Ukraine: The Plot Thickens... Will Rudy Be Indicted By The Same Prosectors' Office He Used To Run, SNDY, Before He Went Bad? And What About Pete Sessions?

Giuliani is using a loophole in ethics laws to avoid disclosing where he's getting the money he uses to pretend he's working for the U.S. government while just operating as a reelection hack for the Trump campaign. If he's paying for all the work he's doing to reelect Trump himself, wouldn't he have to report it as an in-kind campaign contribution? Washington Post reporters Trevor Potter and Delaney Marsco brought it up Thursday: We Have No Idea Who Is Paying Rudy Giuliani. "Giuliani," they wrote "is not the secretary of state. In fact, he has no official position in President Trump’s Cabinet or administration. Yet he is traveling the world holding himself out as a U.S. government operative, engaging in some unknown amount of 'unofficial' diplomacy and insisting his work is not only officially sanctioned by the president but also assisted by the State Department. The president’s 'private lawyer' is not charging Trump for his services, but he and his law firm are known to have dozens of clients-- including foreign entities-- who are paying for whatever services they think Giuliani can provide for them. That is a very convenient setup for Giuliani-- but it leaves the public in the dark about the wealthy special interests who might be subsidizing his gratis work for Trump-- or for whom he might actually be working while invoking Trump’s name and that of the State Department. Because Giuliani is not officially a federal employee, he can sidestep ethics obligations that would require transparency behind the foreign or domestic interests who are paying him."

Elaina Plott, writing for The Atlantic reported that she spoke with Giuliani who told her he was about to fly to Vienna-- just before his two criminal associates Lev and Igor, were arrested-- escaping to... Vienna (with one-way tickets).

[W]hen confirming today that Parnas and Fruman were heading to Vienna on matters “related to their business,” told the Journal that he himself only had plans to meet with them when they returned to Washington. By this logic, Giuliani was also planning to fly to Vienna within roughly 24 hours of his business associates, but do no business with them while all three were there.

This morning, Giuliani told me he’d have to reschedule our lunch. I’ve tried to reach him since then, to discuss Parnas’s and Fruman’s arrests, among other things, to no avail. When I called at 3 p.m. ET to ask about his Vienna trip, a woman claiming to be his communications director answered the phone. I have called him more than 100 times over the past year, and this is the first time that has ever happened. She said she’d have to get back to me. As we spoke, I could hear a voice that resembled Giuliani’s shout “asshole” in the background. “Oh, sorry,” the woman told me. “He was talking to the TV.”

Why were Parnas and Fruman bound for Vienna? Why was Giuliani-- if what he told me was true-- planning to be in the same city a day later?

Giuliani finally sent me a text message at 4:18 p.m. ET: “I can’t comment on it at this time.”

Parnas and Fruman, both Soviet-born, have been instrumental in helping Giuliani develop Ukrainian contacts in his quest to prove that Biden, while vice president, tried to curtail an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company for which his son Hunter Biden served on the board. Parnas told NPR, for example, that he was the one who had arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to discuss their corruption theory. Parnas was also present at meetings in New York and Warsaw earlier this year with Giuliani and Yuriy Lutsenko, another former prosecutor general for Ukraine.

I met Parnas and Fruman in March, when I joined Giuliani at Shelly’s Back Room, a cigar bar in D.C., to discuss Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-released report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sipping back-to-back glasses of Macallan-- double, one large ice cube-- and smoking a Nicaraguan cigar, Giuliani told me he’d known Parnas for two years. Parnas laughed and said he’d grown up “idolizing” Giuliani. They bantered about how the Mueller probe would likely amount to nothing, with Parnas adding that it was Trump’s “constitutional right” to fire former FBI Director James Comey. Save for introducing himself when I arrived, Fruman was quiet. Parnas told me they were all “great friends” and all “work together.”

Along with allegedly using a shell company to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and a pro-Trump super PAC, Parnas and Fruman were also accused by federal prosectors of meddling in American political activities on behalf of one or more Ukrainian officials. In the 21-page indictment, prosecutors allege that Parnas and Fruman lobbied for the removal of the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, Marie Yovanovitch-- something Giuliani sought as well, arguing that she was biased against the president. In May, Trump ordered Yovanovitch’s removal.

The White House has kept mum about the arrests. Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal lawyer alongside Giuliani, told reporters that neither Trump nor his campaign has “anything to do with the scheme these guys were involved in.”

