There's always more

Rudy Giuliani’s contacts with officials at the State Department as part of his controversial efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine are more extensive than have been publicly reported.

  The Daily Beast

Which is why they trotted Giuliani out when they did. To try to frame the issue on something less than what's there. It's their old playbook.

Over the course of the past year, Giuliani has participated in a far-flung campaign by Trump allies to unearth damaging information about Biden and his son Hunter. As part of that effort, Giuliani pressed the Ukrainian government to investigate so far unfounded allegations of corruption in the country involving the Bidens. At the time, Hunter Biden was accused of using his father’s political standing to secure lucrative business opportunities abroad. Ukraine’s prosecutor general would subsequently say he had no evidence of any wrongdoing.

I have no trouble believing that Hunter Biden did exactly that, regardless of what the prosecutor general said. Why are the Trump boys at the UN this week?

This summer, Giuliani briefed U.S. diplomats, including special representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, on his work in Ukraine and his efforts to convince the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. But Giuliani confirmed to The Daily Beast that he also briefed another diplomat: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.

So, is he saying it was approved by diplomats? Is that even meaningful? Other than to implicate the diplomats, I mean.

It wasn’t exactly an unknown topic for Sondland. The ambassador was also closely involved with the Trump phone call to Zelensky in which Trump repeatedly pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens.

Another Congressional witness the president will have to instruct not to cooperate.

“I spoke with both of them before and after this conversation,” Sondland told Ukraine’s state-run news agency after the phone call. “The conversation was very successful. They found a common language immediately.” The two leaders discussed Ukraine’s war, energy security, and “the rule of law,” Sondland said in July.

By "the rule of law" I presume they mean who is above it.

That same day, Zelensky met with both Sondland and Volker to discuss Ukraine’s war with pro-Russian rebels. It was a particularly poignant topic at the time; the U.S. was holding back on nearly $400 million worth of equipment promised to Kyiv to deter Moscow and its allies.

[...]

[T]he specifics of [Giuliani's] contacts with Foggy Bottom have remained opaque, including what, if anything, Secretary Mike Pompeo knew about the Ukraine work.

Let's guess.

They weren’t the only senior members of the Trump administration brought into the president’s efforts to use a foreign government to squeeze a political foe. According to The Washington Post, Trump ordered Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget, to hit pause on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid for Ukraine—just days before a now-infamous July phone call between Trump and Zelensky. Mulvaney’s OMB deputies then directed officials at the Departments of Defense and State not to distribute the military aid.

Another witless witness.

And Wednesday morning’s release of the phone call’s transcripts revealed that Trump also suggested Zelensky work with U.S. Attorney General William Barr on a Biden probe.

“I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said, per the transcript, later adding: “Whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

No surprise there. We can surely widen the impeachment proceedings to include Barr.

Giuliani’s work on Ukraine began months earlier. The Trump attorney’s work, done with the president’s explicit blessing, involved chasing leads on possible origins of the Mueller investigation. It eventually led to his attempts to dig up dirt on the Biden family. This was all happening as Trump was preparing to head into a presidential election year.

[...]

Giuliani was planning to travel to Ukraine in May to look into allegations of corruption involving the Bidens there. The trip was pulled. But the president’s lawyer met up with Andrei Yermak, a close adviser to Zelensky, in Spain last month.

The reason Giuliani gave for his trip cancellation was that he felt like he was being set up.*

While Volker is known in diplomatic circles as the U.S. special representative for Ukraine, Ambassador Sondland has—until recently—maintained a lower profile. The founder and chairman of Provenance Hotels, Sondland appeared to be uncomfortable with his status as a Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign.

[...]

When the Seattle Times reported Sondland’s participation in [a Trump] fundraiser, he and his wife said they were backing out of the event after Trump’s treatment of a Muslim Gold Star family.

[...]

But as The Intercept subsequently reported, Sondland appeared to have a change of heart after Trump won the election. The hotel magnate donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee using limited liability corporations that masked his name from the list of Trump contributors. The move prompted a Federal Election Commission complaint from a campaign finance watchdog, the Campaign Legal Center, but Sondland’s relationship with the Trump administration wasn’t harmed by his apparent discomfort—Trump nominated him to be U.S. ambassador to the European Union in May 2018.

*May 11, 2019:

Facing withering attacks accusing him of seeking foreign assistance for President Trump’s re-election campaign, Rudolph W. Giuliani announced on Friday night that he had canceled a trip to Kiev in which he planned to push the incoming Ukrainian government to press ahead with investigations that he hoped would benefit Mr. Trump.

Mr. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, explained that he felt as if he was being “set up” by Ukrainians critical of his efforts, and he blamed Democrats for trying to “spin” the trip.

“They say I was meddling in the election — ridiculous — but that’s their spin,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani said on Thursday that he had hoped to meet in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, with the nation’s president-elect and urge him to pursue inquiries that could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump. One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

  NYT

Nothing like admitting to your criminal intentions.

I guess Rudy being forced to cancel is what led to Trump calling the Ukrainian president directly. The Guardian has a timeline.