Bizarre, Criminal law, Media, Politics

Giuliani Denies Then Admits To Asking Ukraine To Investigate Joe Biden

This morning on NPR, I discussed the latest controversy triggered by President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. We have previously discussed the often conflicting statements made by Rudy Giuliani in this representation of President Donald Trump and the failure to follow a type of legal Hippocratic oath to first do no harm to one’s client. Last night Giuliani triggered another firestorm of criticism on CNN after he first denied speaking to Ukraine about investigating Joe Biden and then immediately contradicted himself and said that he did.

The interview with Chris Cuomo seemed at times unhinged and uncontrolled. The entire interview is below.

Reports indicate that the subject of the whistleblow complaint found credible and “urgent” by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz was the Ukraine. Specifically, it is alleged that Trump called the head of Ukraine to pressure the country to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

In fairness to the White House, Hunter Biden was responsible for highly disturbing conflicts of interest while his father was Vice President. He made a huge about of money in Ukraine and China and even conducted business in China when accompanying his father to China. The New York Times and others have said that, at a minimum, Hunter Biden presented a serious appearance of conflict of interest for Biden.

However, the merits are not at issue on those allegations. The issue is whether Trump used $250 million in withheld military aid to pressure a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent.

For his part, Giuliani first said that he did not ask for Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and then immediately said that he did.

Cuomo asked “Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?”

Giuliani responded “No, actually I didn’t. I asked Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton for which there already…”

Cuomo then asked “Your never asked anything about Hunter Biden? You never asked anything about Joe Biden to the prosecutor?” Cuomo pressed.

Giuliani then said “The only thing I asked is to get to the bottom of how it was that the guy who was appointed dismissed the case against Antac.”

Cuomo then correctly noted “So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden.”

“Of course I did,” Giuliani responded.

Giuliani then says that CNN would cover up the proof of Biden’s corruption, but when asked for the proof, Giuliani declares that he would not show CNN the proof because it would “just cover it up.” That all seems utterly incomprehensible.

Ok, it is another misstep, but the more serious question is the looming separation of powers fight over this call. This is a classic executive privilege context but hardly the classic executive privilege conversation. If true, this would be self-dealing with $250 million in military aid to try to get an investigation into one’s political opponents. It is ironic since Trump has long objected to the Obama Administration using the FBI to investigate him.

There are good arguments on both sides in any court fight over this conversation. However, executive privilege, as shown in Nixon v. United States, can be overcome by congressional oversight needs. Self-dealing is an abuse of office, which was part of the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

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63 thoughts on “Giuliani Denies Then Admits To Asking Ukraine To Investigate Joe Biden”

  1. I’ve never been a fan of Cuomo, but Rudy needs a good defense attorney. He came very close to admitting that he conspired to commit extortion and bribery.

    In this peanut gallery, however, it seems that any means justifies the ends. Even for Members of the bar.

  2. Giuliani, a once great pillar of law and order, has turned into a fumbling idiot.
    All for the Orange Pumpkin.????
    On that subject, will someone please tell the nit wit, HES DISFIGURING HIS PLUMP FACE, ON THE SUN BED….What is wrong with this idiot.???

    1. David Benson is the God Emperor of Making Stuff Up and owes me thirty-eight citations (one from the OED, one from the town ordinances and two from the Old Testament), an equation and the source of a quotation, after forty-four weeks, and needs to cite all his work from now on. David, we need a citation here.

  6. The self delusion on this thread is off the charts, undoubtedly not subject to reason, so a waste of time to argue.

    For anyone else lurking, no, Biden did not intervene in Ukrainian affairs to shield his son (the timeline doesn’t work – see below) and the guy he urged be fired was protecting corruption including the gas firm Biden’s son worked for.

    Using millions (rumored 250) from our treasury as a bribe for the benefit of the President and his campaign are neither SOP or a practice constitutionally and fair minded people would want to look away from, now will they. On the other hand there are no depths Trump will not stoop to and his cult followers will not excuse.

    On Biden and the Ukraine:

    “Almost as long as there have been questions over Trump’s Russian dealings, there have been rival questions about former vice president Joe Biden’s role in post-revolutionary Ukraine. To sort out the truth, it’s imperative to understand two things. The first is that Biden’s son Hunter took a job at a Ukrainian oligarch’s gas company, known as Burisma, shortly after the 2014 revolution, which was unwise, greedy and rightly criticized at the time.

