IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY
Six degrees of Rudy: Giuliani’s web tangles three Trump controversies
Ukraine only skims the surface of the former mayor’s influence in the administration.
Nov. 30, 2019, 7:46 AM EST
By Dareh Gregorian
All roads lead to Rudy.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is in the news constantly for his role in the impeachment inquiry. But while Giuliani’s efforts to have Ukraine launch investigations politically beneficial to Trump are much discussed, it’s not the only way he and his associates have woven themselves into the fabric of Trump’s world.
Asked in a text Wednesday by NBC News about how his circle has been able to be so influential in the Trump administration, Giuliani responded, “I don’t know.”
Here’s a look at Giuliani’s key players and how they intersect with Trump:
UKRAINE
Giuliani’s ties to Ukraine go back to at least 2008 when he did consulting work for Vitaly Klitschko, a former boxer who is now mayor of Kyiv. While he’s had other business dealings there over the years, Giuliani said he started focusing on Ukraine’s alleged role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a way of countering special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference.
This year, Giuliani seized on unfounded allegations that Ukraine had scuttled an investigation into Hunter Biden at the behest of his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic presidential rival. Giuliani said his investigative efforts had the president’s blessing, which has been confirmed by multiple witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
But Giuliani had some help with his efforts.
LEV PARNAS and IGOR FRUMAN
Parnas, a Trump donor, told the New Yorker earlier this year that he became “good friends” with Giuliani after the 2016 election. The friendship was lucrative for Giuliani, who told Reuters that Parnas’ company Fraud Guarantee paid his consulting company Giuliani Partners $500,000 for business and legal advice last year.
Parnas, who was born in Ukraine, told the New Yorker he volunteered to help Giuliani’s efforts there. “Because of my Ukrainian background and my contacts there, I became like Rudy’s assistant, his investigator,” he told the magazine.
Parnas and Fruman, his business partner in another company called Global Energy Producers, had already been agitating against U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Federal prosecutors said they raised money for a congressman in 2018, later identified to NBC News as former Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, in order to push for his help in getting rid of the ambassador.
Igor Fruman exits federal court after an arraignment hearing in New York on Oct. 23, 2019.Stephanie Keith / Getty Images file
As NBC News reported in October, the plot against Yovanovitch was driven by Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who claimed without evidence that the ambassador had given him a “do not prosecute” list. Parnas and Fruman helped Lutsenko connect with Giuliani, and the two discussed a possible investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Lutsenko later said that he didn’t think Hunter Biden did anything wrong.
Parnas and Fruman also helped connect Giuliani with Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, who claims he was fired for investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden worked. There’s never been any evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from pushing this narrative.
In addition to their work for Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman had another side gig — doing work for two of Giuliani’s longtime friends.
JOE diGENOVA and NANCY TOENSING
DiGenova is a longtime friend of Giuliani’s who was the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., while Giuliani was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. DiGenova and his attorney wife, Victoria Toensing, have their own Washington-based law firm, diGenova & Toensing, and are fixtures on Fox News, where they’ve been staunch defenders of the president.
Trump announced they were joining his legal team in March of last year, but had to pull back the offer because of conflicts of interest involving the Mueller probe. “However, those conflicts do not prevent them from assisting the president in other legal matters,” Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said at the time.
As the New York Times and Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the couple, along with Giuliani Partners, had been in negotiations to represent Lutsenko earlier this year.
The husband and wife also worked with a Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, who has been fighting extradition to the U.S. Firtash told The New York Times he’d hired the couple in June at the urging of Parnas and Fruman. Toensing has said she hired Parnas as “a translator” to do work on Firtash’s case.
TURKEY
Giuliani has strong ties to the Turkish government and represented a Turkish-Iranian banker, Reza Zarrab, who was jailed in March 2016 on money laundering charges. Zarrab, who had an office in Trump Tower Istanbul, was close friends with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and had politically damaging information involving a government-run Turkish bank, Halkbank.
In February 2017, Giuliani met with Erdogan in Turkey about the case, and he later met with Trump and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson about Zarrab as well. He had company at both meetings.
MICHAEL MUKASEY
Mukasey, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, worked with Giuliani at a New York City law firm, and the pair remained close over the years even after Mukasey became then-President George W. Bush’s attorney general.
Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.Yuri Gripas / Reuters file
Mukasey teamed with Giuliani on the Zarrab case, but their addition to Zarrab’s legal team did not sit well with New York prosecutors or the judge presiding over the case. The judge, Richard Berman, accused the men of having conflicts of interest — Mukasey’s law firm had represented eight of the banks that were victimized by Zarrab, as had Giuliani’s firm. Giuliani’s law firm had also served as an “agent” of Turkey, Berman found — but he allowed them to stay on the case because Zarrab had “voluntarily and knowingly” waived the issue.
