DOJ needs to open a criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani

The Washington Post would have us believe that the “brains” of the Ukraine extortion operation was Trump’s vampire “Bat Boy,” Rudy Giuliani. Puh-lease. That bumbling idiot of a lawyer cannot be the “brains” of this operation. But he was involved up to his bug-eyeballs, and that means he can be prosecuted and disbarred from the legal profession.

The Washington Post reports, Giuliani pursued shadow Ukraine agenda as key foreign policy officials were sidelined:

President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

The sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aidadministered by the Defense and State departments — all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani’s activities from news reports.

Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.

As those worries intensified, some senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyout of concern that Trump would use the conversation to press Kiev for damaging information on Trump’s potential rival in the 2020 race, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter.“

An awful lot of people were trying to keep a meeting from happening for the reason that it would not be focused on Ukraine-U.S. relations,” one former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

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U.S. officials described an atmosphere of intense pressure inside the NSC and other departments since the existence of the whistleblower complaint became known, with some officials facing suspicion that they had a hand either in the complaint or in relaying damaging information to the whistleblower, whose identity has not been revealed and who is entitled to legal protection.

One official — speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity — described the climate as verging on “bloodletting.”

Trump has fanned this dynamic with his own denunciations of the whistleblower and thinly veiled suggestions that the person should be outed. “Is he on our Country’s side. Where does he come from,” Trump tweeted this week.

Trump’s closest advisers, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who was ordered by Trump to suspend the aid to Ukraine, are also increasingly targets of internal finger-pointing. Mulvaney has agitated for foreign aid to be cut universally but has also stayed away from meetings with Giuliani and Trump, officials said. But the person who appears to have been more directly involved at nearly every stage of the entanglement with Ukraine is Giuliani.

“Rudy — he did all of this,” one U.S. official said. “This s—show that we’re in — it’s him injecting himself into the process.”

Several officials traced their initial concerns about the path of U.S.-Ukrainian relations to news reports and interviews granted by Giuliani in which he began to espouse views and concerns that did not appear connected to U.S. priorities or policy.

The former New York mayor appears to have seen Zelensky, a political neophyte elected president of Ukraine in April and sworn in in May, as a potential ally on two political fronts: punishing those Giuliani suspected of playing a role in exposing the Ukraine-related corruption of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and delivering political ammunition against Biden.

After the conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election, Giuliani turned his attention to Ukraine, officials said, and soon began pushing for personnel changes at the embassy while seeking meetings with Zelensky subordinates. He also had his own emissaries in Ukraine who were meeting with officials, setting up meetings for him and sending back information that he could circulate in the United States.

The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, became a primary Giuliani target.

Though she was widely respected in the national security community for her efforts to prod Ukraine to take on corruption, Giuliani targeted Yovanovitch with wild accusations including that she played a secret role in exposing Manafort and was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by the liberal financier George Soros. [That is anti-semitism, by the way.]

“She should be part of the investigation as part of the collusion,” Giuliani said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, adding that “she is now working for Soros.” Yovanovitch is still employed by the State Department and is a fellow at Georgetown University. She declined to comment.

Giuliani also said the entire State Department was a problem, and officials familiar with his actions say he regularly briefed Trump on his Ukrainian endeavors. “The State Department is a bureaucracy that needs to change,” he told The Post.

Many of Giuliani’s charges were either recycled from, or subsequently echoed by, right-wing media outlets.

In late March, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. amplified this campaign with a tweet calling for the removal of “Obama’s U.S. Ambassador.”

Yovanovitch, who was to depart in July after a three-year assignment, was prematurely ordered back to Washington, a move that both baffled and unnerved senior officials at the State Department and the White House, officials said.

Within days of her ouster on May 9, Giuliani seemed determined to seize an unsanctioned diplomatic role for himself, announcing plans to travel to Ukraine to push for investigations that would “be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Giuliani canceled the trip amid an ensuing backlash over his purpose but later met with one of Zelensky’s senior aides in Madrid and pressed the issue of Ukraine’s helping against Biden.

