HUGELY INCRIMINATING PHONE RECORDS SUGGEST RUDY GIULIANI IS F---ED

HUGELY INCRIMINATING PHONE RECORDS SUGGEST RUDY GIULIANI IS F---ED

The president’s lawyer should probably get a lawyer.

BY BESS LEVIN at Vanity Fair

DECEMBER 3, 2019

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/rudy-giuliani-ukraine-phone-records

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Much of the damning information comes in the form of phone records. According to logs obtained by the committee from AT&T, Giuliani was in extremely frequent communication with the White House, specifically the Office of Management and Budget, where acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, of Ukraine “drug deal” fame, is still director. For instance, Giuliani spoke with unidentified individuals at OMB and the White House on April 12, 23, and 24. An OMB call on the latter date lasted over 13 minutes and occurred just one day before Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was told to return from Kiev. Following many of these communications, the Week notes, Giuliani placed calls to or received calls from his indicted associate Lev Parnas, whom Giuliani allegedly dispatched to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son. Another call of particular interest was the 13-minute one between Giuliani and OMB on August 8, which occurred just one day after Ambassador Kurt Volker messaged Giuliani about a meeting with Ukrainian presidential aide Andriy Yermakand a “visit” the two had discussed.

Last month the Washington Post reported that a confidential White House review of Trump’s decision to put a hold on aid to Ukraine “has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal,” on which OMB led the charge. In early August, for instance, Mulvaney asked acting OMB director Russell Vought to provide an update on the legal rationale for holding up the aid and how much longer it could be delayed. According to the justification from the OMB lawyers—which the State Department and National Security Council disputed—withholding the aid was legal so long as they referred to it as a “temporary” hold. Was Giuliani strategizing with someone at OMB re: the delayed aid? Who’s to say!

Walter Shaub

✔@waltshaub

There is no good reason for Rudy Giuliani to be talking to OMB and plenty of bad ones.

Link to tweet

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In addition to the frequent calls with OMB, logs show a number of calls with an individual whose number only appears as “-1” in phone records, which at least one former Justice Department official believes is Trump’s cell phone. Obviously, it’s not at all surprising that Giuliani—who is already the subject of numerous investigations—was in close contact with Trump, but it’s yet another data point that blows a hole in the president’s “Giuliani acted alone” defense, which no one believed the first time he trotted it out.


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