    The second is that Joe Biden was the White House’s Ukraine enforcer, and it was in this capacity that he forced Ukraine’s president to sack an at-best ineffectual prosecutor general as a condition for a billion dollars’ worth of loans. Biden has himself boasted of this episode, and most Ukrainians are perfectly content about it, since they saw prosecutor Viktor Shokin as incapable of the investigations needed to uncover the previous regime’s crimes…..

    ….I may be an outsider to the bewildering mess that is Ukrainian politics, but, on this particular issue, I have a genuine insight into what happened, having written extensively about Hunter Biden’s ex-employer, Mykola Zlochevsky.

    As a result, when journalists seek the fire behind the smoke in the Biden-Ukraine tale, they often call to ask my opinion. Many are eager to flesh out what seems a satisfyingly simple conspiracy, but I have to tell them: It isn’t true. The timeline doesn’t work. The investigation into Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, had ground to a halt long before the prosecutor was sacked. A subsequent probe into the company’s owner was opened because of a request from Ukrainian legislators, not because of prosecutorial initiative. There is, in short, no there there; the bloggers are putting two and two together — and coming up with 22. Prosecutor Shokin did not open the case on Zlochevskyi & Burisma. He dumped it. And he was fired for being corrupt and failing prosecution reform….”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/08/why-joe-bidens-alleged-ukraine-conspiracy-doesnt-hold-up/

    and:

    “President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer is raising the specter that Joe Biden intervened in Ukrainian politics to help his son’s business.

    But if that was Biden’s aim, he was more than a year late, based on a timeline laid out by a former Ukrainian official and in Ukrainian documents.

    The official described to Bloomberg details about the country’s political dynamic in the run-up to early 2016 when Biden, then the U.S. vice president, threatened to hold up U.S. funding to Ukraine unless it cracked down on corruption. Biden’s chief demand was the ouster of a top Ukrainian prosecutor who he said had been ineffective. The episode has come under the spotlight in the last week because at one point, that prosecutor had been investigating a natural gas company where Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board and received substantial compensation.

    There’s little question that the Bidens’ paths in Ukraine held the potential for conflict, and in a tweet last week, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said the U.S. should investigate the matter. But what has received less attention is that at the time Biden made his ultimatum, the probe into the company — Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky — had been long dormant, according to the former official, Vitaliy Kasko.

    “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said in an interview last week. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”

    Kasko’s assessment adds a wrinkle to one of the first political intrigues of the 2020 election season. It undercuts the idea that Biden, now a top Democratic presidential candidate, was seeking to sideline a prosecutor who was actively threatening a company tied to his son. Instead, it appears more consistent with Biden’s previous statements that he was pressing for the removal of a prosecutor who was failing to tackle rampant corruption: According to public reports and internal documents from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, U.S. officials had expressed concern for more than a year about Ukrainian prosecutors’ failure to assist an international investigation of Zlochevsky.

    The case against Zlochevsky and his Burisma Holdings was assigned to Shokin, then a deputy prosecutor. But Shokin and others weren’t pursuing it, according to the internal reports from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office reviewed by Bloomberg.

    In a December 2014 letter, U.S. officials warned Ukrainian prosecutors of negative consequences for Ukraine over its failure to assist the U.K., which had seized Zlochevsky’s assets, according to the documents.

    Those funds, $23.5 million, were unblocked in 2015 when a British court determined there wasn’t enough evidence to justify the continued freeze, in part because Ukrainian prosecutors had failed to provide the necessary information.

    No Action

    Shokin became prosecutor general in February 2015. Over the next year, the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund criticized officials for not doing enough to fight corruption in Ukraine.

    Shokin took no action to pursue cases against Zlochevsky throughout 2015, said Kasko, who was Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation and helping in asset-recovery investigations. Kasko said he had urged Shokin to pursue the investigations.

    The U.S. stepped up its criticism in September 2015, when its ambassador to Ukraine, during a speech, accused officials working under Shokin of “subverting” the U.K. investigation.

    Kasko resigned in February 2016, citing corruption and lawlessness in the prosecutor general’s office.

    The U.S. plan to push for Shokin’s dismissal didn’t initially come from Biden, but rather filtered up from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Embassy personnel had called for U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to be tied to broader anti-corruption efforts, including Shokin’s dismissal, this person said.

    Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion if Ukraine didn’t crack down on corruption reportedly came in March. That same month, hundreds of Ukrainians demonstrated outside President Petro Poroshenko’s office demanding Shokin’s resignation, and he was dismissed….”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/timeline-in-ukraine-probe-casts-doubt-on-giuliani-s-biden-claim

    1. Why’d Biden allocute to causing the aid package to be withheld until Shokin was dismissed, then? It’s beyond puzzling for Biden to take credit for a superfluous dismissal specifically aimed at ending an investigation into his own son’s business dealngs.

      And we have the spectacle of CNN presumably not being in a parallel universe when Biden boasted about getting Shokin dismissed, but taking no notice of the fact. It is very likely this that Giuliani had in mind when he told Chris Cuomo “You’d just cover it up”, although it would have been more accurate to say “Why don’t you read about it in the New York Times?“

      1. Bingo! We know the House won’t investigate, but will the Senate? If Joe has nothing to hide…

  7. The partisan, phony Mueller investigation, premised entirely on false statements, is “a good thing.” But calling for a real investigation of Biden is “a bad thing,” given the fact that Biden’s son profited enormously when Biden admitted that when he was Vice President he personally “Threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin [who was investigating Biden’s son].” Such is the “logic,” “rationality,” and “ethics” of the left.

  8. This is an excellent article that is actually quite reasonable and objective on this topic:

    There’s a long history of high-ranking lawmakers and their offspring who have gone into lucrative and/or powerful consulting gigs, lobbying jobs, appointed government positions, elected offices of their own, or other rewards from being related to a lawmaker. If you’re going to be a senator negotiating big changes to laws that affect banks, your son probably shouldn’t be working for one of the country’s biggest banks. If you’re going to be vice president and helping shape U.S. policy on China and Ukraine, you can’t play hardball to get a guy investigating your son’s company dismissed.
    https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/trumps-whistle-blowers-complaint-is-probably-about-hunter-bidens-dealings-in-ukraine/

  9. “In fairness to the White House” Fairness?

    Biden bribed the president of the Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was investigating his son Hunter.

    Biden and his son took $1.5 Billion out of China while VP Biden was negotiating on behalf of the American people.

    Turley is spinning much like Chris Cuomo. Whereas Chris may not understand Turley should.

    If Ukraine interfered with our election they shouldn’t be getting a dime and that money remains in the US treasury. That money made on that deal with China didn’t remain with the American people. It was pocketed by the Biden family.

    Giuliani was appropriate in letting American Prosecutors look into the allegations he made and not prematurely giving them to Cuomo. If Cuomo were interested he could look into it by himself just like he could have looked into the Biden incident which didn’t occur.

          1. Read it loup – I did. It confirms that the Obama administration consistently pressured Ukraine to out corruption and particularly the gas firm Biden was employed by. It fails to mention that Shokin did nothing to go after corruption, including the gas fir, though it doesn’t assert that he did, with good reason. He didn’t.

            Now read the articles from the WaPo and Bloomberg which fill in the blanks and the timeline – which doesn;t work for you conspiracy. There is no there there. There is a there to Trump pressuring a foreign government to help his campaign. You can read about it now at everyt major paper, including the WSJ.

  10. he was investigating. lawyers often investigate. he had to ask someone with pull for help. so what

    Democrat controlled media can make any molehill into a mountain with their army of collaborators

  11. I usually respect your considered legal opinions. However, in this case, your headline and basic outline of this story appear to be biased nit-picking, Mr. Turley, particularly after listening to the actual video. C’mon, don’t take us back to an explanation—a la Bill Clinton—of “…what ‘is’ is.”

  12. So a son makes a lot of money because dad is v-p. Reminds me of daughter and son-in-law who make a lot of money because dad is pres.

    1. I believe the word your struggling to use is nepotism. It is proper to identify every instance where power, prestige and wealth are abused, especially if it involves government actors. Making a lot of money isn’t necessarily a crime. Has Trump applied pressure or influence in his capacity as President to financially benefit his family? If so, cite the evidence. Did Joe Biden do so for his son? The China trip and the subsequent hedge fund should be investigated. The Ukraine incident involving the VP should also be investigate.

    2. http://www.kaye.com/fambz/Nepotism.htm

      In Praise of Nepotism. By Adam Bellow. Random House, 2003.

