Zany Rudy Giuliani Conveniently Tucked In His Shirt Before The Botched Trump Press Conference

 

Earlier today, former President George Bush gave an unsolicited lesson to soon-to-be former President Donald Duck. "I just talked to the President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden," he wrote. "I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night. I also called Kamala Harris to congratulate her on her historic election to the vice presidency. Though we have political differences, I know Joe Biden to be a good man, who has won his opportunity to lead and unify our country. The President-elect reiterated that while he ran as a Democrat, he will govern for all Americans. I offered him the same thing I offered Presidents Trump and Obama: my prayers for his success, and my pledge to help in any way I can... The challenges that face our country will demand the best of President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris-- and the best of us all.  We must come together for the sake of our families and neighbors, and for our nation and its future. There is no problem that will not yield to the gathered will of a free people. Laura and I pray for our leaders and their families. We ask for God's continued blessings on our country. And we urge all Americans to join us in wishing our next President and Vice President well as they prepare to take up their important duties."

Today, as the U.S. reported another six-figure death toll from COVID, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran the most perfect denouement for the whole of America's tragic Trump Anamoly. Hilarious reporters Jeremy Roebuck, Maddie Hanna and Oona Goodin-Smith wrote that "What began five years ago with the made-for-TV announcement of Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions from the escalator of his ritzy Manhattan high-rise, ended Saturday with his aging lawyer shouting conspiracy theories and vowing lawsuits in a Northeast Philadelphia parking lot, near a sex shop and a crematorium. In hindsight, the hastily arranged news conference featuring Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, just minutes after Joe Biden had been declared the victor of the 2020 race, delivered a fitting end to a campaign that had been at times characterized by its slapdash techniques. But the story of how a landscaping company in Holmesburg became the backdrop for what could have been one of the Trump team’s last public gasps in its bid to reverse the results quickly captured the public’s imagination."

It started Saturday morning, with a presidential tweet that, as has often happened during the last four years, Trump’s advisers quickly scrambled to correct.

Trump announced: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia, 11 a.m.,” only to delete his post minutes later and replace it with one changing the venue from the upscale Center City hotel to a similarly named business: Four Seasons Total Landscaping on industrial State Road, next to Fantasy Island Adult Books and Novelties and across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

“To clarify, President Trump’s news conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia,” the hotel’s management tweeted out minutes later. “It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping-- no relation with the hotel.”

But by then, many on social media were already delighting in a booking they assumed must have been a mistake.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Giuliani and Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski had always intended the news conference to take place in a section of Philadelphia where they might receive a more welcomed reception than at the raucous celebrations of Joe Biden’s victory going on in Center City. It was the president, the paper reported, who had misunderstood.

As for why Four Seasons Total Landscaping? Giuliani offered no explanation Saturday and made no mention of the company or its owner, Marie Siravo, during his remarks. Tom Matkowski, GOP ward leader for the neighborhood, said the news conference hadn’t been coordinated with the local Republican Party and that he didn’t believe the Siravo family was active in local party politics.

The phone at Four Seasons went unanswered throughout the day, and Siravo did not return calls for comment.

Her social media posts indicate she and some of her family members were vocal, but not necessarily unshakable, Trump supporters.

“We don’t need to invite him for dinner,” Siravo posted in August, in response to a “Conservative Hangout” Facebook page that listed Trump’s accomplishments in office. “We just need him to fix our country & all the democratic mess.” She added that she had been “raised a Democrat.”

In a Facebook post, the Four Seasons team described itself as a “family-owned small business run by lifelong Philadelphians” that would have “proudly hosted any presidential candidate’s campaign.”

“We strongly believe in America and in democracy,” the message read. It promised it would have merchandise ready to sell by next week.

While Giuliani spoke Saturday outside the business against a backdrop of “Trump-Pence” signs, he drew a local crowd of supporters, waving flags and booing reporters as campaign staff called on them to identify what news outlets they were representing. But as news of Biden’s victory spread, the group’s noise was rivaled by the honking horns of cars with “Biden-Harris” signs zipping down the nearby road.

Meanwhile, online, jokes about the locale proliferated. T-shirts popped up for sale featuring Gritty riding a tractor under the slogan “Not the Four Seasons Hotel” and the company’s online reviews took a turn for the zany.

By afternoon, Yelp slapped the business' page with an “unusual activity alert” and temporarily disabled comments so it could investigate that incoming reviews "reflect actual consumer experiences rather than the recent events.”

On Google, one five-star reviewer posted: “When I was losing an election back in 2004, I knew exactly where to turn for a desperate, last minute news conference. Four Seasons Total Landscaping has the best combination of gardening and Pennsylvania electoral law litigation services. I didn’t win the election, but I sure had a great news conference.”

Even Lewandowski joined in the fun, tweeting: “All great Americans in PA use Four Seasons Total Landscaping. They love this country and are American Patriots.”

Back on State Road, by Sunday afternoon even tourists had flocked to the company’s barbed-wire gates, taking selfies with the signage and livestreaming the construction equipment and gravel parking lot.

“World’s greatest landmark!” said Katheryn Wlodarcyzk, who’d driven from Wayne with her dog, Emmett, just to see the building for herself. “No place more beautiful.”

The Four Seasons staff remained perplexed by their moment in the national spotlight. Kevin Moran, a foreman at the firm, simply shrugged when approached while opening the gate to the parking lot on Sunday. He said his boss got the call from Trump campaign staffers Saturday morning and thought they must have found the business on Google and been interested because it was a “secure location” set off from the street by a security fence.

As for the confusion with the hotel, Moran said, “everybody gets mixed up. There’s multiple Four Seasons. Four Seasons Hotel, there’s two Four Seasons Landscaping. We’re ‘Total;’ the other one, I think it’s just landscaping.” (There’s a Four Seasons Diner, off Cottman Avenue, too. They weren’t involved, either, the hostess there said.)

