Rudy Giuliani Attacks Biden as SDNY Sifts Through His Comms for Ukraine Foreign Agent Investigation

Among the many Trump allies suggesting that the former President was better on Russian issues than the current, Rudy Giuliani attempted to attack President Joe Biden with a Tweet dripping with projection.

Just over four weeks ago, the Special Master Barbara Jones delivered the latest tranche of records seized from Giuliani’s phones to prosecutors in SDNY, the US Attorney’s Office that Rudy once led.

While the scope of the review exceeds the scope of the known warrants, those known warrants target Rudy’s role in getting Maria Yovanovich fired in 2019 as part of an effort to get campaign dirt on Joe Biden.

Indeed, for six of Rudy’s devices, the latest review focused on the period from December 1, 2018 through May 31, 2018, which would cover the following events.

Late 2018: Rudy Giuliani participates in a Skype call with the former top Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was ousted from office after multiple Western leaders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, pressed for his removal. Leaders complain Shokin was failing to tackle corruption. It’s around this time that Giuliani says he first learned of a possible Biden-Ukraine connection.

January 2019: Giuliani meets in New York with the top Ukrainian prosecutor at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko. This is when, Giuliani says, his investigation into the Bidens began.

A man named Lev Parnas has said he attended the meeting with Lutsenko and arranged the call with Shokin. Parnas told NPR he attended at least two meetings Giuliani had with Lutsenko. Parnas and an associate, who also worked with Giuliani, are later arrested and charged with violating campaign finance law in a separate matter.

March 31: The first round of presidential elections take place in Ukraine. Zelenskiy, a comedian who once played a president on television, comes out ahead of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. The race goes to a runoff.

April 7: In an interview on Fox News, Giuliani, unprompted, brings up a Biden-Ukraine connection. He says that while investigating the origin of the Russia investigation, “some people” told him “the story about [gas company] Burisma and Biden’s son.” Giuliani suggests that as vice president, Biden pressed to remove Shokin because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that had Biden’s son Hunter on its board for several years. There is no evidence to support this claim.

April 21: Zelenskiy is elected president of Ukraine and Trump calls to congratulate him. A White House readout of the call says Trump “expressed his commitment to work together with President-elect Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity, and root out corruption.”

April 25: Trump calls in to Sean Hannity’s TV show and says he has heard rumors about Ukrainian “collusion.” He tells the Fox News host he expects Attorney General Bill Barr to look into it. “I would imagine he would want to see this,” Trump says.

May 6: Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and an Obama appointee, ends her assignment in Kyiv. According to the whistleblower complaint filed against Trump, she had been “suddenly recalled” to the U.S. by senior State Department officials a week earlier.

Giuliani later says in an interview that she was removed “because she was part of the efforts against the President.” Yovanovitch tells Congress that she learned from the deputy secretary of state “there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018,” according to prepared remarks reported by multiple outlets.

May 9: Giuliani tells The New York Times he will travel to Ukraine “in the coming days” to push for investigations that could help Trump. Giuliani says he hopes to meet with President-elect Zelenskiy to push for inquiries into the origins of the Russia investigation and the Bidens’ involvement with Burisma.

“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Giuliani tells the Times.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he says. “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.”

Among the members of Congress criticizing Biden, Tulsi Gabbard voted present to impeach Trump on his related extortion attempt; virtually all Republicans voted not to impeach Trump, including Biden critics Paul Gosar and Scott Perry. Of Republican Senators, just Mitt Romney voted to convict the President.

Trump was not serious about Ukraine. He viewed it as nothing more than a political football. Almost his entire party backed him in that effort.

And his former attorney, wailing on Twitter about the ‘CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER” posed by “mentally deteriorating [men], who [were] of limited intelligence even before [] dementia” remains under criminal investigation as an unregistered agent of Russian-backed Ukrainians for his role in politicizing Ukraine.

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62 replies
    • greenbird says:

      did not know.
      Urban Dictionary: EAIAC
      [Search domain urbandictionary.com] https://www.urbandictionary.com › define.php?term=EAIAC
      Every Accusation Is A Confession. Pizzagate revealed the source of the astonishing conspiratorial conjectures to be EAIAC: “we like the INS abusing (brown) children with impunity, therefore the other side must be doing it too.”

        • Peterr says:

          Observation of Trump and his minions over the last six years, as they ascribed to their political opponents seemingly every illegal thing they were doing or dreamed of doing?