It’s difficult to know, however, precisely what Trump may or may not know about Parnas and Fruman, given that Giuliani and Trump are in constant contact and that Giuliani, at least broadly, has frequently kept Trump updated on his maneuverings in Ukraine. Presumably these are the kinds of questions that House Democrats had in mind when they subpoenaed Giuliani last month, and Parnas and Fruman today. Giuliani has said he refuses to testify or provide documents to the House Intelligence Committee. Parnas and Fruman, for their part, are being held in a Virginia jail on a $1 million bond each.

Trump is already seeking to distance himself from the controversy. “I don’t know those gentlemen,” the president told reporters before departing for a rally in Minnesota. “Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them, because I have a picture with everybody.”

“Maybe they were clients of Rudy,” Trump added. “You’d have to ask Rudy.”

24 hours later former-- as in fired-- U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was testifying before Congress in the Trump impeachment hearings. Trump tried stopping her from testifying. This is the statement from committee chairmen Adam Schiff, Eliot Engel and Elijah Cummings yesterday:

Last night, the Committees learned that the State Department, at the direction of the White House, directed Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch not to appear for her voluntary interview today. This is the latest example of the Administration’s efforts to conceal the facts from the American people and obstruct our lawful and constitutionally-authorized impeachment inquiry.

In response, the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to compel her testimony this morning.  This duly authorized subpoena is mandatory, and the illegitimate order from the Trump Administration not to cooperate has no force.  As is required of her, the Ambassador is now complying with the subpoena and answering questions from both Democratic and Republican Members and staff.

Any efforts by Trump Administration officials to prevent witness cooperation with the Committees will be deemed obstruction of a co-equal branch of government and an adverse inference may be drawn against the President on the underlying allegations of corruption and coverup.

You can read the entire opening statement she gave Congress yesterday by clicking on the link. But this probably isn't going to help cases currently being made against Trump, Giuliani, Igor and Lev: "With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him-- a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue. I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine."

In closed hearings, according to the early reports from the NY Times, Yovanovitch delivered a scathing indictment of the Trump administration’s conduct of foreign policy, warning that private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment, threatening to undermine the nation’s interests and drive talented professionals out of public service… She said that John Sullivan, the deputy Secretary of State, told her this spring that she had "done nothing wrong and that this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause."

Washington Post reporters Karounn Demirjian and John Hudson wrote that she "was confirmed as ambassador to Ukraine in August 2016 but recalled in May, after conservative activists-- including Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani-- accused her of being biased against the president. State Department officials have said the accusations against the career diplomat are baseless."

Yovanovitch’s early departure stunned career diplomats who had been planning high-level internal meetings for her that were scrapped because she would no longer be serving in the position.

The resignation this week of Michael McKinley, a career diplomat and senior adviser to Pompeo, came amid rising dissatisfaction inside the State Department at what is seen as Pompeo's failure to defend his subordinates who became targets in the Ukraine controversy.

According to an indictment that federal prosecutors unsealed Thursday, a Soviet-born associate of Giuliani’s met in the spring of 2018 with a U.S. congressman, who public campaign records indicate was Texas Republican Pete Sessions, to seek “assistance in causing the U.S. government to remove or recall the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.” The indictment says that Giuliani’s associate, Lev Parnas, pushed for Yovanovitch’s ouster “at least in part, at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials.”

Sessions, who lost his reelection bid in November 2018, said Thursday that he did not know if he was the congressman mentioned in the indictment and denied any wrongdoing.

Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidential election in April and took office on May 20, the same day Yovanovitch was recalled.

Sessions, it should be noted, is running for Congress again, albeit in another Texas district, far from the north Dallas district that got sick of him and kicked him out. This one (TX-17), from which GOP incumbent Bill Flores is retiring, is also turning purple and is unlikely to embrace Sessions, especially now that he's seen as being tied up with this Ukraine mess. Although Trump won the R+12 district 56.3% to 38.8%, 2018 was closer for an unfinanced Democrat, Rick Kennedy, who held Flores to just 56.8%.

Meanwhile, Giuliani's relationship with Igor and Lev is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation. The FBI wasn't ready to go public with it but they "had to quickly move to arrest Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman before they boarded a flight out of the country from Washington Dulles Airport with one-way tickets. They have been named as witnesses in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Trump. The investigation is being conducted by the FBI's New York field office and prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the same U.S. Attorney's office Giuliani ran before he became mayor of New York."