Changing it's name to Rudy's Adult Books & Viewing Booths

 

But not all in the neighborhood were so amused. The 78-year-old employee manning the counter at the Fantasy Island sex shop, who declined to give his name, said the phone had been ringing off the hook since Saturday with callers asking: “Is Rudy Giuliani there?”

And despite the stream of new interest in the neighborhood, it hadn’t led to an uptick in business. The Trump train had taken all his parking spots, the worker complained. Then, the day after, normally the store’s busiest day of the week, more people than ever were gawking outside but none were stopping in to sample his wares.

“It is a circus," he said. "But to be honest with you, it doesn’t surprise me. That’s Trump.”

Expect More Evidence Of Trump's Guilt To Continue To Seep Out Despite The Senate's Decision To Perpetrate A Coverup

Lisa Murkowski wimped out on even just calling Bolton as a witness and so did retiring Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander. Why? John Harwood wrote that "Trump's vituperative attacks, regularly trained on critics through his vast social media following, make every Republican politician wary of crossing him. But that represents the lesser factor in the party's fealty. More significantly, decades of American political realignment have tightened the bonds holding Republicans together in any high-stakes fight with Democrats. The ongoing diversification of American society further unites an overwhelmingly white GOP around a shared fear of impending doom. Together, those changes lend weight and rigidity to Republican partisanship that did not exist that last time a GOP chief executive faced impeachment. The modest barrier that once separated Republicans from Democrats has become a dense, multi-layered wall reinforced by ideology, race, education and religion as well as party identification. That helps explain why so many Republican senators have cast aside consistency, logic and unrebutted evidence to shield their president from impeachment charges. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell aims for a Friday Senate vote in which Republicans would refuse even to hear new testimony about Trump's culpability before summarily acquitting him."

Well, that might work just fine for senators in Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas and Oklahoma, where the PVIs are, respectively, R+25, R+19, R+15 and R+20, but that doesn't explain the calculus going on in the minds of senators for states that are looking more shaky for incumbents this year:

• Cory Gardner (CO)- net approval- minus 18
• Martha McSally (AZ)- net approval- minus 3
• Joni Ernst (IA)- net approval- minus 9
• David Purdue (GA)- net approval- minus 2
• Kelly Loeffler (GA)- net approval- minus 2
• Thom Tillis (NC)- net approval- 0
• Dan Sullivan (AK)- net approval- minus 2
• John Cornyn (TX)- net approval- +1

Worse, even as more and more evidence of Trump's wrongdoing floods in, the GOP suicide pact doesn't break. Yesterday, for example, around the same time Murkowski announced she was killing the chance of Bolton being subpoenaed-- despite overwhelming numbers of voters demanding exactly that-- the NY Times published another explosive Bolton leak from by Maggie Haberman and Mark Schmidt. They reported that over two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate the Biden's, Señor Trumpanzee had directed "Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials." Bolton wrote that Señor T ordered him to do so during an Oval Office conversation in early May that included Mulvaney, Giuliani and Cipollone, who is now leading Trump's impeachment defense, and should certainly be disbarred.

Trump told Bolton to call the recently elected Zelensky to ensure that he would meet with Giuliani. Bolton never did so and today Trump was screeching that that is "proof" he never gave the order.

The previously undisclosed directive that Mr. Bolton describes would be the earliest known instance of Mr. Trump seeking to harness the power of the United States government to advance his pressure campaign against Ukraine, as he later did on the July call with Mr. Zelensky that triggered a whistle-blower complaint and impeachment proceedings. House Democrats have accused him of abusing his authority and are arguing their case before senators in the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, whose lawyers have said he did nothing wrong.

The account in Mr. Bolton’s manuscript portrays the most senior White House advisers as early witnesses in the effort that they have sought to distance the president from. And disclosure of the meeting underscores the kind of information Democrats were looking for in seeking testimony from his top advisers in their impeachment investigation, including Mr. Bolton and Mr. Mulvaney, only to be blocked by the White House.

In a brief interview, Mr. Giuliani denied that the conversation took place and said those discussions with the president were always kept separate. He was adamant that Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Mulvaney were never involved in meetings related to Ukraine.

“It is absolutely, categorically untrue,” he said.

...Mr. Bolton described the roughly 10-minute conversation in drafts of his book, a memoir of his time as national security adviser that is to go on sale in March. Over several pages, Mr. Bolton laid out Mr. Trump’s fixation on Ukraine and the president’s belief, based on a mix of scattershot events, assertions and outright conspiracy theories, that Ukraine tried to undermine his chances of winning the presidency in 2016.

As he began to realize the extent and aims of the pressure campaign, Mr. Bolton began to object, he wrote in the book, affirming the testimony of a former National Security Council aide, Fiona Hill, who had said that Mr. Bolton warned that Mr. Giuliani was “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”

Mr. Trump also repeatedly made national security decisions contrary to American interests, Mr. Bolton wrote, describing a pervasive sense of alarm among top advisers about the president’s choices. Mr. Bolton expressed concern to others in the administration that the president was effectively granting favors to autocratic leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Xi Jinping of China.

...The White House has sought to block the release of the book, contending that it contains classified information. The government reviews books by former officials who had access to secrets so they can excise the manuscripts of any classified information. Officials including Mr. Trump have described Mr. Bolton, who was often at odds with Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney, as a disgruntled former official with an ax to grind.

Mr. Bolton has angered Democrats-- and some Republicans-- for remaining quiet during the House investigation, then announcing that he would comply with any subpoena to testify in the Senate and signaling that he is eager to share his story. Administration officials should “feel they’re able to speak their minds without retribution,” he said at a closed-door lunch in Austin, Texas, on Thursday, the NBC affiliate KXAN reported, citing unnamed sources.

“The idea that somehow testifying to what you think is true is destructive to the system of government we have-- I think, is very nearly the reverse, the exact reverse of the truth,” Mr. Bolton added.

