Tag: Rudy Giuliani

Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden ‘did not violate anything’

Washington Post logoKIEV, Ukraine —  A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky.

Lutsenko’s comments about Hunter Biden — which echo what he told Bloomberg News in May — were significant, because Trump and his personal attorney Giuliani have sought to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in recent weeks. Joe Biden is leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

View the complete September 26 article by Michael Birnbaum, David L. Stern and Natalie Gryvnyak on The Washington Post website here.

How Trump and Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate the president’s rivals

Washington Post logoWhen President Trump spoke on the telephone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late July, the Ukrainians had a lot at stake. They were waiting on millions in stalled military aid from the United States, and Zelensky was seeking a high-priority White House meeting with Trump.

Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart that his country could improve its image if it completed corruption cases that have “inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA,” according to a readout of the call released by Kiev.

What neither government said publicly at the time was that Trump went even further — specifically pressing Ukraine’s president to reopen a corruption investigation involving former vice president Joe Biden’s son, according to two people familiar with the call, which is now the subject of an explosive whistleblower complaint.

View the complete September 20 article by Josh Dawsey, Paul Sonne, Michael Kranish and David L. Stern on The Washington Post website here.

Behind the Whistle-Blower Case, a Long-Held Trump Grudge Toward Ukraine

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — For months this spring and summer, Ukraine’s newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, tried to deflect pressure from President Trump and his allies to pursue investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Biden’s son and other Trump rivals.

The pressure was so relentless that Mr. Zelensky dispatched one of his closest aides to open a line of communication with Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers. Mr. Giuliani was the loudest voice among those demanding that Ukraine look at Mr. Biden’s dealings with the country when he was vice president at the same time his younger son, Hunter Biden, was doing business there, and also the release by Ukrainians in 2016 of damaging information about a top Trump campaign aide.

Over breakfast in early July at the Trump International Hotel, Mr. Zelensky’s aide asked the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine for help connecting to Mr. Giuliani. Several days later, the aide discussed with Mr. Giuliani by phone the prospective investigations as well as something the Ukrainians wanted: a White House meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump.

View the complete September 20 article by Kenneth P. Vogel on The New York Times website here.

Legal experts dismantle Rudy Giuliani’s claim that the courts should stop Democrats from impeaching Trump

AlterNet logoWith more Democrats in the House of Representatives moving in favor of an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s conduct, the president’s attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said Friday that Democrats should be stopped in court from going forward.

But as legal experts quickly pointed out, Giuliani — who has served as a U.S. attorney — made an argument that’s completely contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

On Twitter, Giuliani said of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, “Based on no evidence supporting original falsified charge, Nadler wants to impeach. The entire investigation should be challenged in court as an unconstitutional attempt to destroy POTUS for political advantage. All the witch-hunt committees should be challenged in court.”

View the complete September 13 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Giuliani Unmasked

Eighteen years ago, on a terrible day every American then living remembers too well, Rudolph Giuliani earned respect for his calm, inspiring, and unifying leadership of a wounded New York City. Too much has happened since then to feel anything but disappointment in him — but on this year’s 9/11 anniversary, the man once known as “America’s Mayor” descended to a new and ominous low.

Mimicking the crude style of his client Donald Trump, Giuliani tweeted an angry video that purports to show a noble police officer arming for battle against a crowd of screaming, flag-burning protesters. Originally filmed as an advertisement for a right-wing T-shirt company, this clip was designed to incite fury against “leftists,” a term of abuse that evidently defines anyone who is not a Trump Republican.

The video’s scruffy villains brandish signs denouncing fascism and threatening to “burn it down,” an obvious reference to the Antifa activists demonized by the president and his media minions. Its hero is a police officer in riot gear who remembers 9/11 and loves America. Is that simple enough for you? It’s simple enough for Giuliani’s intended audience, including many who yearn for an excuse to assault and bloody their liberal opponents.

View the complete September 11 article by Joe Conason on the National Memo website here.

‘Deranged police state fever dream’: Internet explodes over Rudy Giuliani’s ‘incredibly fascist’ video for 9/11

AlterNet logoFormer New York City mayor, now President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani observed the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by posting a chilling, creepy, and many are saying “fascist” video in the early morning, tweeting “GOD BLESS AMERICA!” in all-caps.

The highly-edited video opens with staged images of people protesting fascism, as a young child slowly sings “America the Beautiful.”

The camera closes in on a lone police officer starting at the protestors, who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

View the complete September 11 article by David Badash from the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Giuliani Says State Department Helped Him Dig Dirt On Biden

If Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is to be believed, the U.S. State Department aided his efforts to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on Trump’s political enemies, according to a report from ABC News on Thursday.

Giuliani claimed the State Department put Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak “in contact with me.” Giuliani insisted it was the State Department that helped him reach out to Yermak, “Not the other way around.”

Giuliani alleges that he told Yermak, a close ally of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Ukrainian government “should not be cowered [out of] fully investigating serious possible crimes like bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and illegal interference in 2016 election.”

View the complete August 22 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

Attorney for Giuliani’s estranged wife claims that ‘pro bono’ work for Trump is a case of ‘SIDS — sudden income deficit syndrome’: report

AlterNet logoFormer New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as “America’s Mayor” and a northeastern Rockefeller Republican who appealed to many Democratic voters, has become a strident GOP partisan in recent years — relentlessly defending President Donald Trump and insisting that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was a sham. And Giuliani’s work on behalf of Trump, according to the Daily Beast’s Victoria Bekiempis, was discussed in a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday, when an attorney argued that his “pro bono” work for the president is coming at the expense of his estranged wife, Judith Nathan.

Nathan filed for divorce in April 2018, and the 75-year-old Giuliani’s finances were discussed during a divorce-related hearing on Thursday — when Bernard Clair, an attorney representing Nathan, argued that Giuliani’s work on Trump’s behalf is meant to lead the courts to “believe he somehow doesn’t have money.” Continue reading “Attorney for Giuliani’s estranged wife claims that ‘pro bono’ work for Trump is a case of ‘SIDS — sudden income deficit syndrome’: report”

This one act by Giuliani and his friends in the FBI could have been responsible for Trump’s win

How Rudy Giuliani engineered the infamous “Comey letter” of October 2016, and what Trump wants from him now.

A few years ago I wrote here in Salon about a phrase I call “Cokie’s Law,” referring to a comment by journalist Cokie Roberts during the Lewinsky scandal. There was a silly kerfuffle over Hillary Clinton allegedly claiming that her husband’s philandering was a result of his rough childhood. Roberts said,

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

This comment says a lot about how the media sees its role as the arbiter of truth, but it’s also illustrative of how political operatives manipulate the press to their advantage. Take, for example, this passing comment about Rudy Giuliani’s latest antics in Politico:

View the complete May 29 article by Heather Bigby Parton from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Trump’s Roy Cohns: William Barr has the power, but Rudy Giuliani slings the mud

While he was in Japan, Donald Trump demanded that the American press “apologize” for reporting on the Russia investigation. That would include reporting such as this January 2018 article from The New York Times in which it was disclosed that Trump had ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to pressure then-Attorney General Jefferson Sessions into unrecusing himself from the Mueller investigation. The reporting of those events turned out to be exactly right, and Congress would still like to chat with McGahn about that episode of obstruction. Except Trump is obstructing it.

The whole issue of Sessions’ recusal is worth remembering for another reason. It was at this point, when he saw that the attorney general was following the law by stepping down from an investigation of a campaign in which he had personally played a key role, that Trump issued one of his most memorable laments: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?

View the complete May 28 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.