Trump Administration - Festering Skidmarks

[andydp]

Poor Rudy !!

Feds Execute Search Warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s NYC Apartment

Investigators searched the apartment of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani Wednesday as part of a federal probe into his business dealings with Ukraine.

The Department of Justice has been trying to determine whether Giuliani, the personal lawyer for former president Donald Trump, illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs for, among other things, pushing to have the American ambassador to Ukraine removed.


www.newsandguts.com/feds-execute-search-warrant-at-rudy-giulianis-nyc-apartment/?fbclid=IwAR01dUJ_BqfH8dZJT3z7vSWZCYpLY3sH_yFo82aTonIi8gWG5eyBkFhZRZU

Prediction:  coming soon to a tabloid near you:  a Fox News exclusive on Hunter Biden !!

[AnBr]

Apr 28, 2021 17:28:12 GMT andydp said:

Prediction:  coming soon to a tabloid near you:  a Fox News exclusive on Hunter Biden !!

Looking forward to it.

[goldenvalley]

I wonder if the dye or makeup is leaking from his hair today.

[Traveler]

Yeah, whatever happened to that Biden investigation? Seems like crickets lately.

[Deleted]

Apr 28, 2021 22:31:44 GMT goldenvalley said:

I wonder if the dye or makeup is leaking from his hair today.

The raid happened too early in the morning. He didn't get a chance to properly wake up, let alone apply. When the FBI entered his apartment they found him laying down on his bed, legs dangling from the side, oddly his hand inserted inside his pajama front, claiming he was adjusting. His extended hand went abegging, agents who have known him for years steered clear. Among the assortment of evidence collected, the agents confiscated a large cardboard box, which later turned out to be an unusually large number of jars of shoe polish.

I don't know if any of this actually happened but wouldn't be least bit surprising if it did

[LFC]

Apr 29, 2021 12:17:40 GMT Traveler said:

Yeah, whatever happened to that Biden investigation? Seems like crickets lately.

The problem for them is that it's all yesterday's news. He admitted he was a drug addict and did a ton of stupid shit that messed up his life. If he pulled a Matt Gaetz and denied just it all I suspect they'd still be all over him. As it is "Look what he did!" is kind of already neutered unless he actually harmed another person or cute animal.

The Burisma stuff was all a nothing burger, just a standard corporate move to try to gain influence. They could still try that route but pulling that thread is likely to drag the relatives of dozens of sitting Congress critters in similar arrangements out into the light and they do NOT want that to happen. The Republicans have been trying to dig up make up stuff concerning Ukraine for several years now and it's just all played out. Well, except for the actual dirt involving Giuliani and Trump.

Maybe it's just my perception but it seems that outside of the right-wingnut media these manufactured outrages are getting less initial coverage and less traction in the country overall. Could it be that 3 decades of crying wolf is finally catching up to them?

[LFC]

As with all things Trumpian we see the usual competence we've come to expect, this time from Giuliani's legal team.

Rudy Giuliani posted a rambling statement from his lawyer Wednesday night calling the search warrants executed on former mayor’s home and apartment a “disturbing example of complete disregard for the attorney-client privilege protected by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.” The statement claimed that the Justice Department was “running roughshod over the constitutional rights” of anyone who represented former President Trump.

“It is outrageous that the Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone so far that hatred has driven this unjustified and unethical attack on the United States Attorney and Mayor who did more to reduce crime than virtually any other in American history,” the statement said.

The statement — replete with misspellings and curious capitalization choices — reiterated the lawyer Robert Costello’s claim that they had offered to speak to federal prosecutors.

“Twice the offer was rejected by the SDNY by stating that while they were willing to listen to anything Mr. Costello had to say, they would not tell Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Costello, the subject matter they wanted him to address,” the statement said.

It also took several swipes at Hunter Biden, a target of Giuliani’s Ukraine smear campaign.

[LFC]

Trump on Vaccines: "GIVE ME CREDIT!!!" What a f***ing child.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called himself “the father of the vaccine,” and declared that his administration had saved “tens of millions of lives” in its efforts to push for the quick development of COVID-19 shots.

“They’re very ungracious people,” Trump said of the Biden administration during a Fox Business interview on Thursday morning, bemoaning what he believed was undue credit attributed to his successor for the coronavirus vaccine’s development. “I did the vaccine.”