In a May 19 interview on Fox News, Trump recited repeatedly disproved allegations that then-Vice President Biden had coerced Ukraine to drop an investigation into the owner of an energy company, Burisma, for which Biden’s son Hunter was a board member.

The allegations were baseless. Though Hunter Biden had served on the Burisma board for five years — a questionable decision given his father’s influential position — he was never accused of any wrongdoing by Ukrainian authorities. The probe had been shelved before any action by the vice president, and the elder Biden’s efforts involved removing a prosecutor widely criticized by the West as failing to tackle corruption.

Nevertheless, Trump is alleged to have used his July 25 call with Zelensky to get Ukraine to revive this dormant inquiry and widen it to include possible wrongdoing by Biden.

In Washington, officials outside Trump’s inner circle who were dismayed by Yovanovitch’s ouster reacted with growing alarm and confusion over Giuliani’s subsequent activities.

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Giuliani told The Post that one of his calls with a top Ukrainian aide was partially arranged by Kurt Volker, a State Department official, and that he briefed the department afterward.

“We had the same visibility as anybody else — watching Giuliani on television,” a former senior official said. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev were similarly deprived of information, even as they faced questions from Ukrainians about whether Giuliani was a designated representative.

“The embassy didn’t know what to do with the outreach,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who traveled to Ukraine this month.

In an interview Monday night with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Giuliani said he had been enlisted by the State Department to intervene on the Ukraine matter. “You know who I did it at the request of? The State Department,” he said, holding up his cellphone to indicate that call records would back up his claim. He also said that he began pursuing the issue in late 2018 after a visit from an investigator whom he did not identify.

State Department: “Sorry, but no, Rudy is full of shit.” The Hill reports: When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson said, “Mr. Giuliani is a private citizen and acts in a personal capacity as a lawyer for President Trump. He does not speak on behalf of the U.S. Government.”

The perception of a parallel, hidden agenda intensified in the summer as officials at the NSC, Pentagon and State Department began reacting to rumors that hundreds of millions of dollars of military and intelligence aid to Ukraine was being mysteriously impeded.

“There were never any orders given, any formal guidance from the White House to any of the agencies,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter. “And the NSC was scratching their heads: How is this possible?”

NSC officials, including Tim Morrison, who had replaced Fiona Hill as the senior director for European and Russian affairs, began organizing meetings to try to understand these hidden forces affecting Ukraine policy, officials said.

But even then, clear answers proved elusive. Officials were told that the money was being blocked by the Office of Management and Budget, without any accompanying explanation.

“It was bizarre,” the official said.

A former official familiar with the meetings said participants began to file out raising troubling questions about what was driving the White House to withhold the aid as well as a meeting with Trump that had been all but promised to Zelensky.

Although the question of a linkage or leverage never came up in the formal NSC discussions, participants began to believe that Trump was “withholding the aid until [Ukraine] gave him something on Biden or Manafort.”

It was in this stretch, in July, that some officials began to question the wisdom of a Trump call with Zelensky. In part, there was a desire to hold off until after Ukraine’s parliamentary elections. But, mindful of Giuliani’s agitation and influence, some worried that even if Trump were coached before the call, the president would not be able to resist pressing Zelensky for dirt on Biden.

On July 24, Mueller testified before Congress on the outcome of the Russia investigation, a probe that had threatened Trump for much of his presidency and was focused on whether he had conspired with Moscow to influence the U.S. election. Dodging Mueller Made Trump Cocky Enough to Get Himself Impeached.

The very next day, Trump spoke with Zelensky on a call, and the vague misgivings that had risen over the preceding five months hardened into alarm. Among those who listened in on the call or were in a position to see a transcript readout, the president’s persistence with Zelensky on the corruption probe marked the crossing of a perilous threshold.

Former assistant U.S. Attorney Mimi Rocah explains, Trump won’t be prosecuted for Ukraine call about Biden. But Rudy Giuliani can.

With respect to Ukraine, most of the focus, rightfully, rests on President Donald Trump’s conduct, but the conduct of his attorney Rudolph Giuliani also deserves serious attention. Based on the facts already in the public arena, the Department of Justice has more than enough basis to open a federal criminal investigation into the former New York mayor.

