Rudy Giuliani reportedly had lunch with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman at Trump International Hotel in Washington yesterday, the same day that they were arrested on campaign-finance charges, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Prosecutors said at a press conference that Parnas and Fruman were attempting to leave the country when they were arrested at Dulles International Airport.
Ken Frydman, a former press secretary for Rudy Giuliani, writes in the New York Times: “After his mayoralty ended in 2002, Rudy went to work for what seemed like every rich bad guy and tinpot dictator who called. (So going to work for Mr. Trump made sense.) He charged $100,000 for self-aggrandizing speeches about his heroic leadership after Sept. 11. He became a multimillionaire.”
“In perfect political symmetry, Rudy Giuliani now does Donald Trump’s dirty work: Vainly trying to cover up the Ukrainian cover-up and attacking a Democratic presidential front-runner, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.”
“Watching and reading Rudy’s ferocious lying for Mr. Trump, whether on Fox or CNN, forced me to re-examine his last 25 years, especially the profiteering from Sept. 11. But Ukraine was the coup de grâce. We who admired him for so long expected much more from Rudy Giuliani and his legacy.”
Former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker told House investigators that he warned Rudy Giuliani, that Giuliani was receiving untrustworthy information from Ukrainian political figures about Joe Biden and his son, the Washington Post reports.
“Volker said he tried to caution Guiliani that his sources, including Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, were unreliable and that he should be careful about putting faith in the prosecutor’s stories.”
“Volker also said that he and other State Department officials cautioned the Ukrainians to steer clear of U.S. politics. Getting involved would open the nation up to allegations that they were interfering in an election and could be detrimental to Ukraine long-term.”
Rudy Giuliani “refused to say what sort of agreement, if any, he has with President Trump to act as his lawyer,” BuzzFeed News reports.
Said Giuliani: “If I did, I wouldn’t show it to you, and what right do you have to ask me that? I’m a private lawyer. I could have a handshake with him. I don’t have to tell you what the basis of my attorney-client relationship is.”
“The nature of Giuliani’s work for Trump is central to how Congressional investigators are able to gather information from Giuliani. If Giuliani has been working as the president’s personal lawyer, he could claim attorney-client privilege over his communications with the president… But there are exceptions to that privilege, and Giuliani himself recently told The Atlantic, ‘I’m not acting as a lawyer.'”
John Cassidy: “If this was a dystopian thriller, one could imagine Giuliani as an undercover saboteur, who was ordered to embed himself as deeply as possible within Team Trump and then bide his time. In 2016, he proved his bona fides with Trump by publicly defending him after the appearance of the Access Hollywood tape, and then he accompanied Trump on his final campaign swing. In 2018, after Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, Giuliani reappeared as the public face of the President’s legal-defense team. With other lawyers conducting most of the actual legal work, he had plenty of time for pursuing other projects, including a certain oppo-research effort in Kiev. And what a job he made of it.”
“Giuliani isn’t an undercover operative, of course. He’s a retired politician who couldn’t bear to be out of the spotlight and who saw, in Trump’s rise, a way to get back on the stage. He’s also a rich security consultant, whose clients include Eastern European moguls with ties to the Ukrainian government. In promoting to Trump the unfounded theory that Biden blackmailed Ukraine’s government to protect his son, these two streams in Giuliani’s life came together. And you have to give him some credit, at least, for knowing his client. Outside the confines of 4chan, there is probably nobody in America more partial to conspiracy theories than Trump.”
NBC News: “Giuliani’s role in the scandal that has triggered an impeachment inquiry is still coming into focus. But several legal experts who used to work with the former U.S. attorney-turned New York City mayor-turned chief President Trump defender told NBC News they believe his conduct likely broke the law.”
Rudy Giuliani told CNN that he would not testify for the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry without consulting his client, President Trump.
He said his work for the President should be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Said Giuliani: “Ultimately, if I were to say yes and he were to say no, I can’t testify.”
“Rudy Giuliani, whose actions as President Trump’s personal lawyer have helped set in motion an impeachment inquiry, is set to appear as a paid speaker at a Kremlin-backed conference in Armenia on Tuesday — an event expected to include the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials,” the Washington Post reports.