“If I weren’t president — the vaccine — you wouldn’t have a vaccine for five years, three to five years would be the minimum,” Trump continued. “I got it done in less than nine months. And that’s only because of me.”

The comments from an embittered former president striving to claim enduring relevance in the sector of public health which he spent months undermining come on the heels of President Joe Biden on Wednesday addressing a joint session of Congress, touting his administration’s successful vaccine rollout.

In remarks on Wednesday he said that his administration had surpassed its promise to provide 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots in 100 days — “we will have provided over 220 million COVID shots in 100 days,” Biden said.

“When I was sworn in, less than 1% of seniors were fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” he added.

The comments did not sit well with the former president who said that everyone is now eager to get a vaccine “and that was all done by Trump.”

“And look, I guess in a certain way I’m the father of the vaccine because I was the one that pushed it. To get it done in less than nine months was a miracle,” he added.

[LFC]

Another familiar name has come up in the Giuliani investigation.

In addition to Rudy Giuliani, the feds also executed a search warrant on Wednesday on Victoria Toensing.

A federal prosecutor in the Reagan administration, Toensing has made a name for herself as a conservative media personality along with her husband, Joe DiGenova.

But it’s the couple’s involvement in the Ukraine affair that got President Trump impeached in 2019 which may be related to the warrant.

There are conflicting reports on the target of the warrant. Per Politico, the feds seized a cell phone, while the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that the warrant was executed on Toensing’s D.C.-area home.

Toensing’s firm released a statement saying that she “was informed that she is not a target of the investigation.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is leading the probe, declined to comment.

Even less is clear about the substance and focus of the Toensing warrant than the Giuliani one, which reportedly focused in part on potential foreign lobbying violations.

But the role that Toensing played in the Ukraine scandal might provide a sense of where prosecutors are looking.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 29, 2021 19:12:21 GMT LFC said:

Trump on Vaccines: "GIVE ME CREDIT!!!" What a f***ing child.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called himself “the father of the vaccine,” and declared that his administration had saved “tens of millions of lives” in its efforts to push for the quick development of COVID-19 shots.

“They’re very ungracious people,” Trump said of the Biden administration during a Fox Business interview on Thursday morning, bemoaning what he believed was undue credit attributed to his successor for the coronavirus vaccine’s development. “I did the vaccine.”

“If I weren’t president — the vaccine — you wouldn’t have a vaccine for five years, three to five years would be the minimum,” Trump continued. “I got it done in less than nine months. And that’s only because of me.”

The comments from an embittered former president striving to claim enduring relevance in the sector of public health which he spent months undermining come on the heels of President Joe Biden on Wednesday addressing a joint session of Congress, touting his administration’s successful vaccine rollout.

In remarks on Wednesday he said that his administration had surpassed its promise to provide 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots in 100 days — “we will have provided over 220 million COVID shots in 100 days,” Biden said.

“When I was sworn in, less than 1% of seniors were fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” he added.

The comments did not sit well with the former president who said that everyone is now eager to get a vaccine “and that was all done by Trump.”

“And look, I guess in a certain way I’m the father of the vaccine because I was the one that pushed it. To get it done in less than nine months was a miracle,” he added.

Eh...let him talk.  His loyal followers will only seek vaccination if he says to do it. It's time to be pragmatic.  

[LFC]

Another familiar name (bold mine) pops up in the Giuliani investigation. Liars of a feather...

Federal agents on Wednesday executed a search warrant on Rudy Giuliani’s New York home and office, where they seized electronic devices in their investigation into the lawyer’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, told the Wall Street Journal that the warrant cited potential violations of foreign lobbying laws and that it targeted Giuliani’s communications with columnist John Solomon, a key figure in ex-President Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo scheme.

His son (child of Rudy and his cousin?) proves himself to be as big of a dick as his daddy. You have to have something seriously wrong with you to say this with a straight face.

Giuliani’s son, Andrew, stood outside the lawyer’s apartment building and declared that “any American, whether you are red or blue, should be extremely disturbed” by what he called the “polititization” of the Justice Department, kicking off what would be the right-wing media’s spin on the incident.

[andydp]

Apr 29, 2021 19:42:16 GMT LFC said:

Another familiar name (bold mine) pops up in the Giuliani investigation. Liars of a feather...

His son (child of Rudy and his cousin?) proves himself to be as big of a dick as his daddy. You have to have something seriously wrong with you to say this with a straight face.

