Rudy

Intelligence officials warned President Trump that his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was the target of an influence campaign conducted by Russian intelligence, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Four former officials familiar with the matter told the Post that the intelligence officers were worried that the president’s personal lawyer was being used to pass Russian misinformation to Trump.

[...]

Intelligence officers had also provided written warnings to the White House about Giuliani being a target for Russians earlier in 2019 before his trip.

  The Hill

As if Trump didn't know. Or would care. In fact, that's what they were looking for.

[National security adviser Robert] O’Brien reportedly was unsure if his message went through to Trump who “shrugged his shoulders” in response and said, “That’s Rudy.”

[...]

The intelligence community reportedly learned of the campaign through multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that determined Giuliani was communicating with people tied to Russian intelligence during his 2019 trip to Ukraine.

[...]

O’Brien led efforts to warn Trump about the campaign, saying information provided by Giuliani after trips to Ukraine should be considered to be tainted by Russia, one former official told the newspaper.

The former official told the paper that the message to Trump was,“Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine.” The person added the warning was intended to “to protect” the president “from coming out and saying something stupid,” according to the report.

Seriously? Have they MET the president?

One former official said “that everybody [in the intelligence community who knew about it] was talking about how hard it was going to be to try to get [Giuliani] to stop, to take seriously the idea that he was being used as a conduit for misinformation.”

The Post noted that the information Giuliani was looking for was similar to what was included in emails published in the controversial New York Post piece this week. The New York Post said those documents came from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that Giuliani and Trump’s former political adviser Stephen Bannon gave to reporters.

The newspaper said it was unable to verify the authenticity of the alleged communications that detailed Hunter Biden.

Several senior administration officials, including Attorney General William Barr, FBI Director Christopher Wray and White House counsel Pat Cipollone “all had common understanding” that Russia was targeting the president’s personal lawyer.

[...]

The former officials told the Post that Giuliani was not under U.S. surveillance while in Ukraine but was talking to alleged Russian intelligence who were being surveilled.

Giuliani told the Post he was never informed that Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia legislator in Ukraine, was a Russian asset and he “only had secondary information and I was not considering him a witness.”

Derkach, whom Giuliani met with in Ukraine and New York, was sanctioned by the Department of Treasury in September and accused by ODNI of “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine” Biden and the Democratic Party in August.

This new Hunter Biden "scandal" is pathetic.

Part 1:  The "smoking gun" email

[A]n April 17, 2015, email suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” reads the email, supposedly written by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma.

[...] 

Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman for Joe Biden, said a review of Biden’s schedules from 2015 finds no record of any such meeting. Officials who worked for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such meeting took place.

[...] 

The New York Post article also cites an email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden saying he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.” “I know for a fact he never contacted me or my office,” said Hochstein, who at the time worked closely with Biden as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “I provided every record to the Senate investigation, and no mention of this guy was ever made, no emails, no correspondence. I know almost every player in the energy sector in Ukraine. I never met this guy.”

[...] 

The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for the “smoking-gun” email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of “Active Measures,” a book on disinformation. “There is no header information, no metadata.” The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted. The New York Post said it obtained the material from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump. 

There also is no indication that Hunter Biden replied to the email.

Moreover, another alleged email published by the New York Post contradicts the notion that Hunter Biden could influence his father. “What he will do and say is out of our hands,” Hunter Biden wrote in an email that the New York Post said was sent April 13, 2014.

[...] 

Asked to verify whether the email is genuine, Hunter Biden’s attorney George Mesires told The Fact Checker: “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.”

A separate article, about another email, claims that a public relations company that worked for Burisma was allowed to take part in a conference call about an upcoming visit by Joe Biden to Ukraine. But there was nothing secret about this call, and the transcript was released publicly and posted on the White House website.

More broadly, the New York Post repeats the falsehood, advanced by Trump, that the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

We have fact-checked this repeatedly. During President Barack Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky. 

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv proposed that Biden, during his 2015 visit there, use a pending delivery of $1 billion of loan guarantees as leverage to force reform. Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, decrying the “cancer of corruption” in the country and criticizing the prosecutor’s office. During that visit, Biden privately told Poroshenko the loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced. After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided.

Pavlo Klimkin, Ukrainian foreign minister from 2014 until Aug. 29, 2019, said that the firing of Shokin was universally urged by Ukraine’s benefactors. “The demand came not just from the U.S., and not just from Biden,” he said. “I heard it in every meeting with the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank. It was not just Biden. Clearly.”

[...] 

As Giuliani has sought to locate information about Hunter Biden and Ukraine, he has regularly interacted with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as being an “active Russian agent for over a decade” and was engaged in an influence operation to affect the 2020 election. 

  WaPo

Part 2:  The laptop

Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, said his own attorney, Robert Costello, obtained the material from the owner of a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware, after Hunter Biden allegedly left it there for months.

  CBS

Nothing questionable about that, eh?

[T]he computer store, John Paul MacIsaac, was unable and unwilling to answer key questions about how the laptop supposedly arrived in his store, and eventually, how the data was shared with Giuliani. CBS News interviewed MacIsaac for almost two hours on Wednesday and throughout the interview he contradicted himself about his motivations, raising questions about the truthfulness of one of the central figures in the story.

