Giuliani's legal woes are steadily mounting

And ensnaring others.

The scrutiny isn’t coming just from the previously known probes by FBI agents and the U.S. attorney’s office based out of Manhattan, according to two people familiar with the investigation. The criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington has taken an interest in the former New York mayor, too, meaning an expansion of resources that indicates the politically sensitive probe into the president’s personal attorney is both broader and moving at a faster pace than previously understood.

Adding DOJ’s criminal division to the Giuliani probe is sure to place additional scrutiny on William Barr, who as attorney general has final say over all department business.

  Politico

Well good.

Giuliani’s troubles aren’t just his alone. He has turned members of the Trump team he’s worked with over the past 18 months into potential witnesses for federal prosecutors, who are trying to unravel the tangled relationships he brought to the mix in advising the president while still juggling an international consulting business that promised proximity to the White House.

“He appears to be a subject, if not a target of an active investigation. So to have him be a part of the legal team would be troublesome to say the least,” said Greg Brower, who served as the FBI’s top liaison to Congress until 2018. “At best, it’s a messy situation and more likely it’s just completely dysfunctional.”

Notably, Giuliani was not at the White House earlier this week when his fellow Trump lawyers met with the president for a brief impeachment strategy session.

The bus is getting closer.

But in a series of text messages earlier this month, he downplayed his Ukraine work and insisted he could continue in his role as a Trump lawyer amid all of the scrutiny.

“I was never in Ukraine at all and my investigatory work was done when it was still possible Mueller would charge Russian collusion. Almost all of it was published in the Hill, so [Trump] and everyone else was aware of it," Giuliani said in an Oct. 18 message. "Hardly anything not public.”

"Since the public record is more extensive than what I did, he and all of you probably think I did more than I really did," Giuliani added then.

A few days earlier, on Oct. 12, Giuliani argued that his role on the Trump legal team shouldn’t be disrupted just because he’s resisting a Democratic-approved subpoena for documents.

Yeah, I guess he's finally gotten the message. Be careful crossing the street.

Giuliani’s only public comment in recent days was a cryptic Wednesday evening tweet.

[A] back-channel effort has been underway for more than a week to help find him an attorney — as speculation swirls that he could face charges on everything from violating federal statutes dealing with bribery, foreign lobbying registration and disclosure to making false statements to government officials.

There's always that presidential pardon he can hope for.

Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving member of the Trump legal team, rejected the idea that Giuliani was in any kind of legal jeopardy. He also dismissed questions that Giuliani had put the rest of the president’s outside lawyers into any kind of bind.

“We have no concerns about any of that,” Sekulow told POLITICO. “He’s a member in good standing of the president’s legal team.”

The bus is closer than I thought.

Giuliani has traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad with Parnas over the past year, according to interviews and a series of photographs Parnas posted to his Instagram account that were made public earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. One picture from late March taken at the Trump International Hotel in Washington included a caption Parnas wrote saying he was at a “celebration dinner” with Giuliani and other members of the Trump legal team, including Sekulow, Martin Raskin and Jane Raskin. It was posted a day after Barr released a controversial four-page memo summarizing Mueller’s Russia investigation that the special counsel would go on to criticize as failing to “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work.

Sekulow said he didn’t speak with Parnas at the event and downplayed the significance of the photograph posted from the March dinner at the Trump hotel. “He could have been at the dinner. I have no idea,” Sekulow said. “There were a lot of people at the event.”

We have to remember in all this that Bill Barr is still head of the DOJ.

A move to bring department headquarters — “Main Justice” as its widely known — deeper into the Giuliani probe is causing heartburn at SDNY, which is widely known for its autonomy and reputation as the “Sovereign District of New York.”

“You lose a certain amount of nimbleness and a certain amount of independence because now you are answering to someone above you,” explained a former senior SDNY official who said there’s “no way that Main Justice is not involved.”

“Is it something that people want? No,” this person said. “But in this environment it also gives you cover. You want Main Justice to be involved because it is politically sensitive.”

No, you don't want Main Justice involved, because it's led by a corrupt man who is doing Trump's bidding.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.