Personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was snubbed in the development of the president’s defense team for his impeachment trial that’s getting underway this week, but he’s still keeping himself in the spotlight anyway. During a Monday night interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, Giuliani lashed out at his former associate Lev Parnas, who has essentially flipped against Giuliani, Trump himself, and others after getting hit with a federal campaign finance law violation case. Giuliani claims that he was “misled” by Parnas and that the former ally made many “misrepresentations” about their work together — but the thing is, Parnas has evidence! He’s not just doing interviews; he turned large troves of material over to Congressional investigators.
Giuliani tried to ignore that inconvenient part, it seems. He told Ingraham:
‘Lev is someone… I was close to. Obviously, I was misled by him. I feel very bad. I’m not going to respond to him for each and every one of the misrepresentations he’s made, because there are so many. If I’m called as a witness, I’m prepared to do it. In fact, I wouldn’t mind being called as a witness for a lot of reasons, including being able to reveal the unbelievable amount of corruption that went on between the Democratic Party and the Ukraine all throughout the Obama administration.’
Watch:
After all this time, Giuliani is still refusing to give up on the idea of “unbelievable” corruption that he and he almost completely alone is the valiant revealer of. It’s not there, Rudy — you’ve had your shot, and you fumbled, big time!
Parnas’s claims have centered on supporting the idea that in fact, Giuliani’s anti-corruption crusade was meant as a foreign-helped political hit job on Trump’s opponents.
As Parnas put it to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, discussing what they were trying to get Ukraine to do:
‘It wasn’t supposed to be a corruption announcement, it was to be about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma.’
It’s not hard to see this, considering the president and his allies have claimed that they were just concerned about corruption, but the only supposed corruption that Trump mentioned in a July phone conversation with Ukraine’s president involved Democrats. There’s no evidence for this kind of legitimacy that Giuliani and others are desperately trying to ascribe to their attempt to get Ukraine to open an investigation into this baselessly supposed corruption. There’s just the glaring portrait of President Trump trying to use his power to get back at those who he has a grudge against.
Giuliani has already felt plenty of heat from this. Reportedly, he’s even been placed under federal investigation for his foreign work, which could have violated federal prohibitions against secret foreign lobbying in the United States. Parnas revealed a letter in which Giuliani asserted that he was acting with the “knowledge and consent” of the president while pushing for those investigations into Ukraine, so Giuliani has dragged the president further into this scandal too.
That evidence has also implicated figures like top House Republican and Trump defender Devin Nunes, who had a top staffer in repeated contact with Parnas and, more rarely, personally spoke with him.