MacIsaac told CBS News he first turned over the hard drive to the FBI last December during the president's impeachment, and provided a copy of its contents to Costello after becoming frustrated by the Senate trial in January. MacIsaac refused to provide key details about his interactions with Giuliani.

[...]

The Post's first story ricocheted across major social media platforms on Wednesday before Facebook and Twitter moved to block its distribution, seemingly wary of allowing the dissemination of the kind of misinformation that spread across their networks in the run-up to the 2016 election.

And that move was a mistake. Trump supporters are, of course, crying foul.

MacIsaac, the owner, said several times how he felt Mr. Trump was treated unfairly during his impeachment trial and suggested if the alleged documents are true, the "sham" impeachment was reason to release them. He also repeatedly mentioned his girlfriend left him after he voted for Trump in 2016.

Do we need to go on?

Asked about the timeline of events detailed in the Post story, MacIsaac told CBS News that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops to have them repaired in April 2019.

Three laptops? And they all needed repairs?  This is getting even more unbelievable.

He said the man never paid him for the repairs and did not return to pick them up.

Then obviously the man, if there really was a man with three laptops that needed repairs, was not Hunter Biden.

Standing in his shop on Wednesday, MacIsaac admitted he was unable to confirm it was actually Hunter Biden who dropped off the laptop because he is "legally blind" and only realized it was the former vice president's son when Hunter stated his name for the point of contact.

If you wrote a novel, you wouldn't put a legally blind man in this position. If you were writing for American TV, however, that's just what you would do.

To borrow a phrase from Bobby Kennedy, these are desperate acts of defeated men.   

The Mac Shop is equipped with indoor cameras that preserve recordings for two months. MacIsaac said he did not realize the significance of the laptops until after the footage was automatically deleted.

How convenient.

MacIsaac also would not reveal when he first looked through the data, and refused to provide key details about his handling of the material.

Uh-huh.

Asked by CBS News if he actually saw the email purportedly from Pozharskyi, he repeatedly said "no comment" before saying he "believed" he had. MacIsaac refused to answer in any detail whether or why he would have searched through the laptop to find a four-year-old email, which seemingly appears to be an innocuous message about arranging a meeting for coffee.

They didn't think this through, did they?

MacIsaac provided no additional details to CBS News to corroborate he saw these alleged documents.

He told CBS News he reached out to the FBI through "people that [he] trusted" and was eventually put in contact with two FBI agents.

People he trusted. Like Rudy Giuliani?

On December 9, 2019, he was issued a subpoena demanding he turn over the laptop and hard drive to a federal grand jury in Wilmington, according to a photo of a copy of the subpoena published by the Post and confirmed by MacIsaac.

He said he complied and turned over the hardware, but first made a copy of the hard drive's contents.

As any innocent bystanding computer repairman would.

MacIsaac described becoming frustrated while watching Mr. Trump's Senate impeachment trial in January, with no updates from the FBI. "This country had its third impeachment, and I honestly felt like it was a sham, because of what I had seen," MacIsaac said.

[...]

MacIsaac contradicted himself repeatedly about why he wanted to share the alleged contents of the hard drive. He first asserted he went to the FBI for protection, fearing possible retribution from the Biden family. When the FBI supposedly did not act, he said he thought the FBI could be out to get him, which is why he turned to Giuliani.

As you would.

MacIsaac responded to most questions about Giuliani with "no comment," saying he "didn't feel comfortable" discussing it.

No, I guess not. Giuliani actually COULD be out to get him if he talked.

He declined to say whether he sought Giuliani out or vice versa, but he indicated he viewed the former New York mayor as a potential ally.

[...]

"I was told not to talk to anybody else," MacIsaac said at one point, refusing to provide specifics.

Giuliani told CBS News on Wednesday that MacIsaac had reached out to Costello "around the time of the impeachment hearings," and that he has neither met nor spoken to him personally.

Over the course of the interview, MacIsaac said he felt his life and business were in danger by possessing this information, invoking debunked conspiracy theories of revenge, specifically mentioning false allegations that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered in 2016 to cover up his supposed involvement in leaking Democratic Party emails. The emails were in fact stolen by Russian intelligence operatives, and the conspiracy theory surrounding his death was boosted by a Russian disinformation campaign.

[...]

Mr. Trump seized on the Post story and the ensuing tech crackdown to paint Biden as corrupt and the media as complicit before a massive crowd of supporters in Iowa on Wednesday night.

Of course. Because that's exactly what it looks like.

Giuliani apparently held the information for months and released it less than three weeks before the election.

[...]

CBS News has not seen or corroborated the data supposedly on the hard drive, and Giuliani has declined to allow other news outlets to review the information. In a story published Wednesday, 20 days before the election, the Post said it included a trove of Hunter Biden's emails and photos, some of which it published.

So the FBI had this (or these?) laptop since December.

This is all ridiculous. But just in case it's true, don't vote for Hunter Biden.

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