Giuliani Ally Hit With Federal Sanctions Over Election Interference

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The Treasury Department has announced sanctions against Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, who the department says has been “an active Russian agent for over a decade.” Guess what else Derkach did during that timeframe? He met with top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who eventually became a top defender of the president and, crucially, has helped lead the conspiratorial effort to smear the Bidens over their connections to Ukraine. Derkach met with Giuliani as part of that conspiratorial effort. Now, it turns out that Giuliani was meeting with an “active Russian agent.” Good going, Rudy!

As Axios summarizes, for months, Derkach led “a secret influence campaign” using what the Treasury Department bluntly described as “false and unsubstantiated” claims about the Bidens. The “secret influence campaign” was meant “to spur corruption investigations in the U.S. and Ukraine,” as Axios summarizes, citing the Treasury Department’s press release. As it turns out, a top ally of the president — Giuliani — was therefore ensnared in a Russian intelligence services-connected misinformation scheme.

It’s worth noting — Giuliani isn’t the only U.S. political figure with ties to Derkach. He was also behind packets of conspiratorial “dirt” that were allegedly sent to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), along with then-White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

Senate Republicans have actually been essentially carrying out the wishes of those who’ve tried to get an investigation into the Bidens started. That original effort, of course, led to Trump’s impeachment after the story broke of how he’d tried to bribe Ukraine into starting its own anti-Biden investigation. Now, the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security Committee has been among those investigating the conspiracies, and the Trump administration itself has been helping. The State Department has turned over large caches of documents to Senate Republicans, and they have refused to submit copies of those documents to House Dems, who wanted the chance to conduct oversight of what the State Department was doing.

The Trump administration has consistently tried to downplay the threat of Russian interference. Just this week, House Intel Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) revealed that he’d received a whistleblower complaint from former senior Department of Homeland Security official Brian Murphy, who said, as Schiff put it, that he’d been ordered to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States.”