Giuliani’s son, Andrew, stood outside the lawyer’s apartment building and declared that “any American, whether you are red or blue, should be extremely disturbed” by what he called the “polititization” of the Justice Department, kicking off what would be the right-wing media’s spin on the incident.

They had four years of precedent to learn from

[Deleted]

[LFC]

The investigation seems to be zeroing in on Giuliani's efforts to get the Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, fired. She wouldn't go along with their bullshit so she had to go.

The New York Times reports that the Justice Department’s investigation into Rudy Giuliani is focusing on his campaign to get then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired in 2019, which was at the center of ex-President Donald Trump’s efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden at the time.

According to the Times, at least one of the search warrants that was used to seize Guliani’s electronics at his home and office on Wednesday sought to find the lawyer’s communications with Trump administration officials about Yovanovitch prior to her ouster, along with his communications with Ukrainian officials who had conflicts with the ambassador and her anti-corruption policy.

The DOJ is reportedly looking at whether the lawyer, who is under investigation for potential foreign lobbying law violations, led the smear campaign against Yovanovitch just to help his-then client Trump find dirt on Biden, or if he also did so to help the Ukrainian officials who wanted her gone, such as former top prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.

The FBI warned him repeatedly that he was the being used as a Russian dupe.

The FBI reportedly warned then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that Russia was using him as a conduit in its disinformation campaign against Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, whose business dealings in Ukraine were central to Trumpland’s efforts to take down Biden.

The Washington Post reports that Giuliani received a briefing from the FBI on the matter in late 2019.

Russia reportedly laundered its disinformation by deploying individuals like Ukrainian official Andriy Derkach, whom Giuliani met with several times to discuss Hunter Biden, to rub shoulders with Trump allies and feed them false allegations of Biden using his position as vice president to shield his son from investigation in Ukraine.

The New York Times confirmed the Post’s report on the briefing.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who led the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden, received the same warning from the FBI, according to the Post.

[LFC]

Rudy ran to Tucker to cry, whine, and play the victim on TV.

Rudy Giuliani gave his first interview on Thursday following the FBI searches of his home and office, telling Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the DOJ had “spied on me.”

During a sprawling interview, the former lawyer to the former president spun a yarn in which the DOJ was engaged in a multi-year, politically motivated prosecution. Prosecutors are reportedly actually zeroing in on allegations that the Trump attorney may have violated foreign lobbying laws as he pushed for dirt on President Biden while working with Ukrainian oligarchs.

Giuliani said twice during the show, however, that he had a way out: since exiting the New York City mayoralty in 2001, he had inserted into his contracts with various foreign businessmen and governments a provision that declared that, whatever he was doing for them, it wasn’t lobbying.

“I never, ever represented a foreign national,” Giuliani said. “In fact, I have in my contracts a refusal to do it because from the time I got out of being mayor, I did not want to lobby.”

Giuliani added that “I’ve had contracts in countries like Ukraine, in the contract there is a clause that says I will not engage in lobbying or foreign representation.”

“I don’t do it because I felt it would be too compromising,” the former mayor said.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall (paywalled) on the multi-level corruption schemes of Rudy Giuliani. It appears that the FBI is digging into all of it and the likelihood of his having violated multiple laws is pretty good.

I had worried that federal prosecutors might be forced to whittle the fullness of Rudy Giuliani’s criminal conduct down to a technical violation of failure to report lobbying on behalf of a foreign entity. But reports this morning suggest his legal peril may go well beyond that. Federal investigators seem to be looking at his decision to work with Russian spies to damage Joe Biden and spread disinformation about his family and seek the ouster of the US Ambassador to Ukraine as part of the extortion plot that eventually got Trump impeached.

This morning’s reports don’t make it entirely clear – to me at least – what other specific charges might be possible. Just who Giuliani was working for when he sought to oust Ambassador Yovanvitch is key. To the extent he was working directly at the behest of the President, or as his emissary, he likely has a great deal of cover. But here you get into the frequent absurdity of the Trump era. The President doesn’t need an emissary to recall an ambassador. They work directly for him and can be relieved of duty at any moment at the President’s discretion.

The reality of the situation – to the extent there’s any reality to the claim he was working for the President – is that Trump, the individual or candidate, was in some sense conniving against Trump the President. These are all legal and constitutional absurdities. But they do a good job of injecting a lot of confusion and potential reasonable doubt into any prosecution.