          Also known as “projection” in more academic circles.

            • Kit Traverse says:

              Projection, applied according to its strict psychological definition and not as a metaphorical term of art, precisely equates to a confession.

                • Kit Traverse says:

                  Sure, you could No True Scotsman this in a legal sense, but for all practical purposes, a person who a psychologist would evaluate as projecting would read that projection as a confession, no matter who they made it to or whether it would legally apply.

                • Scott Johnson says:

                  As a legal argument, it’s BS.

                  As a political observation, that the Trumpy GOP often accuses the “left” of doing what it is doing (a tactic out of the Rove playbook), it’s frequently spot-on.

                  In this case, Giuliani’s attempted takedown of Biden seem to apply more to the prior President. Not that any of them care; they’re mainly preaching to the choir with this nonsense.

                  • bmaz says:

                    You might have noticed that what we have been discussing is law, crimes, criminal investigations, criminal charges and/or criminal trials. And someone rolling in to such issues blathering that projection equals a “confession” is not only wrong, but dangerous. It is a complete disservice to the discussion and the people that read here. After a complete litany of comments he insisted on posting, I asked him to stop, he did not. And, irrespective of anything else, projection is NOT a confession. When we have a thread on Deep Thoughts On Theoretical Psychology, fine.

                    • timbo says:

                      And even then you’d likely be mostly right as well! (I appreciate the goop you have to wade through here more than you know, Bmaz.)

        • Kit Traverse says:

          Projective identification is a thing.

          It doesn’t apply – obviously – to all accusations. It does apply, surprisingly often, to guilty parties desperate to deflect from their own crimes, and what better way than by accusing others of them?

          • bmaz says:

            Well I’ve been dealing with criminals, crimes etc. for 35 years, and I say it is an asinine bunch of bullshit.

            • Fraud Guy says:

              However, for Trump’s crowd, “asinine bunch of bullshit” is pretty much on brand. I would say that there’s a significant chance of any claim they make being sourced from either what they have done or what they will try to do given an opportunity.

            • Kit Traverse says:

              Are you criminal defense? How many genuine psychopaths have you encountered? Unless you work with the top tier of white-collar defendants where malignant narcissism is a job requirement, my guess would be not many are quite that grandiose.

              But the mechanism, whether you call it projection or gaslighting, is hardly unknown even in humbler precincts of law. Maybe you don’t do domestic disputes or divorce law. It’s not uncommon for warring spouses to accuse the other of what they’re doing. It’s kind of the MO of an abusive partner.

              As a legal defense, of course, the tools of projection, things like selective prosecution (tu quoque) rarely fly in courtrooms so you’d doubtless encourage your clients to embrace the Reality Principle.

              • Kit Traverse says:

                The tragedy is that Trump, thanks to his dark Svengali Roy Cohn, turned projective identification into a bona-fide legal strategy, starting with countersuing HUD for “racial discrimination.”

                  • Kit Traverse says:

                    Calling something names is not an argument, Bmaz.

                    [Slow your roll. You’ve attempted more than 10 comments in a fairly short window of time at this site which should not be not be mistaken for a Twitter substitute. You’re also dangerously close to poking at the moderation. Note the post’s topic and stay focused on it. You might also note the Community Guidelines. /~Rayne]

                    • bmaz says:

                      Your last warning. And I did not call you a name, I said your relentless fixation on this confession claim is complete shit.

                    • Kit Traverse says:

                      I’ve already poked at the moderation, Rayne. I’ve had a post deleted, a response restricted and I’ve made at least one moderator furious at me.

                      This was not my intent when I came here. I’m not here to troll or monopolize. I looked at your Community Guidelines before my first post. I can’t for the life of me imagine how it’s off-topic to talk about projection in a post about Rudy accusing Biden of doing what Trump did in Ukraine. I never said that “projection equals confession” in a legal sense, despite the accusation.

                      So I’m going to bail, honestly. I wish you all well and of course I’ll continue to read, but this is my last post here.

                    • bmaz says:

                      Listen, I am not “furious”, I was just annoyed. And for the last time, yeah, when you equate “projection” to “a confession”, that’s a problem. You went on relentlessly and repetitively. I asked you to stop with that subject, and you refused to do so. You had already made your point over and over again. And now you are hurt because you could not continue to do so. And, for the record, yes you did indeed so equate when you point blankly said

                      In reply to bmaz.
                      Projection, applied according to its strict psychological definition and not as a metaphorical term of art, precisely equates to a confession.