How far they went to do so became clear recently. While NBC News first reported Mukasey and Giuliani’s meeting with Erdogan in 2017, the Washington Post last month reported that Mukasey and Giuliani had also met with Trump in the Oval Office about Zarrab that same year. Trump called Tillerson in to meet with them as well. “The president says, ‘Guys, give Rex your pitch,’” a source familiar with the meeting told the paper.
They suggested swapping Zarrab for an American pastor who was in Turkish custody. Tillerson considered the request inappropriate, and later complained to Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, who told him to ignore it, the Post reported.
Zarrab wound up pleading guilty and giving testimony in a related case that was devastating to Erdogan and Halkbank. Federal prosecutors in New York charged Halkbank last month in a multibillion-dollar scheme to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran, and Zarrab is expected to be the star witness at trial.
NAVY SEAL CASE
Two other Giuliani associates have been center stage in a case involving Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL acquitted of murder in the death of a wounded ISIS prisoner.
His cause had been championed by Fox News personalities and was taken up by another Giuliani friend.
BERNIE KERIK
Kerik, an Army veteran, is a former New York City police officer who once worked on Giuliani’s security detail when he was mayor. Giuliani gave Kerik the top job in the city jail system, and in 2000 named him police commissioner. The pair worked side-by-side on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In 2010, Kerik would be sentenced to four years in prison for offenses including failure to pay taxes and lying to the White House during his scuttled nomination to be Homeland Security chief.
Since his release, he’s become an advocate for prison reform. Like diGenova and Toensing, he’s also a frequent presence and Trump advocate on Fox News.
Kerik started acting as an adviser in the Gallagher case earlier this year. He helped set up a legal team that included Timothy Parlatore, who’s worked for Kerik in the past, and another Giuliani friend: Marc Mukasey.
MARC MUKASEY
Mukasey, the son of Michael Mukasey, is a former federal prosecutor who worked with Giuliani at two law firms. Mukasey left the firm Greenberg Traurig earlier this year to start his own firm and quickly landed high-powered clients, representing members of the Trump family and the Trump Foundation in a civil case that had been brought by the New York State Attorney General’s office. That case officially settled in early November.
Marc Mukasey, defense lawyer for Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, arrives to military court on Naval Base San Diego on July 2, 2019, in San Diego.Julie Watson / AP file
Kerik, Parlatore and Mukasey scored a huge victory over the summer when Gallagher was acquitted of the most serious charges against him. Gallagher was convicted of posing for a picture with the corpse, and the court ordered him to be dropped in rank from chief to petty officer first class. The legal team vowed to fight the rank reduction, too.
Trump became a vocal advocate for Gallagher, both restoring his rank and ordering the Pentagon to drop a planned disciplinary hearing against him that could have resulted in his expulsion from the elite unit.
Kerik celebrated the developments with a picture of him, Mukasey and Gallagher. His “prayers have been answered,” Kerik wrote.
Giuliani weighed in on Twitter as well, saying Trump’s actions in the case “shows his courage and integrity.”
“Not many Presidents would put their neck out on the line,” Giuliani said. “It shows how much he values those who protect us!”
Dareh Gregorian
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
Allan Smith contributed.
Trump better Potus then Lincoln?
Stone
POLITICS NEWS
53 Percent of Republicans Say Trump Is a Better President Than Lincoln
Yep, you read that right
PETER WADE
NOVEMBER 30, 2019 1:24PM EST
Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock
According to a new weekly tracking poll from the Economist/YouGov, a majority of Republicans prefer President Donald Trump over former President Abraham Lincoln. Yep, you read that right.
The poll, which surveyed 1,500 Americans, showed Republicans favoring Trump over Lincoln by 6 percentage points, 53 to 47. But the same poll gave us hope that not all Americans have lost their minds, with a total of 75 percent saying that Lincoln was indeed the better leader.
Both Democrats and independents disagree with Republicans by a wide margin. Ninety-four percent of Democrats saying that Lincoln was the better president, and 78 percent of independents agree that Lincoln was better.
After former Hillary Clinton press secretary Jesse Ferguson tweeted the Lincoln/Trump poll nugget, the term “53% of Republicans” began to trend on Twitter.
One reaction that garnered a lot of engagement on social media was a GIF from actor Billy Baldwin. Baldwin posted an animated photo of the Lincoln Memorial with the former president flipping the bird at both President Trump and Melania Trumpand included the viral phrase along with a shot at the GOP faithful, writing, “53% of Republicans apparently don’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was…”
However, the never-ending love from party loyalists for former president Ronald Reagancould not be toppled even with the seemingly unshakeable support for the current president. Reagan still bests Trump 59 percent to 41 percent as their favorite.
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Trump’s week: from ‘ordained by God’ to dethroned by a judge
Opinion by Richard Galant, CNN
Updated 10:21 AM EST, Sun December 01, 2019
(CNN) The sweetest sound Donald Trump could hear last week was that of his outgoing Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, proclaiming him the chosen one “ordained by God” to be President of the United States. But this was soon followed by the ringing declaration of Ketanji Brown Jackson, a US District Court judge: Trump is no king, she said, decisively rejecting Trump’s effort to shield his former White House counsel Donald McGahn from testifying before Congress.