The key though is that Giuliani clearly wasn’t just working for Trump. He was knowingly working with intelligence agents of a foreign power trying to interfere in the 2020 election. How do we know he knew this? Because the FBI appears to have repeatedly told him. These are the so-called ‘defensive briefings’ that FBI counter-intelligence agents – separate from criminal investigators – give US persons who are targets. Targets aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re victims, not perpetrators. Unless they continue to work and assist the foreign spies after they know what’s happening. So Giuliani knew and kept on with it. It was fine with him.

He was also making deals with Ukrainian officials upset that Yovanovitch had gotten in the way of their own corrupt deals. Giuliani not only worked with those people. He seems to have tried to set up ‘consulting’ deals with them, though it remains unclear whether money finally changed hands.

In other words, Giuliani had multiple hustles underway at once. He was working to get dirt for the President to help his 2020 presidential campaign. He was working with Russian spies and also corrupt Ukrainian officials to help manufacture that dirt. He eventually arranged an extortion plot to force the President of Ukraine to play ball with the dirt-finding mission as well or risk losing US support in the face of Russian aggression. And all the way he was cutting ‘consulting’ deals, or trying to, to monetize these corrupt endeavors for his personal financial benefit.

The one thing I take from this mornings reports is that investigators seem deep into the substance of Giuliani’s multiple layers of wrongdoing and not looking solely at a foreign representation that would have been proper or at least not criminal if it had simply been reported. As a general matter, the US criminal code has lots of laws that cover enabling foreign corruption. And it’s hard to get so deep with the folks Giuliani was working with without running afoul of a lot of them.

[goldenvalley]

Even after all this time I find my jaw dropping as I read about what the people around Trump have been up to. And somehow we were powerless to stop it even when law enforcement types and a large contingent of US Senators knew it was happening. 

[LFC]

From Mother Jones: In Sworn Testimony in Inauguration Scandal Case, Donald Trump Jr. Made Apparently False Statements.

This is all about the use of the inauguration to siphon up money for personal and Trump company use. With Don, Jr. telling easily verifiable lies right out of the gate you can bet the truth of the amount of corruption that occurred is pretty awful.

[LFC]

This is a fairly big retraction on the Rudy Giuliani story. Imagine the right-wing noise machine admitting a f***-up like this.

Several outlets that reported last week that the FBI had warned Rudy Giuliani that he was a target of Russia’s disinformation campaign against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden have walked back their reports.

Giuliani, it seems, may not have been warned after all.

The Washington Post, which was the first to report that the FBI issued the warning to Giuliani and the pro-Trump media organization One America News (OAN), updated its article with a correction on Saturday.

“An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.”

[goldenvalley]

May 3, 2021 16:24:39 GMT LFC said:

This is a fairly big retraction on the Rudy Giuliani story. Imagine the right-wing noise machine admitting a f***-up like this.

Several outlets that reported last week that the FBI had warned Rudy Giuliani that he was a target of Russia’s disinformation campaign against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden have walked back their reports.

Giuliani, it seems, may not have been warned after all.

The Washington Post, which was the first to report that the FBI issued the warning to Giuliani and the pro-Trump media organization One America News (OAN), updated its article with a correction on Saturday.

Sadly, the noise machine will play the retraction forever and ever.  Thanks WaPo for adding fuel to the fire.

[LFC]

May 3, 2021 16:28:31 GMT goldenvalley said:

Sadly, the noise machine will play the retraction forever and ever. Thanks WaPo for adding fuel to the fire.

I'll give them a pass. They're bound to have a failure now and again plus their track record sure seems to surpass that of the New York Times. And since the RWNM screeches about things that aren't real having something real to screech about doesn't seem to really make a difference anymore.

[Traveler]

May 3, 2021 17:54:58 GMT LFC said:

May 3, 2021 16:28:31 GMT goldenvalley said:

Sadly, the noise machine will play the retraction forever and ever. Thanks WaPo for adding fuel to the fire.

I'll give them a pass. They're bound to have a failure now and again plus their track record sure seems to surpass that of the New York Times. And since the RWNM screeches about things that aren't real having something real to screech about doesn't seem to really make a difference anymore.

Well, it turns out the Feebs were the ones that blew it.  

The original stories were published after Wednesday’s FBI raid of Giuliani’s office and home, part of a criminal investigation of his activities in Ukraine. In the corrected versions of their stories, both The Post and NBC reported that the FBI was aware that Giuliani was a target of a Russian operation — and that it planned to warn him about this but ultimately did not.

The three news organizations were reluctant Monday to discuss their sources and reporting methods. In its correction, NBC said the incorrect claim about a Giuliani disinformation briefing “was based on a source familiar with the matter, but a second source now says the briefing was only prepared for Giuliani and not delivered to him, in part over concerns it might complicate the criminal investigation of Giuliani.”



The Washington Post, which was the first to present the briefing claim, originally cited “several current and former U.S. officials” and “people familiar with the matter” as the sources of the information it later retracted.



But it appears that competitive pressures and a lack of a response from Giuliani and his representatives on deadline helped push the stories in the wrong direction.

[jackd]

Wouldn't it be nice if "responsible" news sources took the time to get their stories right instead of getting some esoteric prize for being first?

[LFC]

Bill Barr's DOJ lied to a judge. Gee. What a shock.

The Justice Department under President Trump made misrepresentations about an internal memo related to the Mueller report that it has sought to withhold from public view, a judge said Monday.

The blistering opinion by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson concerned an Office of Legal Counsel memo that was drafted in the key weekend between when special counsel Robert Mueller issued his report to Attorney General Bill Barr and when Barr released a public letter to Congress ostensibly “summarizing” the report.

The Justice Department in the case has argued it was allowed to withhold parts of the memo that it said amounted to legal advice to Barr on whether to prosecute Trump based on Mueller’s investigation. But the judge said Tuesday that, having viewed the full memo herself, the Department’s “incomplete explanations” of the memo “obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum.”

The department had produced a partially redacted version of the memo, which had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Judge Jackson has now ordered the department to produce the memo in full, but is giving the department two weeks to say whether it wants her ordered paused for an appeal.

She said that the department had made a “misrepresentation” about the purpose of the memo and engaged in a “the lack of candor” about its content. She said that CREW, while never laying “eyes on the document,” had supplied a summary “more accurate than the one supplied by the department’s declarants” in its filings alleging that the memo was being illegally withheld.

Much of Jackson’s opinion itself is redacted, including portions that describe the parts of the memo that the DOJ has refused to release. But the unredacted portions include assertions that the department misled the court about the nature of the memo and why it should be exempted from FOIA.

[LFC]

My response to this is "you first." When Trump pays for all of the lawsuits he lost including every single election challenge filed with virtually not actual evidence then we can talk.

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers are asking a federal court to make Democrats pay. Literally.

On Monday, the ex-president’s attorneys sent a new motion to the legal team representing Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson and the NAACP in a lawsuit that alleges Trump conspired to incite the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6 and disrupt the Electoral College vote count, according to three people familiar with the document. Trump’s attorneys contend that the plaintiffs brought a “frivolous” suit against the twice-impeached former president, and argue that a federal judge should sanction the opposing side.

In the motion, a copy of which was reviewed by The Daily Beast on Tuesday, Trump attorney Jesse Binnall argues that the lawsuit represents an attempt to “weaponize the federal court system in a political dispute” and use the courts to regulate “political speech.” As a result, Trump’s legal team says that Thompson, the 10 members of Congress who signed onto the suit, and their attorneys “should be ordered to pay President Trump’s fees and costs reasonably incurred in defending against this frivolous lawsuit and for such other sanctions as this Court finds just and reasonable.”

Binnall, Trump’s attorney for Jan. 6 riot-related lawsuits, declined to comment on this story. A spokesperson for the plaintiffs’ attorneys also declined to comment.

The motion mirrors former President Trump’s impeachment defense and argues that Trump’s rhetoric in the runup to the Jan. 6 riot amounted to constitutionally protected political speech. It further contends Democrats engaged in similar rhetorical flourishes, and that those pressing the case against Trump would be open to similar suits for their own rhetorical excesses, should the suit prevail.

Among the others supposedly open to liability, Binnall claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi encouraged “an insurrection by left-wing demonstrators who raided the Hart Senate Office Building on Oct. 4, 2018, to obstruct the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh.”

Note the desperation to turn around the term "insurrection" in that last sentence. The fact is that one political party is guilty of insurrection against the government and people of the United States and that's the Republican Party as lead by Donald J. Trump.