      Reviewed for Family Business Review, 2009

      “What kind of society is this, where you’re afraid to appoint your nephew or your son or your relative, for fear of what might be said?!?” Chicago’s Richard J. Daley (father of the present mayor) famously screamed at his City Council. That must be the only omission from this book, whose author surveys three thousand years of anecdotal cases about the generational continuity of power and influence.

      Adam Bellow defines nepotism as “altruism limited to family members”—a form of discrimination, in other words, as opposed to earned status based on talent, effort, and devotion to the public good. Like the inimitable Mayor Daley, he wants to defend the family value of nepotism against “the extreme contempt” in which he feels it is held by many others.

      Bellow asserts that nepotism, in that broad sense of successful people greasing the wheels of advancement for their kin, got a bad name over the millennia, but that it has evolved into a healthy thing for the American polity. It’s not clear where he sees a serious controversy, nor whether the diverse forms of family advancement he lumps together have enough in common to generalize about. Public officials appointing family members to lucrative positions ahead of more qualified applicants always attract critics, but what does that have to do with a popular Senator appearing at his nephew’s campaign rally in a free election for a seat in Congress from another state? Much less an owner hiring a son or daughter in their family-owned business?

      Given the fact that some children of public servants, like those of artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs, will inherit genetic advantages similar to the parents’, as well as being exposed to the tools and the norms of those trades from an early age, many of the author’s examples merely show non-random choices of profession, rather than nepotism by any definition.

      Bellow says in his introduction, but fails to establish with evidence in more than five hundred densely printed pages (more words, one suspects, than any two of his father’s novels), what we have now in America is a “New Nepotism,” somehow a blend of the best elements of aristocracy and meritocracy.

      Reviews of the book ranged from dismissing it as an amateur’s compilation of historical anecdotes lacking cogency or significance to “a must read for anyone involved in a family business.” Whoever reads it for the latter reason is sure to be disappointed, full of engaging stories as it is.

      Asserting a generalization doesn’t make it true, let alone useful. Bellow claims, “The American political class is increasingly filled with the offspring of political families.” On the contrary, almost half the book details multigenerational political families from Colonial America through the offspring of Jack, Bobby, and Teddy. It seems to have been a constant rather than increasing.

      “No social scientist has studied this phenomenon. But you don’t need a degree in sociology to realize that the boom in generational succession is something new in scope and character.” Actually, you do; at least you need systematic historical or journalistic research, testing propositions against evidence.

      Instead of supporting his broad assertions, Bellow wanders through anthropology, evolutionary biology (“the purest case of nepotism in nature is that of the cellular slime mold”), and comparative religion. Is the importance of kinship in hunter-gatherer tribes relevant? Perhaps, but not when treated superficially. And it’s a stretch to assume that a survey of the 15th century Borgias’ nepotism has anything to teach us about political or business succession in 21st century America.

      Does nepotism in politics have much to do with family firms or their succession?

      Family business successors differ from all the other beneficiaries of “altruism toward kin” that Bellow describes, in that the owning family is perfectly entitled to appoint them. It’s not depriving others in the community, state, or country of their fair shot at controlling that family-owned business or inheriting that family’s wealth

      The word nepotism (nephew-ism, originally referring to several centuries of licentious popes’ “nephews”) only exists to cover the kind of preferment that is illegitimate or unfair. The continuity question in families we work with is which family members, among those legitimately entitled, will be selected to lead; which others will help them carry the enterprise forward for another generation; and which ones will go off in other directions.

      Bellow touches on that in a paragraph about the impact of Old Testament stories on Western conceptions of the family:

      “Unlike the civilizations of India, Africa, or China, the Bible offers a realistic image of family life that … affords no guarantee of harmony, loyalty, or even affection. Instead, from the beginning, the family is presented as a setting of competition, envy, even murder: the source of our greatest passions and the locus of our greatest sins. It is the dynamism of this patriarchal family, full of competitive siblings, jealous wives, and rebellious sons, that drives the action of the story.”

      How little has changed, and how much more significant are the questions that come to mind about all that competition, as opposed to the mere fact of generational succession. Of course people try to advance their offspring and their relatives when they can. How well or how poorly is that goal served in various circumstances, by the competitive processes involved, both rational and emotional?

