Republicans are throwing Giuliani under the bus. But there’s a problem.

[cigaretteman]

By
Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
November 8, 2019 at 9:10 a.m. CST
House Republicans are now preparing to sacrifice poor Rudolph Giuliani to save President Trump. Their new argument is that Giuliani — along with acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Ambassador Gordon Sondland — were freelancing the organized campaign to extort Ukraine into carrying out Trump’s political bidding, and Trump had no input into it.

But this argument requires one to pretend that numerous widely documented facts simply don’t exist — including repeated public statements by the president himself.

Which points to a morbidly amusing perversity about this new turn in the Ukraine saga: Republicans are now blaming Donald Trump’s underlings for taking their cues on how to respond to this scandal from none other than Donald Trump.

The Post reports that House Republicans are planning to defend Trump by arguing that Giuliani, Mulvaney and Sondland “could have acted on their own to influence Ukraine policy”:

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All three occupy a special place in the Ukraine narrative as the people in most direct contact with Trump. As Republicans argue that most of the testimony against Trump is based on faulty secondhand information, they are sowing doubts about whether Sondland, Giuliani and Mulvaney were actually representing the president or freelancing to pursue their own agendas. The GOP is effectively offering up the three to be fall guys.
To discredit Sondland — who has now admitted he directly told a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the military aid was conditional on announcing the “investigations” Trump wanted — Republicans are pointing out that Sondland carefully said he “presumed” this to be the case.

But Sondland has repeatedly and explicitly testified that he was acting at the direction of Giuliani, with whom he conversed regularly throughout this affair — and, crucially, that Giuliani was carrying out Trump’s wishes. As Sondland put it: “Until Rudy was satisfied, the president wasn’t going to change his mind.”

What’s more, Giuliani and Trump have publicly been entirely clear, going back months, on what Trump wanted: Ukraine had to launch investigations that would validate the conspiracy theory absolving Russia of sabotaging the 2016 election for Trump and smear Joe Biden in advance of 2020.

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And Giuliani himself spent months publicly carrying out the whole scheme, repeatedly saying he was acting in the interests in and at the direction of his “client,” that is, Trump.

So how will Republicans get around that niggling difficulty? By arguing that Giuliani, too, was freelancing. As Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) put it: “There are a whole lot of things that he does that he doesn’t apprise anybody of.”

Trump told Zelensky: Speak to Rudy
Here’s the problem, however: Trump himself flatly stated that Giuliani was his point man in carrying out his wishes with regard to Ukraine. On the July 25 call, right after Zelensky said Ukraine needs U.S. military help, Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor though.”

Trump then explicitly demanded Ukraine investigate the 2016 conspiracy theory and the Bidens. After some back-and-forth, Trump praised Giuliani effusively.

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“I will ask him to call you,” Trump said. “Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great.”

Trump added: “I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call.”

So, in Trump’s own words as captured in a White House document, after Zelensky requested military help, Trump directly pressured Zelensky to carry out his political dirty deeds, and repeatedly told Zelensky that Giuliani was his henchman for getting it done.

Republicans will argue that the final act of withholding the military aid to pressure Ukraine can’t be tied directly to Trump. But this requires one to believe something that’s spectacularly implausible.

Note first that Trump himself suspended the aid a week before his call with Zelensky. What’s more, it’s not in serious dispute (Sondland directly copped to this) that Trump conditioned the White House meeting with Zelensky — another thing Ukraine badly wanted — on carrying out the “investigations” Trump wanted.

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So we’re now supposed to believe that after dangling the White House meeting to leverage those investigations, Trump suddenly didn’t intend to use the frozen military aid for the same purpose, at precisely the moment he was maximizing his leverage over Zelensky?

And we’re supposed to believe that Giuliani, having carried out this scheme at Trump’s direction all throughout — again, by Trump’s own admission — suddenly freelanced via Sondland the most spectacularly corrupt act of this whole scheme, even though Trump is the one who froze the aid under still-unexplained circumstances?

Mulvaney is the most hapless of all
One last point: Trump himself has told reporters to their faces that there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with any of this. Trump has said withholding the money to force Ukraine to fight “corruption” was absolutely correct, and he’s also flatly said that he damn well did want Ukraine to “start a major investigation into the Bidens,” thus admitting this is what he truly wanted, not an investigation of generic “corruption.”

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In so doing, Trump seemed to be signaling to Republicans that they should unabashedly defend what Trump actually did do as absolutely fine.