The Oval Office conversation that Mr. Bolton described came as the president and Mr. Giuliani were increasingly focusing on pushing the Ukrainian government to commit to investigations that could help Mr. Trump politically. At various points, Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and their associates pressed Ukrainian officials under Mr. Zelensky and his predecessor to provide potentially damaging information on the president’s rivals, including Mr. Biden and Ukrainians who Mr. Trump’s allies believed tried to help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Mr. Giuliani had just successfully campaigned to have the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, recalled, convinced that she was part of an effort to protect Mr. Trump’s political rivals from scrutiny. Mr. Giuliani had argued she was impeding the investigations.

At the time of the Oval Office conversation Mr. Bolton wrote about, Mr. Giuliani was planning a trip to Kyiv to push the incoming government to commit to the investigations. Mr. Giuliani asserted that the president had been wronged by the Justice Department’s Russia investigation and told associates that the inquiry could be partly discredited by proving that parts of it originated with suspect documents produced and disseminated in Ukraine to undermine his onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, whose work in Ukraine became a central focus of the Russia inquiry.

Mr. Giuliani, a private consultant with a range of international clients, had said none were involved in the Ukraine effort, Mr. Bolton wrote, adding that he was skeptical and wanted to avoid involvement. At the time, Mr. Giuliani was working closely with two Soviet-born businessmen from Florida, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to carry out the shadow Ukraine effort.

After pushing out Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Giulian turned his attention to other American diplomats responsible for Ukraine policy. During the Oval Office conversation, he also mentioned a State Department official with the last name of Kent, whom Mr. Bolton wrote he did not know. Mr. Giuliani said he was hostile to Mr. Trump and sympathetic to George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has long been a target of the far right.

George P. Kent, a top State Department official who oversees Ukraine policy, went on to be a key witness in House Democrats’ impeachment investigation, testifying that claims by Mr. Giuliani’s allies of Mr. Soros’ wide influence in Ukraine were used to smear Ms. Yovanovitch.

Mr. Bolton left the Oval Office after 10 minutes and returned to his office, he wrote. Shortly after, two aides came into his office, saying Mr. Trump had sent them out of a separate meeting on trade to ask about Mr. Kent, Mr. Bolton wrote.

The conversation that Mr. Bolton describes was separate from another one that Mr. Bolton wrote about, where he observed Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Trump talking on the phone with Mr. Giuliani about Ukraine matters. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he would leave the room when Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani were talking to preserve their attorney-client privilege, and his lawyer said earlier this week that Mr. Mulvaney was never in meetings with Mr. Giuliani and has “no recollection” of the first discussion.

Around the time of the May discussion, The Times revealed Mr. Giuliani’s efforts and his planned trip to Ukraine. Mr. Giuliani said at the time that Mr. Trump was aware of his efforts in Ukraine, but said nothing else about any involvement of Mr. Trump or other members of the administration. The disclosure created consternation in the White House and Mr. Giuliani canceled his trip.

A day after The Times article was published, Mr. Giuliani wrote a letter to Mr. Zelensky, saying he was representing Mr. Trump as a “private citizen” and, with Mr. Trump’s “knowledge and consent,” hoped to arrange a meeting with Mr. Zelensky in the ensuing days. That letter was among the evidence admitted during the House impeachment inquiry.

Talk about a swamp! This is another reason Bernie should be the nominee and not Status Quo Joe, whose swamp problems aren't as bad as TRump's but way too exploitable by a compulsive liar like Trump... and way too disgusting to allow him anywhere near the White House!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Moscow's Mayor Rudy Giuliani is one of those knuckle-dragging goons that craves being the center of attention. He can't live without it. So much so he's practically demanding now to be a witness at the impeachment trial of his even more bonkers buddy. Rudy just has to get out there and be in front of the cameras. I mean, can you imagine what he must be like at home, away from public view? This guy is literally bouncing off the walls and probably the ceiling too, all hand gestures, screaming and spraying rivers of saliva all over the floor. His couch is probably a reeking soggy sponge of spit. God, his house must stink! If you go there, be careful you don't slip and fall in the slime.

And all that stuff I just said about Rudy? That is Rudy at his best. There's one thing any other administration, one that had an attorney general that didn't wake up every morning to embrace the sleaze like William Barr does would most likely have done already and that's march his dimply-pimply butt into the nearest high-walled, bars on the windows federal housing. The charge: Being an unregistered foreign agent. Ah, but there's the rub! This current administration doesn't consider Russia to be foreign at all, so Rudy's protected. No indictment headed his way.

So, since we're stuck with Rudy being free and out loud right in public, let's at least go for the dark hilarity that Washington deals in so well. C'mon Donnie! C'mon Mitch! Let's reverse the decision to bar Rudy! Let's go for the gusto! Let's grant Moscow's Mayor his wacko wish! Let's hear from the Rudy who claims to be a cyber-security expert but locked himself out of his own iPhone! Let's hear from the guy who accidentally butt dials reporters! Let's hear from that guy! Let's see how much intelligence he's given out over his unsecured phone while talking to Trump on his! C'mon! Let's have Rudy be a witness at the impeachment trial as he wishes to be! I've already seen apprentice on Hannity. Believe me bigly, Rudy is ready for the bigtime! In fact, I think that after the prosecution gets through throwing nerf balls at him, he should be defended by Louis Gohmert, David Duke, Gym Jordan, Lindsey Graham, and Hannity himself. That would be some funny shit. Just watch him goon-out on live TV all over the world! But even better, just put him on the stand and let Perry Mason have at him until he's just a blob of whimpering gelatinous goo on the $enate floor. Clean up in Aisle One!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Tonight's Meme: A tale of two Jackasses; a two-legged one and his smarter four-legged cousin.

I woke up New Year's morning and sat down before my brand new MAC iCrystal Ball G9000 and peered thru the cloudy mists into the near-future and beheld an image of an almost satyrish Rudy Giuliani, still imagining himself as a crime-burster extraordinaire. Giuliani appeared to have once again disappeared into the hills of the fabled Sierra Ukraine in search of golden dirt on his master's political rivals. As he travelled, he sang to himself of his own greatness and how pleased his master and even his master's master would be with him when he returned from his mission. He sang loudly and proudly, too loudly. The hills began to rumble and cascade down upon him. When the dust cleared, there was Rudy, buried up to his nose in a dune of dirt of his own making, his scratch-covered bald pate exposed to the rays of the sun. It looked like any other rock, except for those two crazed buggy eyes that peered out from the hills.

