The most important thing you need to remember about Mayor Giuliani is that he doesn’t have a security clearance. He applied for clearance, but the FBI (which does all clearance background checks) wouldn’t give him one because he’s worked during the last 16 years for many foreign governments, and there are serious concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence.
As you read about the role of Mayor Giuliani in Trump’s affairs, acting in all of this as his personal lawyer, imagine when and where classified topics might have been discussed. Conversely, wherever Giuliani is involved, Trump cannot invoke executive privilege (which typically only shields national security topics). That means that virtually the entire Ukraine fiasco cannot be shielded by the claim of executive privilege because the mayor was involved every step of the way.
By the same token, if classified information is discussed while Giuliani is in the room, then all individuals in that room at the time can be charged with a felony for unauthorized disclosure of classified information. (Maybe that’s why Bolton has now refused to testify under oath in the ongoing House investigations because he was in the Oval Office with VP Pence and Secretary Perry when Trump set up this whole “drug trade,” as Bolton called it.)
Here’s the timeline:
Trump hired Mayor Rudy Giuliani to his legal team on April 19, 2018. Lev Parnas was Mayor Rudy’s close associate at the time and was used as point man because he was Ukrainian by birth. Later that year, Mayor Giuliani sent Lev Parnas and an associate to Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens.
Lev Parnas literally worshipped Donald Trump, bought his way into many of Trump’s private fund-raising events, and even recorded a revealing tete-a-tete conversation with the president on one occasion.
From April 2018 to May 2019, Lev Parnas introduced Mayor Rudy to all the major players in the corruption scandals and investigations in Ukraine. The lawyers for the defense claim Mayor Rudy was acting on Trump’s behalf to “investigate corruption in Ukraine.” Nothing in the existing record (or introduced into the record during the impeachment trial) supports this claim, and quite a lot refutes it. The following details are excerpted from Giuliani’s Wikipedia biography.
In May of 2019, excerpts from John Bolton’s book indicate an Oval Office meeting (attended by Bolton, VP Pence, Trump, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry) where preliminary planning began for a “quid pro quo” shakedown of Ukraine.
Later that month, Lev Parnas said he delivered an ultimatum (by Giuliani’s direction) to the new president of Ukraine, saying no senior US officials would attend the inauguration and vital US security aid would be withheld unless President Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens for corruption.
(Excuse me, but please tell me why Trump couldn’t order some obscure government agency to announce an investigation of the Bidens for corruption? )
Following the May 2019 White House meeting, Mayor Rudy pushed very hard for Zelensky to investigate the Burisma Group. He told people in the Zelensky administration that he was acting on behalf of his client, President Trump, and thus presented himself as an unofficial envoy with all the concomitant powers (including the President’s ear at any time of day or night).
Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone on July 25, 2019.
Mayor Rudy met with Ukrainian officials in June and August 2019. Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, another associate, also acted as his liaisons with the government. Then Buzzfeed reported that neither Parnas nor Furman had registered as foreign agents in the United States nor been approved by the US State Department, to which Mayor Rudy responded, “This (report) is a pathetic effort to cover up what are enormous allegations of criminality by the Biden family.” Even though, as already stated, no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens has ever been reported.
In September 2019, in a CNN interview, when asked if he had tried to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, Mayor Rudy responded, “Of course I did.”
Mayor Rudy soon thereafter claimed he had evidence and witnesses that he had collected in Ukraine, proving a criminal conspiracy to remove Trump from office and to keep him from getting reelected. He never provided the documents or otherwise authenticated these claims, and US authorities have since declared it all a disinformation effort by the Russians who regularly coerce close associates of people in power into that kind of conspiratorial frenzy.
US security experts, opining further on the matter, were very concerned that Mayor Giuliani did not ever communicate with the President on a secure, encrypted cell phone. The Russians (among others) regularly monitor communications of the President with all close associates. Hence, you can be quite sure that the Russians know a lot more about all of this than we’ll ever know – and that they have more than enough information to blackmail Trump, Mayor Giuliani, and all the other people they might have talked about on their unsecured phone lines – security risks, all. (Meaning that, now that we know with reasonable certainty what actually happened in all of this, there is hereby just cause to revoke the security clearance of President Donald R. Trump, pending further investigation.)
Senator Lankford (R-OR) said in an interview during the first few days of the impeachment that Mayor Giuliani was at the time acting on behalf of the Republican National Committee (RNC). He said the President had two things going on in Ukraine, his official duties, and his duties as head of the Republican Party. The Mayor, he said, was acting in the latter capacity.
The implication Senator Lankford was making is that Mayor Rudy was collecting Biden dirt on behalf of the RNC, not the president. No other Senators said any such thing, and the counsel for the defense soon thereafter gave a rushed presentation detailing the mayor’s involvement, as outlined above, evidently trying to not throw the whole RNC under the bus.
In 2018 and 2019, Ukraine passed anti-corruption benchmarks made by the US as a condition for our foreign aid, as certified by the Department of Defense and the State Department. These benchmarks were created by Congress. Having passed the anti-corruption standard, there was no reason whatsoever for Trump to order the military aid withheld.
A report on the Foreign Relations website states, “Before the July 2019 hold, the Trump administration had approved sending foreign assistance to Ukraine nearly 50 separate times without ever holding it because of concerns that it would be diverted due to corruption.”
There are several takeaways from this:
The DOD and State Department had thorough milestones to track corruption clean-up activities in Ukraine, with detailed investigations to certify their benchmarks were met. There was no reason whatsoever for Mayor Giuliani to conduct a freelance investigation, much less using dubious actors (Ingor Furman has been convicted, and Lev Parnas indicted for campaign finance violations, as foreign agents donating money to the Trump campaign).
The president’s lawyers said, “Obama didn’t send lethal military aid – some kind of friend he was. Trump sent them Javelin anti-tank missiles. Wow!” The fact is that Obama couldn’t send this lethal military hardware until Ukraine had passed the requisite anti-corruption benchmarks. Ditto for Trump – he, too, was restrained by the law.
The only reason Trump could send them the Javelins was that, as of July 25, Ukraine had done so well in their anti-corruption efforts that we now could send them the most lethal military hardware in our arsenal.
This means Mayor Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine were exclusively to dig up dirt on the Bidens. Nor can you delegate the Mayor’s acts to the RNC, not when Trump implored no less than eight times in that official phone call on July 25 for Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
Trump has, since Ambassador Yovanovitch’s damning testimony in the House last fall, publicly ridiculed her, to the point where she has recently resigned from the foreign service – after a distinguished 35-year career. She was appointed Ambassador to Ukraine in 2016 (after serving as Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia) and was the go-to anti-corruption expert in the whole Foreign Service Corps. If the administration was so focused on anti-corruption, the last thing they would do is to run off the one person who could (and did) make a difference.
And so, as stated in the very beginning here, Trump was guilty as charged: withholding valuable military aid in order to coerce Ukraine into announcing a (bogus) investigation into this top Democrat rival, Joe Biden.
Retaliation and harassment against a witness is a felony, by the way.