I was going to go as Rudy Giuliani this Halloween, but I worry it’ll scare the kids too much.
So, I’ve decided to go as Hannibal Lecter : - )
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Junior writes tweets that not only don’t make sense in the moment, but are really nonsensical when you put them in context. He acts as if he thinks his audience has no memory of what happened even a day ago. We all still remember that infamous “if it’s what you say it is, I love it” comment he made to a Russian agent.
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Macabre to us, because we like our meat neatly packaged without heads and scrotum still attached.
Quite normal to most of the world.
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Rudy just mucks it up for everybody:
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When it comes to Dark Matter, I’ve come to believe all bets are off.
@kelaine. That’s also how the Republican base like their politicians.
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My hotel room at Koh Samui years ago had cheap pirated VHS copies of movies, with the American titles mistranslated on the cases.
My favorite was “Silence of the Lamps”.
I’m now thinking of gaslight Rudy being extinguished.
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As a former reporter (as was my mom) I couldn’t agree more.
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The news on Rudy is following a similar pattern to what we saw preceding the indictment and guilty pleas of Manafort, Gates, Flynn, Cohen, Stone.
Rudy is getting indicted, folks. So much has come out, in fact, about Rudy’s mobster connections that it’s quite conceivable that the thing I’ve been complaining about, the connection between Rudy’s shady Ukrainian connections and schemes, and the Trump-UKR shakedown might actually get made this week.
It turns out that this plot had overlapping quid pro quos that served the interests of multiple conspirators.
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Trump needed ‘dirt’ from official UKR sources to (1) fuel the Barr investigation into the 2016 election, and to (2) attack Biden.
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Dmitry Firtash and his Kremlin, pro-Kremlin Ukrainian and Mafia backers wanted to change the board at Naftogaz (UKR’s state owned energy co) and squeeze the Zelensky regime to accept Putin’s ‘peace plan’.
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Dmitry Firtash also wanted help to avoid extradition to the US for a bribery trial and wanted the case thrown out.
For these reasons, Firtash hired Rudy, paid him a ton of money, and appointed Parnas and Fruman as his lieutenants to execute the scheme (those 2 are useful because they are US citizens, have a long history in money laundering and have earned their stripes as mobsters).
So Rudy, Trump, Parnas and Fruman cook up this scheme to elevate UKR bad actors like former prosecutors Shokin and Leschenko, use the State Department (Volker & Sondland) + Perry to push folks out of the way, force the UKR gov’t to replace the board of Naftogaz and extort the UKR gov’t, tying the release of sensitive military aid for political dirt, accepting Putin’s peace plan and replacing that board, all the while covering it up.
The bad thing for Trump-Rudy is that there are so many separate, discrete crimes along the way, prosecutors and investigators don’t need to nail the whole conspiracy to cause it to unravel. So, in a sense, what the whistle blower started has set off two investigative prongs, one by Congress and one by the SDNY, that are approaching the conspiracy from different ends and sweeping up everything in between. They are about to meet in the middle.
The Rudy-UKR prong (which involves illegal unregistered foreign lobbying, campaign finance violations and public corruption) appears quite well developed.
This week from the chronicles of Rudy:
- CNN piece on him securing a visa for Shokin
- Bloomberg piece that Firtash funded Parnas and Fruman
- NYT piece that suggesting (confirming?) Rudy has been repping Firtash to try to get his bribery case and extradition shut down.
- Various pieces on the interesting places Parnas showed up (GHW Bush funeral, DeSantis victory rally)
- Pieces out on grand jury looking at former Congressman Sessions (he’s William Sessions, former FBI director’s son, btw) involvement in getting illicit political donations from Parnas/Fruman and advocating for the removal of Yovanovitch.
- Various pieces about State Department testimony (Fiona Hill, Sondland, George Kent, Michael McKinley, Yovanovitch)
- On top of that, there are pieces out there highlighting Rudy’s role to help Turkey end the Zarrab investigation, extradite Gulen, and stop a prosecution against the Turkish bank caught up in money laundering).
I’m sure I’m missing a few but you get the picture. Rudy has no clients but Trump and the mob (the latter backed by the shadowy hand of the Kremlin), and they are the same client for all intents and purposes here. The right hand was doing what his mob connects wanted (which again benefited the Kremlin as they have an alliance with the mob re: Ukraine and common interests w/Trump), the left hand was doing what Trump wanted (extort the UKR gov’t for two types of political dirt).
I think the two prongs are meeting in the middle pretty quickly, more quickly than we perhaps thought.
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It’s a miracle direct from Dog that Rudy hasn’t been indicted long before this.
He’s been dirty for decades.
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It seems that Rudy was lobbying for DOJ to drop the charges against Firtash.
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Don’t forget Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Mexico and any other countries in South America, Central America, and Africa that have been denigrated by trump.
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OT, but sobering. Seventy thousand votes and the electoral college may convey us to the Hague. (Resigned sigh)
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Mmmhmm
. That’ll be in the Impeachment docs no doubt.
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Except that the US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court treaty.
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Why not? They seem to have broken just every other law, including the Constitution and Gravity (you’ve seen that picture of Trump pretending to play tennis, right!?!)
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I know, but sometimes optics are devastating.
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Trump has made the US a pariah in large parts of the world.
Republicans seem okay with that.
Silence = consent.
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I’m guessing the boss was Firtash and/or his handlers.
Consequently, Ghouliani is no more likely to talk than Manafort. That doesn’t mean he might not continue to say some indemnifying things about Donald.
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I see Rick Perry as an especially weak link. He’s refusing to testify for now, but as someone who was probably never in Trump’s inner circle, I think Perry’s lawyer will eventually convince him to come clean. He can probably finagle an immunity agreement.
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Rudy will sing a major aria—he’s too scared and selfish to take the fall by himself.
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