Rushin’ To Destruction, 2019 In Review, Part 14-- "Highlights" From New York Magazine’s Interview With Rudy Giuliani

-by Noah

Interview with a demented vampire is more like it. Rudy Giuliani does look more and more like Nosferatu every day. Eventually, he will look like the gollum in the Lord Of The Rings movie. He’s already traipsing ‘round the world in search of that precious ring that will give him power. In so many stories like Lord Of The Rings, the embrace of absolute corruption leads to dementia and physical grotesqueness. This is what has happened to Rudy.

Rudy wasn’t much to begin with. He has always represented and symbolized the diseased parts of America. In that sense, when a goon like Wolf Blitzer dubbed him “America’s Mayor,” it may have been a highly accurate description and appellation.

After too long of a time, New York City eventually got wise to Rudy. Eventually so did much of the rest of the country. Rudy is a megalomaniac, a racist, narcissistic saliva-spraying dumbo. Only Rudy could have spent $50 fucking million dollars on his own presidential campaign and gotten just one delegate for the convention (although that record may soon be broken); and that one delegate hailed form what state? Florida, of course! And who else would put the security center for the World Trade Center right in one of the two towers after an attempt to bring them down with truck bombs? Rudy! That’s who! Genius! Is it any wonder that Rudy and Trump are such a matched pair of pals? They are roommates in Asylum America. And let’s not forget that FOX “News” and its viewership worship this creepy fungus of a man. Republicans hang on his every word. To them, he is a star of 2019, someone to follow and revere.

What follows are some of the make America great again moments of one of Trump’s “Best People.” When you elect a flatulent gasbag, Rudy happens. If you read Olivia Nuzzi’s New York Magazine interview with Rudy, even in encapsulated form as presented below, it quickly becomes obvious that 15 or even a 150 flushes will never be enough.

Let’s start at the beginning of the interview: Olivia Nuzzi’s description of her subject. It is surreal:

He sang me an aria from Rigoletto, one of the first pieces he fell in love with when he was introduced to opera in high school, as he theatrically conducted with his hands. Over a sweater, he wore a navy blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped. He accessorized with an American flag lapel pin, American flag woven wallet, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring, and a diamond-encrusted Yankees world Series ring…

Four things struck immediately struck me about Nuzzi’s description: 1) The pinky ring! Say no more! Or, should I just wonder if Trump’s lifelong connection to mobsters has rubbed off on his lawyer? 2) The Yankees gave him a World Series ring. Shame on them, but, I guess it’s not surprising. The ring was given to Giuliani by the team’s late owner George Steinbrenner, a man who was once convicted of funneling illegal campaign contributions to Republican president Richard Nixon and then intimidating employees of his shipbuilding company to give false information to a grand jury. Birds of a feather. 3) Can you imagine being subjected to a demented old coot like Rudy Giuliani trying to sing opera? I know that I will never again be able to hear so much as 3 notes of opera without thinking of Rudy trying in vain to sing it. As for number 4, I suppose Rudy is used to participating in interviews with his zipper down but he should have known that Olivia Nuzzi doesn’t do that kind of interviewing.

Once the interview began, Giuliani related how he got back to New York in time for it. Rudy said:

We snuck out of Kiev to escape having to answer a lot of questions. They all thought we were going to leave on Friday morning, and I organized a private plane to Vienna on Thursday night.

Of course he snuck out, just like his thug buddies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman tried to sneak out of the U.S. to avoid questions, and more. As Nuzzi points out, Rudy wasn’t clear if he meant questions from the press of from government officials.

As she spoke with Rudy, Nuzzi observed that he held 3 phones of various sizes in one hand. The phones were on, unlocked, and banging against each other. He accidently activated Siri who said she didn’t understand his command.

She never understands me

Nuzzi then describes Rudy poking at the phone, attempting to silence Siri. Think of it this way: A senile old man in a nursing home trying to figure out modern tech. This is a man who bills himself as a cyber systems security expert. It’s all too perfect that his client, the President of the United States, makes a habit of speaking and tweeting on unsecured phones, if only to make it as easy as pie for our adversaries, aka his pals, to know everything he’s up to.

Nuzzi then asks Giuliani how he ever trusted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman:

They look like Miami people. I know a lot of Miami people that look like that that are perfectly legitimate and act like them. Neither on of them have ever been convicted of a crime. Neither one.

Yeah, Rudy, they’re “legitimate businessmen.” The bit about neither one ever being convicted of a crime may be changing soon, and, as we all know, every legitimate businessman tries to sneak out of the country on one-way air tickets. Wave that pinky ring, Rudy.

Then, Rudy offers this. He’s so far gone, as we know from his appearances on Hannity, that he can’t even keep his stories straight within two or three sentences. We’ve seen similar statements from Rudy during his wacked out appearances on FOX “News.” If Rudy wasn’t the heinous individual that he is, the evidence that such statements give might almost engender sympathy.

I have no business interests in Ukraine. I’ve done two business deals in Ukraine. I’ve sought four or five others.

Rudy Giuliani reads his own press and feels betrayed by friends who warned him about tarnishing his reputation. Like many people in his condition, he has become more than a bit paranoid. One of his ex-wives implied that he’s an alcoholic. He states that old friends suspect the abuse of other substances affecting his mental state, too. He gets sarcastic and defensive.

Oh yeah, yeah. I do a lot of drugs. There was one I was addicted to. I’ve forgotten what it is. I don’t know where the drug things come from. I really don’t. The alcohol comes from the fact that I did occasionally drink. I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars. I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.

The idea of him snorting crushed adderall with Trump comes to mind. Party down, dude!

