With Nothing Left To Lose, Rudy Giuliani Goes All-In Amid Investigations, Impeachment

“America’s mayor” has nothing left to lose.

When Rudy Giuliani made the extremely ill-advised decision to play an older, senile version of Tom Hagen to Donald Trump’s lamentable Vito Corleone impression, everyone knew it would end poorly. But even those inclined to expect the worst would have been hard-pressed to envision just how bad (not to mention surreal) things would ultimately get.

It’s true that everything Trump touches (from casinos to charities to mail-order steak businesses) turns to manure, but Giuliani’s grotesque metamorphosis has been astonishing even considering how hard it is to escape from Trump’s orbit with one’s sanity intact.

At the risk of trafficking in superficial cruelty and low-blows, Giuliani has become a hideous ghoul. One cringes when his ghastly visage materializes on television. His bottom row of teeth are a completely different color than the veneers on top and his facial expressions are reminiscent of a varmint in its death throes, emitting high-pitched wails as it struggles to drag its incapacitated hindquarters to the shoulder after being half-flattened on the interstate.

As the Mueller probe wound down, it seemed like Rudy might simply fade into obscurity having  merely made a fool of himself on national television several dozen times. Little did everyone know he was, in fact, knee-deep in a global conspiracy aimed at undermining career US diplomats and perpetuating baseless conspiracy theories with the ultimate goal of assisting Trump in compelling Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 US election.

In that effort he was assisted by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two close associates who effectively served as Giuliani’s fixers in Ukraine. They were arrested in October trying to leave the country and charged with campaign finance fraud. Since then, Parnas has indicated a willingness to testify regarding a number of potentially momentous things, including what he allegedly knows about Devin Nunes’s purported connection to this sordid affair.

Giuliani’s plan involved orchestrating the ouster of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. “Basically, it was people in the Ukrainian Government who said that Mr. Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general, was in communication with Mayor Giuliani, and that they had plans, and that they were going to, you know, do things, including to me”, Yovanovitch told Congress in October.

Other witnesses testified that Giuliani was a continual source of consternation and that he was told on numerous occasions that Lutsenko was not credible. It would later come to light that Giuliani was in talks to represent Lutsenko in proceedings aimed at recovering assets he said were looted from the Ukrainian government. The payment to Giuliani’s company would have been “at least” $200,000. Although the deal was never done, the negotiations took place while Giuliani was actively working to undermine Yovanovitch and dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova — the notorious husband-wife duo who worked off the books for Trump — were in similar negotiations. At least two versions of the draft deals (which, again, were never executed) mentioned the pair. They too would have been paid.

Read more: Giuliani Negotiated $200,000 Contract With Ukraine Prosector Who Conspired Against Marie Yovanovitch

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DiGenova and Toensing have reportedly collected some $1 million in legal fees from Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash this year, a sum that includes payments to Lev Parnas. Firtash, who resides in Vienna, is charged with conspiracy by the US and is angling to avoid extradition. Giuliani tapped into Firtash’s network to secure a witness statement in September from Viktor Shokin, Lutsenko’s predecessor and the prosecutor who Joe Biden had removed.

Giuliani repeatedly cited the statement during a series of paranoid, frantic television interviews which eventually prompted the Biden campaign to demand that he be blackballed by the networks from spreading unfounded conspiracy theories and pushing propaganda to the electorate.

Well, on Tuesday, a lawyer for Firtash said he paid $1 million to the family bank account of Parnas, who prosecutors previously charged did not disclose where the money came from. The revelation that the money was in fact deposited in Parnas’s wife’s account by an attorney for Firtash came in federal court in Manhattan. Here’s Bloomberg with the short version:

In addition to not disclosing the $1 million payment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebekah Donaleski said Parnas obfuscated $200,000 in income he received from a U.S. law firm representing Firtash and failed to disclose that he had recently put down a deposit on a $4.5 million home in Boca Raton, Florida.

The defense has maintained that the $1 million payment was a loan. It was made in five tranches of $200,000 over the month of September, Oetken said, reading from a pile of documents that had been handed to him.

The Firtash lawyer who made the deposits is a Swiss national, Ralph Oswald Isenegger, according to Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph Bondy. It was a loan from Isenegger to Parnas’s wife, Bondy said.

As we discussed back in October, Firtash has been tied to the Russian mob and stands accused by the US of racketeering.

Both Parnas and Fruman have, of course, been accused of working at the behest of Ukrainian government officials to oust Yovanovitch, an ultimately successful effort that Giuliani is extremely proud of.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Rudy railed against the ambassador, whose testimony both in private in October and in public last month, was some of the most riveting of the entire impeachment inquiry.

“Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine”, Giuliani said, referencing Shokin. “She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that’s not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion”.

To be clear, that is libel. Rudy knows that, but he also knows that it doesn’t matter. He’s doing this on behalf of the president and besides, he’s reportedly under investigation for a series of possible crimes, so what’s one slanderous tweet? Or two, actually, because he also said this:

[I] recently acquired documentary evidence shows she perjured herself before Schiffless Committee. Also her embassy stopped a Ukrainian audit of over $5 billion in aid funding put in question in 2017 by Ukrainian auditors. Enough for now more to come, plenty more.

Giuliani is repeating baseless charges he made earlier this month before a trip to Ukraine which he said was aimed at “bringing before the American people” top secret information. The trip was, of course, a flop, but not according to Giuliani. In addition to his farcical OANN collaborations, he’s also granted interviews to Fox and The New York Times (among others) this week.

“Just in case you think we’re on defense, we’re not”, he told CNN.

Maybe not, but he (or “we” or “they”) probably should be. Because, as Bloomberg dryly noted on Tuesday afternoon, “Giuliani is continuing his efforts on Ukraine even as federal prosecutors investigate whether there’s enough evidence to charge him with crimes”.

“I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way”, Giuliani told The New Yorker’s Adam Entous. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody”.

Back in January, in another interview with The New Yorker, Giuliani said he was “absolutely afraid” that his gravestone will read “He lied for Trump”.

“Somehow, I don’t think that will be it”, he added. “But, if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead”.