                      If you want to take your keyboard home and “bail”, that is unfortunate. We would like to have you here.

                  • greenbird says:

                    it was an acronym new to me, and i posted the ‘urban’ def, only to provide info to others.
                    twasna meant otherwise, or to split focus. bless me, i’m just a bird.

              • bmaz says:

                Yes criminal defense, at a pretty high level and for a very long time. For the love of god, I will trash any more of this horseshit you hocker up.

          • georgieporger says:

            Kit. Sorry to be nitpicking. You are using projection and projective identification interchangeably. They are entirely different defense mechanisms. What people have been referring to as Trump’s behavior is projection, and no, it is not a form of “confession”. Next, projective identification is an unconscious means of forcing the “other” to feel what they are feeling, in essence, externalizing their conflict. Very different defense mechanisms.

        • Kalkaino says:

          I dunno, BMAZ, your ire seems disproportionate to the spirit of the post, and your characterization of it unjust. Yes, EAIAC is somewhat of a conundrum [Like ‘Everything I say is a lie’ — or ‘My accusation of projection is a projection’], but it’s a useful generality, and a clue to some actual human behavior, and in the case of the current Right-Wing practice on the one hand, and propaganda on the other, entirely apposite.

          • Rayne says:

            Let. It. Go. You’re addressing a lawyer who deals in specifics as well as a moderator. Continued arguing about this takes comments off topic.

        • Leoghann says:

          To put the social media acronym EAIAC into a non-legalistic form that might be more clear and less controversial, think of the Republican party during the Gingrich days, on up until the recent Paul Ryan regime, but mostly the Neo-Con and Tea Party periods. Often we would hear charges leveled against Democrats and the party in general that came out of nowhere and seemed to be completely fabricated. But how many times have we found out later that members of the Republican party had been doing exactly that?

          It became common wisdom to immediately look for where the GOP was doing whatever they were accusing Democrats of doing. It’s not really projection (the psychological term), because that’s a subconscious line of thought by an individual. And it’s not a confession in a legal sense (or a personal sense, really), because a desire to put things right, however small, comes with a personal confession. Legal confessions are a different animal. But EAIAC was coined at some point (I’m pretty sure it originated on FARK), and it stuck. Trump and his merry band of outlaws continue to reinforce the principle almost daily.

          • bmaz says:

            I honestly do not care. It was stupid to insert it in to a legal discussion. And I am done, and hope others are too, with this ridiculous tripe.

          • Rayne says:

            It’s a group level expression of DARVO, which I’ve been scratching something out about but can’t seem to get it finished. We need to let this go as it’s derailing the topic.

            • MB says:

              Here is Jennifer Freyd’s DARVO research page (just in case it might help to flesh out your unfinished article):

              https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineDARVO.html

              [Let this off-topic subject go. I’m fully aware of Freyd’s work which is included as a reference in the Wikipedia page I’d linked. Any further expansion on this will be purged. /~Rayne]

    • Kit Traverse says:

      I very casually and without much snark called Ken Vogel an access journalist in one tweet and was instantly blocked ;)

      • BobCon says:

        Access journalist is potentially too innocent a term for what he does.

        He may well have veered into John Solomon territory. I think the institutional framework at the Times partially limits the oportunities for fast tracking Solomon style conspiracy theories, but there’s a huge impact from getting the Times brand backing even half of what Giuliani was pushing.

        I’m curious whether Vogel wasn’t just talking extensively with Giuliani but actually helping him shape his fictions to pass the formal requirements of reporting at the Times.

        • Eureka says:

          >>I’m curious…

          Wouldn’t we all love to know. I’ve thought that answer has to be at least partially ‘yes’ (so, yes). I can see it having been done in a bumbling manner (esp. given how sensitive Vogel is, incl. his level of righteousness when he feels his reporting has been validated in any small way), like through interrogatories, but at least some in the Times chain (perhaps Vogel himself) had to have known exactly what they were doing.

  1. harpie says:

    I wonder how much Russian money is sloshing around at the Council for National Policy.

    The Big Money Behind the Big Lie Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie
    Jane Mayer August 2, 2021

    [Marcy, there are two small TYPO’s:
    Yovanovich’s first name and the year [May 31, 2018] I guess should be 2019.]

