense Agreement With The Russian Mob
Marcy Wheeler wrote all of this: If we survive Trump and there are still things called museums around that display artifacts that present things called facts about historic events, I suspect John Dowd’s October 3 letter to the House Intelligence Committee will be displayed there, in all its Comic Sans glory. In it, Dowd memorializes a conversation he had with HPSCI Investigation … Read More
Impeachment Inquiry Updates:
Things are moving very quickly. Nobody is talking about this, but this story caught my eye: Attorney General William Barr reportedly met with media mogul Rupert Murdoch on Wednesday night, The New York Times reports. The Trump official and the Fox News owner reportedly met at Murdoch’s home in New York. It’s unclear what they discussed, or if anyone else attended the … Read More
Vienna Waits For You
This started as a simple string, A whistleblower and a phone call. Now it’s… well, tangled. Not the phone call part. Or the impeachment inquiry. But the Rudy angle. Where to begin? So yesterday, the two Florida clowns, Giuliani associates Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, who were arrested at the airport before they could flee. They had lunch with Giuliani at the … Read More
Yup. Sure Looks Like Trump’s Entire Ukraine ‘Anti-corruption’ Team Was Corrupt—And Funded By An Unnamed Russian Source
It was already clear that the whole scheme that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani had cooked up in Ukraine was to extort an entire nation and grossly distort U.S. foreign policy merely for the purpose of smearing Joe Biden. But a series of arrests and grand jury indictments on Thursday drove home the point that Giuliani wasn’t alone in his shuttle-shakedown between … Read More
More Trump Crimey-ness
Having trouble keeping track: President Donald Trump pressed former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Department of Justice to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader in a 2017 Oval Office meeting, Bloomberg reported Wednesday night.Tillerson reportedly refused, saying the move would constitute an interference in an active investigation. He repeated his objections to then-chief … Read More
Fruity-G’s Associates Are Arrested
I don’t know what Rudy Giuliani has been up to in the Ukraine, but it doesn’t sound good: Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, two foreign-born donors who gave money to a political action committee supporting President Donald Trump, were arrested Wednesday night and face charges tied to campaign-finance violations, two law enforcement officials confirmed to NBC News. The pair are … Read More
Trump Formalizes Obstruction In Letter To Congress
He won’t cooperate, period. And now we are officially in a constitutional crisis. The missive sprawls over eight pages, but its message can be boiled down to just five words: You’re damn right we’re obstructing. I need to discuss the legal issues here — there are very few in this letter. They are tucked away in footnotes. And they are terrible. … Read More
Document Dump: Senate Report On Russian Interference In 2016 Election
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian ratfucking in the 2016 election was released today and it didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, or hadn’t already intuited, but it told us a lot more about what we already knew or already had intuited. What is significant, of course, is that this comes from the Republican-majority Senate. From the report itself: … Read More
Trump Lawyers: The Unanimous Supreme Court During Watergate Was Wrong
Yes, L’Affaire Russe is still a thing. In fact, today the lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee were in court, trying to get the documents that Mueller submitted to the grand jury and which underlie the Mueller Report. The DOJ was, of course, trying to stop that from happening, even though this is precisely what happened under Nixon when Judge … Read More
The Call
CNN has a great story on the call which set L’Affaire Ukraine in motion: By the time President Donald Trump’s line with Volodymyr Zelensky went quiet, the scramble began. In the hours and days after the Ukrainian President signed-off — “Thank you Mr. President, bye-bye” — nervous word spread among national security aides about the contents of the July 25 call, … Read More