President Donald Trump is surrounded by crooks, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Recently, federal investigators delivered a subpoena for records from Giuliani’s consulting business, which has included him getting paid for work for a dizzying array of clients from around the world. This weekend, a panel on MSNBC hammered Giuliani over his corruption, which has included him, in one of the commentator’s estimations, essentially offering the president and U.S. foreign policy in general as a product for corrupt world leaders. The panel also had a memorable metaphor for Giuliani’s behavior — one panelist called his behavior like “a bag of scorpions on meth.”
The jumping off point for all of the latest mess involving Giuliani is his advocacy on behalf of the president in the ongoing Ukraine scandal. Giuliani pressured Ukrainian authorities to investigate the Bidens in exchange for military aid and a summit in D.C. with the Trump team, and in the wake of that plot coming out, he’s been one of the president’s most vocal defenders as investigators have kickstarted impeachment.
POLITICO reporter Andrew Desiderio noted:
‘Some [Republicans] have had the foresight for months to tell the president, look, Rudy Giuliani is bad news for you, he might end up getting you impeached, and look where we are right now. And that’s a message that Republicans have been sending him for a while. And then they’ve relayed back to me and said, the president loves Rudy, they are loyal to each other, they’ve been loyal to each other for so long, the president’s never going to dump Rudy.’
There have been eyecatching developments on both sides of the Trump-Giuliani relationship recently. Giuliani insisted that he had “insurance” against Trump firing him in the form of some kind of dirt he could use as leverage against the president or something — but he said he was joking. Meanwhile, despite his own documented participation in the Ukraine quid pro quo scheme, Trump recently claimed that he didn’t even know what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine.
However, that doesn’t mean that the problems will be going away anytime soon. Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez noted:
‘Aside from the fact that Rudy Giuliani sounds crazier than a bag of scorpions on meth, we have to think about what he’s doing here. The president is not paying Rudy Giuliani, but he’s trying to get all these Ukrainian oligarchs and a Venezuelan billionaire… all of these people are paying him, but the president doesn’t pay Rudy Giuliani?.. Donald Trump is not the customer of Rudy Giuliani, he is the product. He is what is getting served to the people who pay Rudy Giuliani… for the American people, knowing that the president is the product should be pretty disturbing.’
Watch:
Trump certainly doesn’t seem to care. He has consistently refused to even pretend to engage with those concerned about his behavior, and all precedent indicates that he won’t be curtailing his personal abuse of power anytime soon. Thus, Democrats are continuing to build their case for impeachment.