      The case of John Adams is particularly interesting for the internal battle he fought between political philosophy and his nepotistic impulses. Bellow’s ten pages on this founding father, a fine summary, will be familiar to readers of David McCullough’s biography or viewers of the HBO series based on it. It does have relevance to family business, both because we can see parallels to a subgroup of our clients and because Adams would be an extreme case even among those.

      Bellow quotes this astonishing letter:

      “I will not bear the reproaches of my children. I will tell them that I studied and labored to procure a free constitution of government for them to solace themselves under, and if they do not prefer this to ample fortune, to ease and elegance, they are not my children, and I care not what becomes of them. They shall live upon thin diet, wear mean clothes, and work hard with cheerful hearts and free spirits, or they may be the children of the earth, or of no one, for me.”

      Principled words, not by Lenin but our second President. Yet inconsistent, we learn, with the reality of Adams’s paternal relations. He advanced his eldest son, the first of our four dynastic successors to the Presidency, at the expense of his two other sons. When Charles drank himself to death, “his father the president refused to see him. … He was denied burial in the family crypt, and the Adamses never spoke of him again.”

      Missing from Bellow’s book is an awareness that the desire to preserve wealth is much more than the desire to advance one’s children’s security, careers and influence. John Adams’s behavior appears less hypocritical, though no less harsh, if we see his favoritism in the light of how “good son” and “bad son” reflected on himself—their altruism toward him, in other words, not his toward them.

      Darwin in the boardroom?

      Bellow’s tangent into theories of evolution (classing nepotism among the things parents of every species do to promote the success of their genes) is silly. It applies least of all to a business owner, the spread of whose genes depends entirely on the number of his progeny rather than on which of them, if any, carry on the business.

      Actually, competition and survival of the fittest are pervasive forces within successful families. Business advisors and researchers, as well as family members, are more struck by those competitive dynamics and their consequences than by the fact that parents try to promote their clan as a whole.

      In a competition for family business succession, if the fittest to lead succeeds without actually murdering his or her competitors for the top job, it has no effect on the founder’s genes. It does help his non-biological legacy survive: the business. So, if parents assert control over the choice of successors, it must be either because they believe the business will be fitter to survive under particular children’s leadership or because they’re more concerned about what’s best for different children. Either way, it is their personal legacy not their genes they’re promoting. So it makes no sense to talk about nepotism as a biological phenomenon in this connection. Human thought long since supplanted the force of the selfish gene, in favor of emotional attachment to legacy institutions.

      When the author gets around to making assertions about different methods that nepotists employ (“the nepotistic arts” as he nicely puts it), he is still lumping business, politics, and philanthropic institutions together. A serious book exclusively about family firms’ favoritism versus meritocracy would go beyond the obvious. Yes, parents try to use their resources to promote the welfare of their progeny (the businesses and foundations they create, not only their children and grandchildren). That fact leads to questions that don’t appear in this book: What roles do the processes of competition within families play in selecting leaders? How effective are they in achieving the various goals of wealth creators (long-term family financial security, survival of the legacy business, social causes, etc.)?

      Are there typical paths that next generation members take when not selected for leadership, paths for those who stay active within the FOB as compared with those who pursue lives in other directions? How much of each kind of family capital do they take with them? Where the answer to that is “less than their numerical share,” parental favoritism isn’t always, or even usually, responsible for the inequality. Often it is simply the parents’ belief that survival of the business is the higher calling, necessitating or deserving the greater share of resources.

      MY COMMENT: GET OVER THIS ISSUE. A FOOT IN THE DOOR DOES NOT KEEP ANYBODY ON STAFF FOREVER. AMERICA IS THE LEAST NEPOTISTIC SOCIETY IN HISTORY BUT IT’S ONLY NATURAL AND IMPOSSIBLE TO ELIMINATE AS A PERSISTENT SOCIAL PHENOMENON

      1. Read it loup – I did. It confirms that the Obama administration consistently pressured Ukraine to out corruption and particularly the gas firm Biden was employed by. It fails to mention that Shokin did nothing to go after corruption, including the gas fir, though it doesn’t assert that he did, with good reason. He didn’t.

        Now read the articles from the WaPo and Bloomberg which fill in the blanks and the timeline – which doesn;t work for you conspiracy. There is no there there. There is a there to Trump pressuring a foreign government to help his campaign. You can read about it now at everyt major paper, including the WSJ.