And so, the hapless Mulvaney admitted and defended the quid pro quo directly to reporters before rapidly taking it back. But arguably, Mulvaney was just following Trump’s cues in doing so.

Now Republicans are tossing Mulvaney overboard for defending Trump more or less just as shamelessly as Trump himself had done, and they’re tossing Giuliani overboard for implementing the plot that Trump himself advertised. It all couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer henchmen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...e-throwing-giuliani-under-bus-theres-problem/

 

[cigaretteman]

House Republicans’ latest plan to shield President Trump from impeachment is to focus on at least three deputies — U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and possibly acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — who they say could have acted on their own to influence Ukraine policy.

All three occupy a special place in the Ukraine narrative as the people in most direct contact with Trump. As Republicans argue that most of the testimony against Trump is based on faulty secondhand information, they are sowing doubts about whether Sondland, Giuliani and Mulvaney were actually representing the president or freelancing to pursue their own agendas. The GOP is effectively offering up the three to be fall guys.

Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) initiated the impeachment inquiry Sept. 24, congressional Republicans have struggled to come up with a consistent and coherent explanation for why Trump tried to coerce a foreign leader to investigate the president’s domestic political rivals.

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Their evolving strategy comes as House Democrats settle on their argument that Trump tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to undertake two politically advantageous investigations as a precondition for U.S. military aid and a White House meeting between the two heads of state.

Trump allies defend Trump by pointing to his incompetence

When President Trump has been accused of wrongdoing, his allies often defend him by pointing to his lack of knowledge or awareness on things. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
By raising questions about the motivation of Trump’s top lieutenants on Ukraine policy, the GOP hopes to undermine the reliability of otherwise incriminating testimony from several current Trump administration officials.

William B. Taylor, currently the top diplomat in Ukraine, and National Security Council expert Tim Morrison told lawmakers they learned through Sondland that U.S. military aid to Ukraine was being leveraged to secure the probes.

White House official corroborates diplomat’s account that Trump appeared to seek quid pro quo

Sondland “made a presumption,” House Oversight Committee member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters, stressing that “what Sondland was told by the president ... [is] there was no quid pro quo.”

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Republicans, however, face several potential problems if they try to pin a quid pro quo on Sondland alone.

Sondland testified that he was “assuming” Giuliani was speaking for Trump when he said the president wanted Zelensky to investigate the Ukrainian energy company Burisma — which gave Joe Biden’s son Hunter a job on its board when the elder Biden was U.S. vice president — and also to pursue a debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine’s interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.

“All the communication flowed through Rudy Giuliani, and I can only speculate that the president was instructing his personal lawyer accordingly,” Sondland said, according to a transcript of his deposition.

But while Giuliani is Trump’s personal lawyer, GOP lawmakers appear to think they can argue he was not coordinating his actions with the president.

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“There is no direct linkage to the president of the United States,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told reporters this week, contending that while lawyers normally coordinate with their clients, Giuliani is a special case. “There are a whole lot of things that he does that he doesn’t apprise anybody of.”

The White House and a lawyer for Sondland declined to comment.

Live updates: State Department official says Giuliani was engaged in a campaign ‘full of lies and incorrect information’ about former ambassador

The suggestion that Sondland, Giuliani and possibly Mulvaney made demands of Ukrainians without Trump’s explicit blessing has emerged among several theories that Republicans have offered in Trump’s defense, as witnesses testify that they believed Ukraine was being squeezed.

In a sign of how the GOP is scrambling, however, many of those theories run counter to each other.

In the past few days, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has said it doesn’t matter whether Trump made a quid pro quo demand because he didn’t have “criminal intent.” Sens. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have argued, as Mulvaney did from a White House lectern last month, that such exchanges happen “all the time” in foreign policy and are not a serious offense, let alone impeachable.

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And Trump ally Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has floated yet another defense, suggesting Trump’s Ukraine policy was too “incoherent” for officials to successfully execute anything as calculated as a quid pro quo arrangement.

“What I can tell you about the Trump policy toward Ukraine: It was incoherent, it depends on who you talk to, they seem to be incapable of forming a quid pro quo,” he said.

Much of the GOP’s frustration in recent days has focused on Sondland, who amended his original testimony after Taylor and Morrison spoke to House impeachment investigators. Sondland said he did in fact recall telling Ukrainian officials that the release of military aid would be contingent on Kyiv’s opening investigations Trump wanted.