Rudy apparently feels even more betrayed by the lawyers of the Southern District of New York. He considered them to be his guys working in his world. He had power there but that was the 1980s. He feels entitled to some looking the other way action. He thinks “his guys” might be jealous of him.

If they’re investigating me, they’re assholes. They’re absolutely assholes if they’re investigating me.

Nuzzi says he starts drooling onto his sweater as he gets into his paranoia and bitterness at possibly being betrayed by those who see the law as the law. In all of this, he is unbelievably Trump-like.

If they are, they’re idiots. Then they really are a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals… If they think I committed a crime, they’re out of their minds.

Rudy speaks and acts like his client. Speaking of the whistleblower, he even engages in projection:

How do we know he isn’t a paranoid schizophrenic? How do we know he isn’t an alcoholic?

The money shot of Nuzzi’s conversation with Rudy is the one that most of us heard the day the conversation was published. It’s hard to tell, though, which of Rudy’s mutterings are more bizarre. Anyway, what leapt from the page was Rudy’s engaging in the grand Republican tradition of George Soros conspiracy theorizing. Republicans are obsessed with Soros. They blame him for a lot of their credibility problems. They spread tales of him spending billions against republicans even though what he spends is a pittance compared to what a whole battalion of Republican-supporting billionaires each spend against Democrats. Rudy claims that former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is “controlled” by Soros:

He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents. Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him. Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about-- he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion-- synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel. He’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.

Well, Rudy does call George Soros a human being so there is that. The whole article shouldn’t have been called “A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani.” It should have been called “Rudy Off The Rails,” but we already knew that. Still, it’s good that Rudy puts his mental state on display so openly, not that we can readily do anything about it. Once in a while, though, sunlight actually does serve mankind as a disinfectant.

Rudy And The Apple Tree

Rudy Giuliani by Nancy Ohanian

-by Granny Smith

While stereotypes often contain kernels of truth, as a whole they are dangerous generalizations that can be weaponized against individuals or groups, with the aim of inciting denigration, hate, anger and retribution.

Obviously, there are good and bad people in most groups, be it religious affiliation, nationality, political affiliation, race, gender, etc. Still, when a stereotype fits like a glove, it can be quite striking.

One common adage, “The apple does not fall far from the tree,” is often used to cast aspersions on a person’s parentage. The implication is that children wind up following in the footsteps of their parents. Some do, many do not.

Donald J. Trump, a racist who flaunts the law and enriches himself at the expense of everyone else, has certainly mind melded with his father, Fred Trump. And by virtue of his office, his power to run amok far outstrips that of his Dad. Ivanka and her brothers appear to be modeling their father, making Trump family greed, criminality and ethical dysfunction intergenerational.

Another obvious example of the apple/tree theory in Trump world is Jared Kushner, who also appears to be outdoing his father, Charles Kushner, in grand fashion. Charles is a convicted white collar criminal. All indications suggest that Jared is sprinting down the same path, leveraging his position in the Trump administration for his own enrichment.

Jared has cozied up to notoriously tyrannical and evil people around the world. MBS comes to mind. His associations with foreign governments, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, do not pass the smell test. Clearly, Jared is compromised and is a threat to our national security. He never should have been granted security clearance and only obtained it when Trump overrode all established channels and simply handed it to him. This issue is currently under investigation by the House. Who knows what Jared has been up to with his suspicious contacts and international jaunts? Will he eventually wind up in prison, just like his father? If so, he would surely outdo Charles in spades.

Given that Trump surrounds himself with sycophants who have a low bar for ethics, morality and criminality, does apple/tree theory apply to anyone else in his immediate orbit? The answer is YES. Rudy Giuliani.

I was taken aback by a recent Salon interview with David Kay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and an expert on Donald J. Trump.

Harold Angel Giuliani

During the interview, Johnston mentioned the little known fact that Rudy’s father, Harold Angel Giuliani, served time in prison. Wow. The Giulianis were associated with the mob. Several of Rudy’s cousins were involved in organized crime. Thus Rudy, like Donald and Jared, is currently on track to outdo his father.

From the interview:

Is Rudy Giuliani a true believer or is he just working for Trump in the shadows because it is a way to make money?

I believe that Rudy Giuliani is one of the great frauds of all time. Giuliani's father was a bandit who served time in Sing Sing prison. Giuliani surrounded himself with mobbed up people like Bernard Kerik, who he made first corrections commissioner, and then Police Commissioner. Of note: Giuliani did not try any of the mob cases [during his time as U.S. attorney in New York]. He just took credit for them. The convictions were won by career prosecutors who did an excellent job.

When he worked for the Reagan administration, Giuliani made it clear that he is a horrible racist as shown during the Haitian refugee crisis. Giuliani is an opportunist. He's certainly looking out for his own pocket and his own welfare. Giuliani now has this lucrative gig with Donald Trump. And Giuliani has made this claim that he's not being paid by Donald Trump. In fact, lawyers know lots of ways to get paid. It will not surprise to me one bit if Giuliani’s alleged associates in the Ukraine scandal, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, eventually reveal that Giuliani had some side extortion scheme to make money.

In July 2000, the release of 'Rudy!' An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani by Wayne Barrett revealed shocking details about the twisted tree from which Rudy has fallen. Given Rudy’s current shenanigans, his family background is intriguing, to say the least.

Here are a few excerpts from Michael Powell’s review of the book in the Washington Post, 'Rudy!' Shakes the Family Tree:

It seems Hizzoner Rudolph Giuliani, bane of the mob and scourge of street hoods, is himself the son of a stickup man and the nephew of a mobster.

The revelations, contained in Rudy!, a new "investigative biography" of New York's once-fearsome mayor, are another curious turn in a curious year for him. He has prostate cancer and a girlfriend and a wife who is just a little bit bitter. And, no, on second thought, he's not going to run for the Senate against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. So a public man's life becomes Shakespeare meets Freud as rendered by Mario Puzo.