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[T]he demands that Ukraine investigate Joe Biden included repeated, personal exhortations by Trump to work with Giuliani. In addition, Giuliani has by his own admission personally pushed Ukrainian officials to conduct such an “investigation.” And Giuliani can’t say definitively that Trump did not threaten Ukraine.

There are several different federal laws that might apply to Giuliani’s conduct here. Most obviously, Giuliani appears to be in violation of the Logan Act, which makes it a crime for private citizens who attempt to intervene without authorization in disputes or controversies between the United States and foreign governments. [Note: No one has been successfully prosecuted under the Logan Act; Rudy may very well be the first case.] He is Trump’s personal lawyer, not a government official, and so his involvement is clearly a complicating, detrimental element for U.S. diplomatic interests. Ukraine officials need to know who is speaking for the president and, as Ukrainian journalist Serhiy Leshchenko wrote this week, who is trying to “drag” Ukraine into a U.S. presidential election.

More significant, Giuliani and Trump’s reported actions raise the real specter of a federal criminal bribery and extortion conspiracy. While Attorney General William Barr has made it clear that he will not prosecute Trump due to current DOJ policy, Giuliani enjoys no such privilege or immunity. And, while the factual record is not fully developed, federal investigations are opened every day against people with far less known and incriminating information. Any objective prosecutor, I believe, would agree with that.

As explained by my colleague, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, in the Daily Beast, it is a crime under the federal bribery statute for a public official to demand anything of value in exchange for performing an official act. Additionally, the Hobbs Act defines extortion as “obtaining property from another, with his consent, under color of official right.” McQuade continues:

The essence of both crimes is a demand by a public official to obtain something for himself to which he is not entitled in exchange for performing an official act of his office. Here, if the reporting is correct, Trump may be similarly committing bribery and extortion by using the power of his office to demand a thing of value, dirt on Biden, in exchange for an official act, the provision of military aid. This is precisely the kind of old-fashioned corruption scheme that the bribery and extortion statutes were designed to punish.

And, if Giuliani assisted or agreed to assist this scheme — even if he did not fully adopt the entire plan — may have aided and abetted or conspired to commit those same crimes. In addition, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it illegal for a U.S. citizen to corruptly offer “anything of value” to a foreign official to retain business or influence an official decision.

Giuliani defended himself by claiming that “no money was mentioned, no quid pro quo,” in the call between Trump and the Ukranian president. Let’s see if that’s true. But more important, Giuliani — a former mob prosecutor — surely knows that most crimes don’t happen so explicitly. In 16 years of listening to criminals on wiretaps, I rarely heard anyone say, “If you don’t give me X, I will do Y.” That’s not how mafia bosses work. They make a “request” and others follow up with the demand. The law is very clear that a quid pro quo need not be explicit for a crime to have taken place. It can be inferred from the facts as a whole.

Even if there was no quid pro quo (no withholding of military aid, in this case), Giuliani was clearly acting on behalf of Trump’s campaign in seeking to persuade Ukraine to “investigate” the Bidens. Federal law prohibits a foreign national from directly or indirectly making a “contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” in connection with a U.S. election, and prohibits a person from soliciting, accepting or receiving such a contribution or donation from a foreign national. Damaging information about a political opponent could fit within this definition, meaning Trump and Giuliani solicited an illegal “thing of value” from a foreign national in connection with an election.

Just like they did with Russia in 2016.

This isn’t to say Giuliani should or shouldn’t be charged with a crime — and I am not calling for any certain outcome. This is to say that, based on my experience as a federal prosecutor, I believe the facts support the kind of investigation that would have been undertaken by former U.S. attorneys in the Department of Justice under Republican and Democratic presidents.

And my real concern is that the attorney general – William “Coverup” Barr – will try to prevent such an investigation or, perhaps worse, that current prosecutors will not feel that they can even initiate such an investigation because of Giuliani’s relationship with the president.

These are not things I say lightly or indeed ever imagined I would have to say about the top law enforcement official in America. But, here we are.