On Friday afternoon, Nancy wrote “Giuliani Is Asking a Foreign Government to Interfere in the 2020 Election” so I did not cover the story here at Progress Pond. Apparently, the blowback against Rudy was strong enough that Friday night he went on Fox News and declared that he won’t be going to Ukraine to ask them to assist Trump in his reelection bid.
If I were you, I would not take Giuliani’s word on that.
Here’s the back story. Rudy told the New York Times that he wanted to get Ukraine to conduct some investigations.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, is encouraging Ukraine to wade further into sensitive political issues in the United States, seeking to push the incoming government in Kiev to press ahead with investigations that he hopes will benefit Mr. Trump…
“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Thursday when asked about the parallel to the special counsel’s inquiry.
“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”
As Nancy pointed out, the purpose would be to damage Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
As a reminder, Giuliani wants Ukraine to pursue an investigation of Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, because Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board and received substantial compensation. As vice president, Biden had threatened to pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko didn’t fire the country’s top prosecutor for giving the oligarchs a pass on corruption. That prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was eventually fired and a chorus of right-wing conspiracy theorists are suggesting that Biden applied pressure to stop his investigation into Burisma.
On behalf of his client—who happens to be the president of a country that provides Ukraine with hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid—Giuliani is asking them to press ahead with an investigation that he thinks could be damaging to Joe Biden, one of Trump’s potential opponents in the 2020 election. Giuliani isn’t even being subtle about it, perhaps because he assumes that the president has gotten away with participating in another foreign government’s attempt to interfere in an election.
What ensued was widespread agreement that what Giuliani was proposing is improper and a lot of debate over whether it would be illegal. Within 24 hours, Giuliani backed off the idea, at least publicly, although I think a FISA warrant would be justified at this point to make sure he doesn’t follow up despite his denials.
