More and more of the Trump team’s behavior keeps falling under scrutiny. Now, the Daily Beast is reporting that House Democrats are considering launching an investigation of presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s overseas activity, which has most prominently and recently included a planned trip to Ukraine to pressure leaders there to investigate the Bidens for possible corruption.
In conversation with Ukrainian media, Giuliani eventually claimed that he cancelled the trip in light of supposed George Soros-driven plots against him, and he was similarly belligerent in response to the prospect of an investigation from House Democrats. He shared:
‘If they want to come after me, I gladly accept it, because we could just make the Biden stuff bigger news. Do it! Give me a chance to give a couple speeches about it and hold a press conference. I’d love that… I think it’d be a fun fight.’
Despite Giuliani’s best efforts, there remains not much of anything to his talking point of there being something to the Bidens’ behavior. Ukrainian authorities have shared that there is no evidence of corruption on their part. The story goes that while serving as vice president alongside now former President Barack Obama, Joe pressured Ukraine to fire a chief prosecutor as a form of a kickback for his own family, since the now presidential candidate’s son Hunter worked with an energy firm that the government was investigating. In reality, that probe had already been shelved at the time of Joe’s pressure, the former vice president says he only learned of his son’s involvement with the company through media reports, and in the first place, Joe’s actions fit right into broader U.S. and even global positions.
Even still, Giuliani has been pushing the story of supposed Biden corruption, even meeting with former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, who has in the past “made unproven claims that the Democratic National Committee worked with the Kiev government in 2016 to dig up incriminating information,” The Washington Post shares.
There’s more to the story of Giuliani’s overseas connections besides the Ukraine debacle, including a late 2018 letter he sent to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis recommending “changes to the country’s anti-corruption program” that included notable diversions from the State Department’s stated stance on the issue, as the Daily Beast describes.
A couple of months after that, in October 2018, Giuliani spoke alongside a sanctioned Russian official at a conference in Armenia, an event the former New York City mayor says he was attending as a private citizen. The event is unsettlingly similar to one that’s become a flashpoint of concern over the Trump team’s contacts to Russia in mid-2016, when one-time Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page spoke in Moscow as part of a trip consisting of “meeting with allies of Vladimir Putin… allegedly discussing the acquisition of damaging information about Hillary Clinton; and allegedly floating the prospect of lifting sanctions against the Kremlin,” as Vanity Fair describes that situation.
There have been other indications besides Giuliani’s overseas ties that the Trump team hasn’t exactly learned a lesson from the years of scrutiny into their ties to Russia surrounding the 2016 elections. For instance, during a recent appearance on Axios on HBO, Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner said he would not necessarily alert authorities if he got an email offering foreign help like he got surrounding an infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting he participated in with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Separately, Giuliani himself has said on national television that it’s not necessarily wrong to take information from the Russians in the first place, which many have refuted as an outlandish assertion.
Featured Image via screenshot