Giuliani always has woven a moral hair shirt out of his life's work. As U.S. attorney and mayor, he took on the mobsters and beat back the predators. And always, he mocked anyone who gainsayed him. He was Sin City's Mr. Clean, out to restore New York to its technicolor 1950s heyday. It was a vision that he credited to his old man, the janitor and Brooklyn barkeep who instilled in him a reverence for working hard and keeping his nose clean.

Now, according to author Wayne Barrett, a longtime investigative reporter for the Village Voice, a rather different father emerges. It seems that the mayor's dad, Harold Giuliani, was a 5-foot-11, big-knuckled man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and made a living as "muscle." Which, in Brooklyn at that time, meant working as a debt collector for a loan-sharking operation. He swung a mean baseball bat and was a most skilled craftsman.

According to the book, Harold Giuliani "shoved people against walls, broke legs, smashed kneecaps, crunched noses. He gave nearby Kings County Hospital a lot of business. 'People in the neighborhood were terrified of him,' said a frequent customer at Vincents," the Giuliani bar.

Giuliani's father enjoyed signing his love letters to his future wife "Your Savage."

Giuliani has refused to comment on the book, although there's no indication that he contests the findings. It's not known if he was aware of his father's criminal past. He did say Tuesday that his father, who died in 1981, "was the finest man I ever knew... the most generous and kindest and most charitable man I ever knew."

In 1934, his father took a step farther over the line, according to the book. With an accomplice, he grabbed a milkman in the stairwell of an apartment building on East 96th Street in Manhattan (seven blocks from Gracie Mansion, where the mayor now lives) and stuck a gun to his stomach. The two men forced the milkman to drop his pants and began to bind his feet when a police officer came running in.

Giuliani was sentenced to two to five years at Sing Sing prison in New York.

Harold Giuliani lied about his name, age, address and occupation when he was arrested, which perhaps explains why his arrest and conviction went unnoticed by reporters and political opponents during the past two decades of Mayor Giuliani's very public life.

"Twenty-five years in public life with everyone out to get him, and they didn't know his father was a stickup man?" says Mitchell Moss of New York University's Taub Urban Research Center. "Who says you can't keep a secret?" When Harold Giuliani arrived at Sing Sing, he received a psychiatric examination. Reading it today--the document is posted on the Web site TheSmokingGun.com--is like reading a cross-generational X-ray. Giuliani the father bears more than a passing temperamental similarity to Giuliani the son.

"He is a personality deviate of the aggressive egocentric type," the 1934 report reads. "This aggressivity is pathological in nature and has shown itself from time to time even as far back as his childhood. He is egocentric to an extent where he has failed to consider the feelings and rights of others."

As late as 1962, when Rudolph Giuliani was in college, his father engaged in a shootout with a Mafia thug, Barrett's book claims.

About all of this, the mayor will say but one thing: His father's past died with him.

An August 2000 article in the New York Times by Andy Newman, Giuliani Acknowledges Knowing Of His Father’s Criminal Activity, described an interview with Giuliani, which addressed his father’s crimes and Rudy’s knowledge of them. Here are some excerpts:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani acknowledged for the first time last night, in a television interview, that he had known about his father's criminal activity, which was revealed in a book published last month. The mayor said his father's mistakes had influenced him to go into law enforcement.

"Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected," Mr. Giuliani said of the accounts in the book, Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Wayne Barrett.

"Some of it," the mayor said, "did come as a shock."

Until yesterday, Mr. Giuliani, a former United States attorney, had refused to answer recent questions about his father, other than to defend him as scrupulously honest and the "finest man" he had ever known.

But last night, in an interview on New York Close-Up on NY1 with Sam Roberts, the program's host and deputy editor of the Week in Review section of the New York Times, the mayor opened up a little.

He refused, however, to say just what he knew and when he knew it. "Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected, some of it I absolutely didn't know, and when I write my book, I'll explain which is which," he said with a chuckle.

Mayor Giuliani, who claims not to have read the book, said that his father was "compulsive about being honest," perhaps to compensate for his past deeds.

"He would tell me, 'Never take anybody else's money, make sure you always pay for things, make sure that you don't make a mistake when you fill out a form, make sure it's accurate,'" the mayor said. "I've driven myself crazy over this all my life. And when any mistake has been made it really bothers me, and I realize more than I did as I was growing up why my father was doing that. I mean, he wanted to make sure that I didn't make the same mistakes that he believed he had made."

When asked if his father's criminal past had influenced him to go into law enforcement, Mr. Giuliani replied, "I'm sure it did."

Mr. Barrett's book also said that several of the mayor's cousins were involved in organized crime, and the mayor said that his parents' decision to move to Long Island was in part an attempt to get him away from an unsavory environment.

"I think the decision that my father and mother made, essentially, was to take me out of Brooklyn, where they thought I could get into trouble," he said, "and keep me away from some of the things that I guess my father was worried about."

There are several points to be made here. One, it seems the family’s move from Brooklyn to Long Island, away from “an unsavory environment,” did not in the end save Rudy from associating with criminals and engaging in potentially criminal enterprises. Two, Giuliani unwisely ignored his father’s advice about taking anyone else’s money-- think $500,000 from Lev and Igor’s company, Fraud Guarantee. And who knows what other financial shenanigans and shakedowns he may be involved with. Three, although Harold did not want Rudy to repeat his mistakes, he appears to be making whoppers of his own on the world stage.

Rudy, once a respected district attorney for the Southern District of New York, has gone to the dark side. He is the latest of Trump’s bad apples to be in the line of fire. Ironically, Rudy is currently under investigation by the very own federal office he once headed.

How and why did Rudy veer onto a road of criminality? Perhaps apple/tree theory explains some of this. Surely his father would be extremely disappointed in him. It now looks like Rudy will be indicted. If he eventually finds himself in prison, he would likely serve far longer time than Harold. It would be doubly ironic if Rudy wound up in Sing Sing.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Note to readers: I know I posted this meme and comment back on 10/18 but I decided that, in light of the ever-growing amount of bus tracks all over Rudy's Giuliani's body as Trump tries to pin the blame on everyone else, why not a rerun? It was true six weeks ago and its truth is even more on display now. So, here you are, America's Most Corrupt and Treasonous Mayor, redux:

Rudy Giuliani: Just the latest in a long, long line of Trump "Coffee Boys." "Neva hoida him!"