“The primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings. This means that they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control,” Brown wrote.
“Perry says he told Trump to his face that he was ‘the chosen one,’” wrote Jay Parini. (Perry also said he believed Barack Obama had been ordained by God.) “This notion has been going around the administration like a strange virus, infecting Sarah Sanders and Mike Pompeo as well,” Parini suggested. “I don’t have any easy answers, and it worries me to see evangelicals who do. There is a deep mystery here that precludes the arrogance implied in Rick Perry’s stance. We just don’t know what the Divine has in mind.”
Anthea Butler noted the support for Trump that comes from such inheritors of the American evangelical tradition as Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham. “Trump’s popularity with leading evangelical Christians brings a lot of 20th-century religious history full circle,” Butler wrote. “Perhaps what the Trump era has laid bare is how nakedly church leaders’ support of him is about political power.”
Perry is one of the onetime Trump critics and opponents who surrendered to him as he gained mastery of the GOP, wrote Michael D’Antonio. Along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, Perry and others are “too weak to resist” and “see survival in joining the cult that degrades the nation a little bit more every day.”
The President’s week had it all – a rally in his new home state of Florida, an unexplained tweet of Trump’s head on the body of Rocky Balboa and a surprise visit to American troops in Afghanistan.
Bring on Bolton
While religion’s connection to politics may be a matter of mystery, the law on the limits of presidential power is clear in Judge Jackson’s view. Ken Ballen, staff counsel to the congressional committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, applauded the judge’s ruling and argued that its logic, “that White House aides must answer congressional subpoenas to testify applies to former national security adviser John Bolton’s possible testimony before the House Intelligence Committee as well.”
Bolton has been strongly hinting that he has a compelling story to tell about the withholding of aid from Ukraine, which is the subject of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into Trump. But he also has resisted testifying. And Democrats, eager to move ahead on impeachment before the 2020 primary voting begins, may not wait to hear from him.
That’s a mistake, argued Charlie Firestone, suggesting that censuring the President and continuing to investigate him would be a wiser course. “It essentially places a marker of condemnation pending a further possibility of bringing in an impeachment”.
Trump’s defense doesn’t hold water
Circumstantial evidence of a plot to withhold military aid from Ukraine in return for a political favor for President Trump continued to accumulate: the aid was ordered withheld the same day Trump had his now famous phone call in July with Ukraine’s president, and Trump knew of the whistleblower complaint against him before he decided to release the money. But the President stuck to his “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo” defense.
The problem, according to Elie Honig: “The vast weight of the evidence – supported by logic and common sense – indicates Trump wanted a quid pro quo. And upon scrutiny, Trump’s self-serving denial carries little persuasive or evidentiary weight, and provides a flimsy shield for Trump and his supporters to hide behind.”
Regular rules of evidence don’t apply to an impeachment proceeding, Honig noted, but “our established legal rules likely would deem Trump’s self-serving denial too unreliable to use in court. The logic is so plain that even a child can understand it: Once you’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar, it doesn’t make you innocent to announce, ‘I want no cookies!’”
As more facts come out, you might expect public sentiment to shift, but so far the pro- and anti-Trump camps have become only more entrenched. Writing for CNN Opinion’s Fractured States of America project, Martin Bisgaard noted, “Republicans and Democrats have the same evidence at their disposal – the log of the call, the text messages and the depositions – and still they reach opposite conclusions about whether the President should be impeached.” Rather than being swayed by facts and then arriving at a conclusion, “they do the exact opposite – deciding on a conclusion and then twisting the facts to support it.”
SEALs and military justice
Trump sided with a Navy SEAL who had been accused of committing crimes on the battlefield. Rather than support the findings of the military justice system, he used his presidential powers to undercut them, and in the process the Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer was fired. In the Washington Post, Spencer wrote that the case offered a reminder that “the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”
A Navy commander will have to clean up the mess left behind by the case, observed Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling. “There will be repercussions within the command, and within the Special Operations community, if someone who violated the standards and the culture of the military and his force is treated as ‘special.’”
John Kirby, a retired rear admiral in the US Navy wrote, “What makes our military great is not the money Trump claims he has thrown at it, but the standards of conduct to which it adheres and the high bar for ethics to which it subscribes. We do not always reach that bar, to be sure, but in the struggle to do so we have earned a reputation for integrity, fairness and professionalism that is the envy of the world.”
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{I think fiscal conservatism will trump Democratic Wefare conduits, at a time of critical opinions on good economic indicators cover middle-class insecurities-it’s once again-‘the money, stupid’ that deflects the vagaries of political wrongdoing from effective adjudication. }