  2. wolfess says:

    “mentally deteriorating [men], who [were] of limited intelligence even before [] dementia”

    Is he talking about himself, the failed presidunce, or the current president in this statement??? 🤔😜

  3. earlofhuntingdon says:

    If Rudy, a top lieutenant for a sitting president and doing his bidding, met with a Ukrainian prosecutor in January 2019, then his “investigation” into a purported Biden-Ukraine connection did not start at that meeting, but predated it. These things take a lot of work to set up, and purpose and intent would have to predate that work.

      • wolfess says:

        I was hoping that Marcy would have an article about this latest turn of events in NYC. Is there even a slight possibility that the Trump will ever get what’s coming to him? At the very least, I want it to be impossible for him (or anyone in his family) to be presidunce ever again.

      • ernesto1581 says:

        alternative takes on Pomerantz & Dunne:

        a) Alvin Bragg does not want the first case he undertakes, which is likely to be the defining case of his career, to go forward without having absolutely definitive evidence for a criminal conviction in hand.

        b) The slow-motion hale-and-farewell of Fischetti in for Trump (July 21), and Pomerantz out for Bragg (Feb ’22), for reasons yet to be made public, but possibly involving a relationship between the two going back forty years.
        In the 1980’s, Fischetti and Pomerantz led law firms that made their mark on the NY criminal defense scene defending drug dealers, businessmen, and mob figures. Before Fischetti went with Fischetti & Malgieri, he was partner in the firms Fischetti, Feigus & Pomerantz and Fischetti, Pomerantz, & Russo.

        Fischetti’s best known defense was of John “The Teflon Don” Gotti’s brother, Gene, who ended up with 50 years for racketeering and drug trafficking (released in 2018.)
        “When they say to somebody, as an example, ‘If he does that again, I’ll kill him,’ they don’t mean that they will physically kill him,” said Fischetti at one point, “it’s a manner of speech.”
        Makes perfect sense for Trump to have hired him seeing as how Vance’s investigation has been running along similar lines to that of an organized crime investigation.
        As for Dunne, before joining Vance’s team in 2016, he spent many years with Davis Polk & Wardell, one of the more prestigious firms in NY, defending corporate clients on Wall Street. He also worked for Morgenthau, right out of law school.

        c) Bragg decides that Pomerantz and Dunne leaving will be a good time to suspend his grand jury in order allow James’s civil case to proceed in a timely manner, during which Trump, Weisselberg et al will have ample opportunity to take the fifth. At which point the judge may (will? should?) advise the jury to look upon defendant’s actions in an “adverse light” since there is no possibility of “self incrimination” without the possibility of criminal prosecution.

        I realize Bragg’s grand jury expires in April but I imagine another special grand jury could be convened by him, as Vance did in November just before leaving office.

        (And now I duck and take cover…)

        • Rayne says:

          All excellent food for thought. I’d wondered myself if Bragg wanted to put at a remove anything Vance did, but the timing of Weisselberg’s request seemed oddly coincident.

        • Leoghann says:

          Thanks for this, ernesto. Obviously there are circumstances and factors in motion that aren’t public knowledge. Yesterday while I was acting like a soap opera character in reaction to first hearing of this, bmaz reminded me that MWBR (more will be reveled), which calmed me down some. The possible issue that Rayne cited, the desire of Bragg to have the Trump Organization prosecution be his creation, not something Vance did the footwork on, crossed my mind. Knowing Vance’s reputation isn’t squeaky clean, it makes even more sense. And that ties in somewhat with your first scenario.

  4. glenn storey says:

    Any thoughts on yesterday’s resignations? I apologize if I missed any discussion in other threads.

    [Go back to the SDNY related thread, thanks — see ernesto1581’s comment. Leave this thread for Russia-related topic. /~Rayne]

  5. Leoghann says:

    No matter how far out into the weeds Rudy wanders, he can always go a little further into the swamp. He’s one of those people who can always find an excuse. It’s pretty obvious that he’s going to keep going until someone stops him or nature intervenes. There will never be a nadir for his behavior, or that of his orange boss.

  6. Mart says:

    Stuck in my head that Blackwater/Xe VP, ex CIA, Bush 911 affiliated Cofer Black and Hunter Biden were on the Burisma board together. I have no idea how these things work.

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