Who's going to be the next Traitorous Trump Wise Guy to be dismissed to the media as just a Coffee Boy? Pence? Pompeo? Barr? Jared? Moscow Mitch? Who will be the next goon that Trump claims to not know or have never even met? Trey Gowdy? Devin Nunes?

"I did not have treason with that man, Mr. Giuliani!"

A Little Look At Trump's America One Year Before The Fateful Choice

Barr, Pompeo, Trumpanzee and Pence

UPDATE: With 100% of parishes reporting, Governor John Bel Edwards (D) was reelected in red, red Louisiana, despite-- or more likely because of-- a barrage of Trump's carrying on and tons and tons of Republican sewer money:

• John Bel Edwards (D)- 763,386 (51%)
• Eddie Rispone (R)- 731,455 (49%)

If anyone wasn't already sure, this confirms that Trump has the kiss of death when it comes to endorsing candidates. America is onto this crook, even in states like Louisiana and Kentucky, and if Trump can't win in Louisiana and Kentucky, where exactly can he win? He's still relatively popular in both of those states, but his approval is underwater in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, Alaska, Ohio... all states he won in 2016. Watch him drag Republican senators Steve Daines, Martha McSally, Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, Thom Tillis, David Perdue and Dan Sullivan down the crapper with him. And don't they all ever deserve that!

Chris Strohm and Jordan Fabian, reporting for Bloomberg, wrote that Giuliani is being investigated by the Feds for "campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent as part of an active investigation into his financial dealings. The probe of Giuliani, which one official said could also include possible charges on violating laws against bribing foreign officials or conspiracy, presents a serious threat to Trump’s presidency from a man that former national security adviser John Bolton has called a 'hand grenade.'" He is widely expected to be indicted.

Last night, the Washington Post published an Op-Ed by prominent authors Jon Meacham, Walter Issacson and Evan Thomas, It's The Wise Men vs The Wise Guys In Trump's America. They noted that Napoleon is reputed to have said that "geography is destiny" and continued that the axiom "came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south-- you don’t even need a Town Car-- and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post."

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world. From the Long Telegram to Twitter, and from Averell Harriman to Sean Hannity: To borrow a phrase of Henry Adams, himself a scion of presidents, the current moment disproves Darwin.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill.

The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. More recently, there was Vietnam writ large, and intelligence failures like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Grass-stained ideals of fair play learned on the playing fields of Groton could seem like forlorn hopes on the streets Basra or Baghdad. And the semi-aristocrats of places like Pratt House and the Century Association had a way of turning up their noses at the lesser mortals of Trump’s bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Alger Hiss once inflamed a young congressman named Richard Nixon when he turned to Nixon, who was about to ask some probing questions about Hiss’s ties to the Kremlin, and sneered, “My law school was Harvard. Yours, I believe, was Whittier?” (Actually, it was Duke.) No wonder Nixon could sell himself as a man of the people when Hiss turned out to be a communist spy.

Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. (One particularly relevant lesson today: Confronted with a tough case to argue, Cohn would say that he didn’t need to know what the law was-- just who the judge was.)

In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s-- like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run-- the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

I bet you don't have to think about which side of the equation, the wretched and pathetic Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III falls on. Really wretched. You don't have watch them both... but you can. This doozy came first, "Blow Great Job:"





A week later, for whatever reason, Sessions' senate campaign released this cringe-worthy little portrait that illustrates how the Trump Regime is more a product of this America than an actual creator of it:

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Rudy Giuliani: Just the latest in a long, long line of Trump "Coffee Boys." "Neva hoida him!"

Who's going to be the next Traitorous Trump Wise Guy to be dismissed to the media as just a Coffee Boy? Pence? Pompeo? Barr? Jared? Moscow Mitch? Who will be the next goon that Trump claims to not know or have never even met? Trey Gowdy? Devin Nunes?

"I did not have treason with that man, Mr. Giuliani!"

Frank Schaeffer Dissects William Barr-- But Who Will Dissect Giuliani?

Who knew Trump Attorney General William Barr is a religious leader? Was there ever any reason to think so? Actually, there still isn't. The video of his speech above-- intercut with Frank Schaeffer's savage analysis of hat he's saying proves Barr isn't a religious leader, just a hack politician trying to stoke the flames of white evangelical grievence, exploiting their narrowness to help Trump win in 2020. Is this what an Attorney General does? To Barr, like to all the detritus left in the Trump circle, sees religion as nothing more than a tool to achieve his political ends. Listen to Schaeffer explain. And let me give you another example-- regarding another bit of Trumpist detritus, long-time Trump crony and now personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani and his own run-in with religion.

In the Washington Post yesterday, after interviewing him, Ellen Nakashima, reported that Giuliani pressed Trump to eject a Muslim cleric from the U.S., a top priority of Erdogan. "Giuliani," she wrote, "repeatedly argued to Trump that the U.S. government should eject Fethullah Gulen from the country, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition on anonymity to describe private conversations. Turkey has demanded that the United States turn over Gulen, a permanent U.S. resident who lives in Pennsylvania, to stand trial on charges of plotting a 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan. Gulen has denied involvement in the plot." Giuliani saw a quick buck to be made for himself.

Giuliani is now under scrutiny for his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals. His earlier attempts to persuade the president to turn over the Turkish cleric represent another instance in which he appears to have been pushing a shadow foreign policy from his perch outside government.

The former New York mayor brought up Gulen so frequently with Trump during visits to the White House that one former official described the subject as Giuliani’s “hobby horse.” He was so focused on the issue-- “it was all Gulen,” recalled a second former official-- that White House aides worried that Giuliani was making the case on behalf of the Turkish government, former officials said.

“We’re not going to arrest [Gulen] to do a solid for Erdogan,” the second official said, describing the internal thinking.