Both Taylor and Morrison testified that Sondland told them that Trump had asked Sondland to leverage a head-of-state meeting that Zelensky greatly desired, using it to get the two investigations activated, and that the military aid also would be contingent on the investigations taking place. But Sondland, who told investigators that he was in touch with Trump far more than he was in touch with Giuliani, testified that he never heard directly from Trump on those issues, a contradiction that witnesses have yet to clear up.

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“During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukraine interference in the 2016 U.S. election,” Taylor testified. “He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky in a box by making a public statement about ordering such investigation.”

Taylor said that during another conversation a few days later, Sondland said “he had talked to President Trump,” who was “adamant that President Zelensky himself had to clear things up and do it in public.”

Morrison, who defended Trump’s actions to investigators, said that he wondered at the time whether Sondland was freelancing when he informed him about the apparent quid pro quo on Sept. 1, 2019.

“Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security,” he said.

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Sondland told lawmakers that his understanding was based on conversations with Giuliani, whom Trump had already told him he should listen to on Ukraine matters.

“It must have been Giuliani, because I wasn’t talking to the president about it,” Sondland said, according to a transcript of his testimony, later adding: “I heard that from Rudy Giuliani. I never heard it from the president. I am assuming Rudy Giuliani heard it from the president, but I don’t know that.”

That puts Giuliani back in the spotlight — and potentially in the crosshairs of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Giuliani’s freewheeling approach to representing Trump has frequently perplexed Republicans, who are frustrated by the former New York mayor’s loose-lipped media appearances, in which he has pushed conspiracy theories about Ukraine and even admitted that he directly asked Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens. Republicans also point to Giuliani’s business interests in Ukraine as reasons to think he may have been motivated by personal gain, and not his oft-claimed loyalty to Trump, as he ran what amounted to a shadow policy on Kyiv.

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Giuliani and Sondland are not the only people that Republicans argue can take the heat off Trump. Some congressional Republicans have suggested that Mulvaney was simply exercising his own well-documented penchant for cutting foreign aid when he effectively admitted in an Oct. 17 news conference that the administration had withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine to secure investigations that could help the president politically.

House Democrats consider Mulvaney’s comments during that news conference — remarks that Mulvaney later tried to walk back — to be a central piece of evidence in their impeachment case against Trump.

Several witnesses have cited Mulvaney’s quiet but central role convening meetings in which pivotal decisions about Ukraine policy were made. Multiple U.S. officials have observed that Sondland appeared to have a close relationship with Mulvaney, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified that Sondland exploited his ties to Mulvaney to secure audiences with Trump about Ukraine policy.

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But Sondland denied to investigators that he and the acting White House chief of staff ever substantively discussed the alleged quid pro quo.

“I don’t recall ever having a conversation with Mr. Mulvaney” about withholding a meeting with Zelensky until Ukraine committed to the investigations, Sondland testified. “I’ve had very, very few conversations with Mr. Mulvaney. I wanted to have more, but he was never available.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...a14efa-0173-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

 

[Hawk_4shur]

 

[SB_SB]

If Trump and republicans turn on Giuliani, I fully expect him to turn on them and start talking.

 

[MitchLL]

Rudy has gone conspicuously silent the last few weeks. Guess his lawyer must have told him to STFU.

The Federal prison system might be releasing a big group of prisoners relatively soon in anticipation of an influx of Trump associates in the coming months.

 

[BelemNole]

Never doubt trump supports ability to believe a lie.

 

[ottumwan in tx]

Rudy has gone conspicuously silent the last few weeks. Guess his lawyer must have told him to STFU.

The Federal prison system might be releasing a big group of prisoners relatively soon in anticipation of an influx of Trump associates in the coming months.

basically republicans never pay much attention to him. he has old timer's disease. democrats like to distract themselves with his mutterings.

 

[SB_SB]

basically republicans never pay much attention to him. he has old timer's disease. democrats like to distract themselves with his mutterings.

That old timer is the personal lawyer for old timer trump.

 

[ottumwan in tx]

That old timer is the personal lawyer for old timer trump.

yes and still nobody cares

 

[hawkedoff]

This of course presumes the POTUS can't use whomever he likes as counsel. Strange assumption

 

[ottumwan in tx]

This of course presumes the POTUS can't use whomever he likes as counsel. Strange assumption

they think as dems that if you are a trump supporter you are anti-American or something

rudy is way beyond his "use by date", but I think he's an American

 

[cigaretteman]

they think as dems that if you are a trump supporter you are anti-American or something

rudy is way beyond his "use by date", but I think he's an American

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, you are.