    4. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are already fabulously wealthy thanks to being born into fabulously wealthy parents- that’s how they “made” their money. Hunter Biden is making all his wealth by being hired by foreign governments seeking to influence US policy. Use your brain.

    5. “So a son makes a lot of money because dad is v-p. Reminds me of daughter and son-in-law who make a lot of money because dad is pres.”

      Typical uneducated anonymous garbage

  13. So the allegation is President Trump was pressuring Ukraine to conduct an investigation into corruption by withholding $250 million and Biden is on record of actually threatening to withhold $1 billion if they don’t fire a prosecutor that was actually investigating corruption involving Hunter Biden. That’s odd. There is obviously something missing because the media/intel shitestorm is only interested in efforts to expose corruption and not the efforts to bury it.

    Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

    In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

    “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

    “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

    Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.

    But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436816-joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived

  14. Use of BS words in the topic: 1. A human cannot ask a “country” such as Russia or Ukraine, a question and get an answer. There are humans who work for the government of a territory which we call a country. The media does this error a lot with Russia. So and so “colluded with Russia”. Or “talked to Russia”.

    There was a song out many years ago. The singer says he was driving in Las Vegas and with a girl he hardly knew. “How was I to know… she was with the Russians too?”
    Now that sentence is not as lame as “ask a country”.
    Being “with the Russians too” does allude to Russian humans and not the geography.

    One might say that Hillary “was with the Russians too.” Bill might be offended because some might construe that to mean that Hillary was having sex with some Russian humans.

    Guiliani is an odd duck. He speaks a bit goofy. It is part of the New Yorkie thing.

    “Collude with the U.S.” What part does that refer to? The right or left or middle? With Iowa or some human from the White House? Truman was “the Man From Missouri”. Collude with him and you collude with Missouri. But what part? St. Louis? Kansas City?

    Folks who write in the media need to be more precise. It would be easier to say that Guiliani was “with the Mafia”. Look at his appearance and last name. Or that Trump is “with the yellow haired Yorkies”. Look at his hair on his head.

    One thing about Guiliani came out in the internet jabber. He went out iwith a waitress that he hardly knew. They did not follow that up with a sentence about knowing whether she was with the Russians too. Is he married? What was he doing “going out with a waitress”?

  15. Meanwhile Obama caused job losses in the auto industry in AMERICA, not Ukraine

    https://clarion.causeaction.com/2019/09/14/obama-netflix-movie-doesnt-mention-his-role-in-job-loss/

    Obama Netflix Movie Doesn’t Mention His Role in Job Loss

    The documentary that traces the lives of thousands of workers laid off from their auto jobs in Ohio during the 2008 recession, produced by a company formed last year by the former U.S. president and first lady, fails to mention the role President Barack Obama played in the factory’s closing, Ohio Rep. Mike Turner writes in a column for The Wall Street Journal.

    “The American Factory,” the first project to come from the Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, follows workers laid off from their jobs at a General Motors plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of whom were hired six years later by Chinese company Fuyao Glass America to make automotive glass in the same plant. It aired on Netflix in August.

    “A good story gives you the chance to better understand someone else’s life. It can help you find common ground. And it’s why Michelle and I were drawn to Higher Ground’s first film,” Obama said in a Twitter posting on Wednesday.

    “The Obama administration’s auto bailout highly favored the UAW and its members. The GM plant in Moraine was unionized by the IUE-CWA,” Turner writes. “So — despite being one of the top GM facilities for quality, efficiency and production in the country — it was shuttered, and its employees were put at the back of the line when requesting transfers to other GM plants. Any non-UAW employees looking to transfer were forced to start as new hires, wiping clean any wages, tenure, and benefits built up during careers at other GM plants.”

    “’American Factory’ documents the UAW’s efforts to unionize the reopened auto glass factory without any mention of the same union’s direct role in the GM plant’s closure,” he added “The Dayton community was left out in the cold — thousands of jobs lost, families devastated, longtime GM workers out on the street looking for work.”

    The U.S. government’s $80.7 billion bailout of the auto industry were initiated by former President George W. Bush but largely overseen by Obama.

    Obama has emphatically defended the bailout, arguing it was necessary to prevent massive job losses.