However, Trump appeared receptive to the idea, pressing his advisers about Gulen’s status, the people said.

One former senior administration official recalled that Trump asked frequently about why Gulen couldn’t be turned over to Turkey, referring to Erdogan as “my friend.”

Administration officials were overwhelmingly opposed to the idea and told the president that the move could violate the legal process and damage him politically.

...Giuliani is not registered as a foreign lobbyist, as he would be required to do if he were being paid to lobby the U.S. government on a policy matter for a foreign interest.

Giuliani told The Post in a phone interview late Monday that he never represented Turkey and so he does not need to register as a foreign lobbyist.

In a text exchange Tuesday afternoon, he declined to discuss whether he advocated for Gulen’s extradition, writing: “can’t comment on it that would be complete attorney client privilege but sounds wacky.”

When told that multiple people described the conversations to The Post, Giuliani responded “Bull,” and then liked the question with a thumbs-up emoji.

...Federal investigators are examining Giuliani’s business dealings with two former associates who were arrested last week on campaign finance charges. A federal grand jury in New York has issued a subpoena to former GOP congressman Pete Sessions of Texas seeking records and other information on his interactions with Giuliani and his two associates. Giuliani has denied any wrongdoing.

In December, Trump told Erdogan his administration would take a look at Turkey’s extradition request, the White House said at the time. In January, a U.S. delegation met with Turkish officials to discuss the request, according to Turkish state media.

Giuliani’s conversations with Trump about Gulen came on the heels of a similar effort by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, and his then-associates to promote negative views of Gulen during the 2016 campaign and the presidential transition. “We should not provide him safe haven,” Flynn wrote in a November 2016 opinion piece.

Flynn admitted in December 2017 to lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and making false statements about work his consulting business did for Turkey. He has since argued in court that he is the victim of a government effort to smear him, although he has not withdrawn his guilty plea.

Reid Weingarten, an attorney for Gulen, said that he would find it disturbing if Giuliani was pressing for the cleric’s return to Turkey on the heels of Flynn’s efforts.

“We have argued aggressively and I thought persuasively to both the Obama and Trump Justice Departments that the allegations against Gulen are false and that any effort to extradite him would fail legally and factually and would be an embarrassment to the United States,” he said in a statement. “After Gen. Flynn’s efforts on behalf of Turkey on this subject were exposed it is hard to believe Giuliani would follow suit.”

Giuliani has had a wide range of foreign clients even as he serves as the president’s personal attorney. In interviews in recent months, Giuliani has acknowledged working with clients in Romania, Brazil, Bahrain, Colombia and Ukraine. He has represented an Iranian dissident group, once so controversial it was placed on the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

Giuliani has said that he does not need to register with the Justice Department for his overseas clients because he does not lobby U.S. officials on their behalf.

“I don’t represent foreign government in front of the U.S. government,” he told The Post earlier this year. “I’ve never registered to lobby.”

However, senior administration officials were so concerned that Giuliani might have been paid to push Turkey’s interests that, at one point in 2017, they confronted him and asked him not to bring up Turkish issues when he met with the president, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

When asked via text if he recalled the conversation, Giuliani responded by liking the question with a thumbs-up emoji.

Lobbying experts said that Giuliani’s private conversations with Trump about policy matters-- including his push for Gulen’s extradition-- could violate lobbying rules if he were pressing the matters on behalf of a foreign client.

In the case of the cleric, “the principal beneficiary of his work would be the Turkish government,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a Washington lawyer who specializes in foreign lobbying rules.

The conversations Giuliani reportedly had with Trump about Gulen in 2017 came the same year he was representing Reza Zarrab, a Turkish Iranian accused of corruption.

The trader held embarrassing and politically damaging information about Erdogan and other top Turkish officials in his government, it was later revealed in federal court when Zarrab pleaded guilty to orchestrating a multibillion-dollar conspiracy to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran.

Erdogan had repeatedly lobbied Trump to release Zarrab, both in personal meetings and calls in the spring and summer of 2017, according to multiple administration officials and Erdogan himself. The Turkish president claimed publicly that Zarrab, charged in a conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran, was a political “hostage” of American law enforcement.

Giuliani joined Zarrab’s legal team in March 2017 and flew to Turkey in late February to meet with Erdogan to discuss a possible “state-to-state resolution in this case,” according to court filings in the Zarrab case.

In affidavits filed in federal court, Giuliani said that “at no time” he had “been involved in the representation of the Republic of Turkey” or acted as the country’s agent.

He acknowledged that his law firm did work for the Turkish government but said he was walled off from such discussions.

“Neither [my associate] nor I represent the interests of Turkey or the United States,” Giuliani said in a May 2017 affidavit.

However, lobbying experts said that his conversations with Trump and Tillerson to change U.S. policy on behalf of Zarrab, a foreign client, raised questions about why he did not register as a foreign lobbyist.

“It seems Giuliani was acting on behalf of a foreign principal and representing those interests before a U.S. government official, which can trigger the registration requirement,” said Matthew Sanderson, a Washington attorney who focuses on foreign lobbying registration.

Giuliani maintained in an interview Monday that such registration was unnecessary.

“I have never lobbied for a foreign government,” Giuliani said. He added that Zarrab was his client, not the Turkish government. “I was working for him,” not Turkey, Giuliani said. (Under foreign lobbying rules, registration is required not only for people representing foreign governments, but those representing other foreign interests on political matters in the United States.)

Complaints about his foreign clients are “diversions by Democrats hoping to shoot the messenger,” Giuliani said earlier this month.

And... Trump has apparently lost his mind. This is an actual letter that he sent Erdogan, not an early April Fools joke. Maybe it's why 129 Republicans joined all 225 Democrats in the House yesterday to go on record opposing Trump's insane actions in Syria and Turkey. (Only 60 die-hard far right Trumpists opposed the motion, which passed 354 to 60, with 4 members-- Justin Amash and 3 right-wing Republicans-- voting "present."