Elaina Plott spoke to Rudy Giuliani following the release of the whistleblower report and “he was, put simply, very angry.”
Said Giuliani: “It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero.”
He added: “I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government. Anything I did should be praised.”
“Giuliani then unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the ‘deep state.'”
Rudy Giuliani told CNN he has “no knowledge of any of that crap” in the newly-released complaint from an American intelligence community whistleblower.
Asked about details from the complaint that multiple US officials were “deeply concerned” about his activities speaking with Ukrainian officials and nationals, Giuliani called the charge “total nonsense.”
Three U.S. House of Representatives committees said on Monday they had begun “a wide-ranging investigation” into reports that President Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and possibly others pressured Ukraine’s government to assist Trump’s re-election campaign, Reuters reports.
Rudy Giuliani told The Guardian that President Trump wants Attorney General William Barr to consider investigating Joe Biden, a potential opponent in next year’s presidential election, over Biden’s ties to Ukraine.
“Giuliani made the remark as fears grew among Democrats that the president will use the US justice department – and even help from foreign officials – to go after his political rivals.”
Giuliani added: “I can’t tell Attorney General Barr what to do. He’s a very, very fine lawyer. My experience with him is that he’s a very honorable man, and he will do the right thing.”
Jeanine Pirro returned to Fox News after two weeks off the air and let loose with a tirade against the “traitorous, treasonous” investigators who probed President Trump’s ties to Russia, claiming another “coup” may be in the works if Trump’s accusers don’t “face behind the bars justice.”
Among her guests was Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who praised her as a “crusader for justice.” Giuliani also called for the Justice Department to investigate those “who tried to perpetrate a fraud against the American people” and said former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe “should be in jail for perjury.”
“It’s like waiting for a baby… If the report is good, I’ll give out cigars.”
— Rudy Giuliani, quoted by the Washington Post, on the pending Mueller report.
Daily Beast: “Rudy Giuliani and estranged wife Judith Nathan Giuliani’s divorce has hit such a high level of bitterness that a judge told them not to be in the same room if they run into each other at social clubs.”
An attorney who said he was speaking with Rudy Giuliani reassured Michael Cohen in an April 2018 email that Cohen could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places,” according to a copy of an email obtained by CNN.
“Two emails — both dated April 21, 2018, and among documents provided to Congress by the President’s former attorney and fixer — do not specifically mention a pardon. Cohen, in his closed-door congressional testimony, has provided these emails in an effort to corroborate his claim that a pardon was dangled before he decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors.”
Jonathan Chait: “This is a really, really big deal. The power to pardon convicted criminals for federal crimes is a legitimate use of presidential authority. Whether it’s legitimate for the president to use this power to pardon criminals who committed crimes on his behalf, or might have otherwise testified against him, is a subject of intense debate.”
Michael Cohen “was contacted by two New York attorneys who claimed to be in close contact with Rudy Giuliani, the current personal attorney to Trump,” ABC News reports.
“The outreach came just as Cohen, who spent more than a decade advocating for Trump, was wrangling with the most consequential decision of his life; whether to remain in a joint defense agreement with the president and others, or to flip on the man to whom he had pledged immutable loyalty. The sources described the lawyers’ contact with Cohen as an effort to keep him in the tent.”
Garrett Graff: “Indicting the whole Trump Organization as a ‘corrupt enterprise’ could also help prosecutors address the thorny question of whether the president can be indicted in office; they could lay out a whole pattern of criminal activity, indict numerous players — including perhaps Trump family members — and leave the president himself as a named, unindicted co-conspirator. Such an action would allow investigators to make public all the known activity for Congress and the public to consider as part of impeachment hearings or re-election. It would also activate powerful forfeiture tools for prosecutors that could allow them to seize the Trump Organization’s assets and cut off its income streams.”
“The irony will be that if federal prosecutors decide to move against President Trump’s empire and family together, he’ll have one man’s model to thank: his own TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who perfected the template to tackle precisely that type of criminal enterprise.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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