Refresher Course

So Rudolph Giuliani's Upper East Side office and apartment have been raided, and cellphones and computers seized, and a grand jury subpoena served on Giuliani's executive assistant, in an FBI investigation of whether he may have violated laws against trying to influence or lobby the US government on behalf of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department. Among other things, I trust. Also a phone taken from lawyer Victoria Toensing, who has been variously involved with Giuliani's Ukraine contacts Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmytro Firtash and has employed Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman as "translators", I believe, and is the attorney of writer John Solomon, who is in turn one of the correspondents in the communications the feds are searching for on the devices they seized.

I'm re-upping the following, from January 2020, the day after Trump's impeachment lawyers presented his "case",  as a helpful guide to who all these people were and what they were likely to have been doing, and who they were doing it for (one Donald J. Trump, in his aspiration for a second presidential term)

By Jen Sorensen.

Rudy Rude: The Best Defense Is Pretty Offensive

By Jen Sorensen.

So the Republicans finally did get around to mentioning Rudolph Giuliani's name after all, yesterday, for 15 minutes of their 24 hours (which seem to have reduced themselves by about half, no surprise there), in the person of counselor Jane Raskin, who explained that Rudy was simply a "colorful distraction" introduced into the story by Democrats:

“The House managers would have you believe that Mr. Giuliani is at the center of this controversy,” Raskin said. “They’ve anointed him the proxy villain of the tale, the leader of a rogue operation. Their presentations were filled with ad hominem attacks and name-calling … but I suggest to you he’s front an center in their narrative for one reason alone: to distract from the fact that the evidence does not support their claims.”

Because it wasn't the way the Democrats saw it when he and Lev and Ihor, and the hack journalist John Solomon, and the hack Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn Kulyk and Yuriy Lutsenko, and the very rich Ukrainian crook Dmytro Firtash, worked to concoct their stories of how the real thieves of the Democratic National Committee emails were an imaginary Ukrainian firm called CrowdStrike (overlapping in their alternative universe with the American company of that name in ours); and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was a secret member of the anti-Trump resistance; and Joe Biden's son Hunter had done something unspeakable and indeed undefinable, but very bad.

Raskin asserted that Giuliani’s pursuits were not about the 2020 presidential election, citing the fact that he undertook the effort before Mueller’s report on Russian interference was released and before Biden announced his presidential bid. She said he was driven by a motivation to defend his client against the Mueller probe. 

“He was not on a political errand,” Raskin argued. “He was doing what good defense attorneys do. … He was gathering evidence about Ukrainian election interference to defend his client against the false allegations being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.” 

Let's just take a look at that, focusing on the timing:

Racket

Drawing by Alfredo Martirena.

At the risk of being boring, because I spent a bunch of time on it, I'd like to work back through the timeline of Ukraine Quid Pro Quo no. 1, about which I think we know quite a bit more than we did a few weeks ago. In fact the story as we first imagined it, as a kind of prequel to Quid Pro Quo no. 2, in which Trump gives Ukraine the missiles in return for Ukraine dropping their cooperation with the Mueller investigation, falls apart entirely, but there are some jewels we can pick out of the rubble.

This comes in the first place from the testimony of Catherine Croft, the NSC veteran who served as Kurt Volker's deputy in the special envoy to Ukraine department, to the House Intelligence Committee. Her main function was to talk about the crazy vendetta against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (led by lobbyist Bob "I'm Not a Lobbyist" Livingston, formerly the seniormost congressman who was an implacable supporter of the Clinton impeachment and almost became Speaker before his own fervent adulterousness was revealed by Larry Flynt, ha ha ha, and who now may be facing criminal charges for his pains), but Democratic counsel Dan Goldman asked her about the military aid, with particular attention to the long months in 2017 when Trump was unwilling to yield to the pressure from McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson to let Ukraine have the $47 million worth of military aid, including 210 Javelin antitank missiles and 37 launchers as well as nonlethal communications equipment, armored vehicles, and radar that are actually much more important than the missiles to the Ukrainian soldiers in their day-to-day tasks.

Not for the boring reasons the Obama administration had chosen—that giving them the weapons might lead Russia to escalate the conflict in Russia—but at least officially because he just doesn't like foreign aid: