Rudy Giuliani, Trump Push Limits Of America’s Collective Sanity

You’d think Donald Trump would be avoiding Rudy Giuliani like the plague right now.

You’d also think Rudy Giuliani would avoid traveling to Ukraine unless he plans to stay.

But because both men are seemingly hell-bent on going to prison, neither of those assumptions would be correct.

Instead, Donald Trump said this weekend that Giuliani is set to file (or, actually, “make”) a “report” detailing his findings from a recent trip to Europe.

“He’s going to make a report, I think to the attorney general and to Congress”, Trump told reporters at the White House on Saturday, en route to Florida, where he delivered a predictably unhinged speech which included allusions to becoming a dictator.

“He says he has a lot of good information”, Trump said of Giuliani. “I have not spoken to him about that information yet”.

Giuliani was implicated by multiple former and current US officials during closed-door and public testimony before the House Intelligence committee in October and November. No witness defended Giuliani’s role in the Ukraine affair. Assessments of his involvement ranged from skeptical to incredulous. Gordon Sondland, who was supposed to be a “good” witness for Trump, threw Giuliani under the bus, Maria Yovanovitch described the former New York mayor as a nefarious actor and Fiona Hill quoted her former boss John Bolton in castigating Rudy as a “hand grenade“.

The 300-page report prepared by the panel and then submitted to the House Judiciary committee contained a list of phone calls Giuliani made to White House phone numbers. “The mere fact I had numerous calls with the White House does not establish any specific topic”, he said, effectively serving as his own defense attorney on Twitter last week.

Giuliani recently went to Ukraine along with One America News Network (and yes, that is just as absurd as it sounds) in a bid to, in his words, “bring before the American people” top secret information.

“The American people will learn that Biden & other Obama administration officials, contributed to the increased level of corruption in Ukraine between 2014 to 2016”, Rudy tweeted on Thursday, adding that “this evidence will all be released very soon”.

He later claimed that “the Accounts Chamber in Ukraine found an alleged misuse of $5.3 billion in US funds during the Obama administration while Biden was ‘Point Man'”. “The Obama embassy urged Ukrainian police NOT to investigate!”, he exclaimed, before again slandering Yovanovitch and asserting that “much of the $5.3 billion in US Aid Ukraine reported as misused was given to the embassy’s favored NGO’s”.

Meanwhile, Lev Parnas (one of Giuliani’s indicted co-conspirators in the campaign to have Yovanovitch unjustifiably removed from her post), is under pressure to cut a plea deal after it became apparent that he and Igor Fruman are likely to face additional charges. Parnas’s attorney has claimed that Devin Nunes had contact with key actors in this exceedingly sordid soap opera.

As Bloomberg dryly notes of Giuliani’s Twitter claims, “the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine said that the $5.3 billion came from multiple countries, that the funds to non-governmental organizations represented only a small percentage of the aid, and that the issue was improper accounting rather than misuse of funds”.