    1. Without the actions of the Obama administration, the US auto industry and the upper midwest would have tanked.

      “…The Center for Automotive Research, an independent research group that gets some funding from automakers, predicted harsh outcomes if GM and Chrysler went belly up. Beyond the immediate jobs lost, there would be a partial collapse of the supplier industry that would lead to a 50 percent drop in production at Ford and the American-based foreign car plants. Imports would replace 70 percent of the lost GM and Chrysler production, the group predicted….

      …The benefits have not flowed simply to GM and Chrysler. In a speech this June, Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally said the bailouts were the right medicine for his company as well.

      “If GM and Chrysler would’ve gone into free-fall,” Mulally said, “they could’ve taken the entire supply base into free-fall also, and taken the U.S. from a recession into a depression.”….

      The Economist, one of the bastions of free-market thinking, came around to that view. Originally, it favored no government intervention. In April 2010, it offered an apology to President Obama.

      “Given the panic that gripped private purse-strings,” the magazine wrote in an editorial. “It is more likely that GM would have been liquidated, sending a cascade of destruction through the supply chain on which its rivals, too, depended.”

      Even Sherk at the Heritage Foundation gives Obama credit for forcing the carmakers to go through bankruptcy and the necessary restructuring that followed. The Economist concludes “by and large Mr Obama has not used his stakes in GM and Chrysler for political ends. On the contrary, his goal has been to restore both firms to health and then get out as quickly as possible.”…”

      https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/sep/06/did-obama-save-us-automobile-industry/

    1. how dare rudy try and investigate corruption. that’s corruption itself!

      that’s the argument here in a nutshell

      reminds me of an old proverb

      “when a liar slaps you, he cries out in pain”

  18. Cuomo is a jerk and a propagandist. Giuliani is a fool for providing him fodder. Watching this confirms my conviction that the smartest people I know never appear on the boob tube.

    1. Mespo, it is so rare that I disagree with you. I listened to the complete tape with constant repetition to hear again what was said. If you are looking at the audience of CNN then IMHO it was a win for Giuliani and Trump. It may not appeal to you because of your sophistication but it was directed at those watching CNN so they learn that CNN is withholding important news, is totally partisan and lies. Turley’s interpretation is far off the mark and again is a disturbing example of a great mind that partisanship is gradually destroying.

      1. it’s all very much according to eye of the beholder. i liked giuliani and what he said, but i can see how people like turley get disturbed by it.

        Cuomo needs theatre for his lame show. Big name Rudy gave it to him. That’s New Yorkers scratching each other’s backs.

        Nobody’s mind was changed about anything. This whole thing descends into deeper and deeper conflict.

        That’s fine by me. Let the common people of America arise who can see how intensely motivated the elite adversaries of the Democrat leadership are to do harm to the middle. Let them feel the danger and imbibe the fear, which motivates all who yet live. Let them get them off the couch and march in line to the polls to vote in a deep and wide phalanx of unity in 2020.

        If 99% of people who respond to Trump’s message and leadership will get out and actually vote for him, on the fateful day, then the teeming masses of social parasites, who are comparatively more lazy, will ignore the commands of their masters to go out and vote likewise, and they will be outdone and defeated come election day.

        On the other hand, if the middle American common folk feel like it’s all going to be ok, maybe they will be content to let a screeching harridan like Liz Warren sieze the reins of presidential power, and ram more bureaucratic mandates down our throats, bludgeon us relentlessly with four years of SJW anti-man, anti-American talk, and fleece our pockets with more taxes, well then, that’s what will happen.

        In this way, the nuttier and more strident CNN sounds the better!

      2. Allan:

        It’s less about what Giuliani said than the place he picked to say it. Nothing gained by going into the belly of the beast and giving him credibility.

        1. Mespo, I don’t dismiss your opinion but when I look at the numbers they look something like this. 100 people have been indoctrinated to hate Trump and have no other source of knowledge. Therefore they hate Trump. Guiliani goes into the belly of the beast and some start to think that there is more than one side. That rudimentary bit of knowledge is a crack that lets a bit of light in. I think that is what we are looking for. Trump goes into the belly of the beast all the time when he interacts with MSM, Twitter etc. That is the only way people get to hear his side of the story.

  19. The US extorts states all the time. I am not concerned. There is no day certain that a check has to be cut and Trump can hold it up if he wants.

    1. So? if Giuilliani did nor didn’t what’s that got to do President Trump? A far cry from the imoluments charge facing Biden.

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