The Daily 202: Five reasons Trump cannot easily scapegoat Rudy Giuliani for the Ukraine ‘drug deal’ gone bad

By James Hohmann
November 27 at 11:25 AM

With Mariana Alfaro

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump signaled Tuesday that he may try to throw his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani under the bus as part of an impeachment defense strategy. During an interview with Bill O’Reilly, the president suggested that Giuliani wasn’t working at his behest. “No, I didn’t direct him,” Trump said. “Rudy has other clients, other than me. He’s done a lot of work in Ukraine over the years.” Asked what Giuliani was up to, Trump replied: “You have to ask that to Rudy.”

We’ve seen this movie before. Trump’s M.O. is to cut people loose when he concludes that they’ve outlived their usefulness to him, whether they’re fixers or former national security advisers. He has a well-documented pattern of saying he “hardly knows” former confidants once they become liabilities, so much so that it has become a punchline. Trump downplayed his ties to Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos after each of these former advisers became embroiled in serious legal troubles.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are now scrutinizing Giuliani, the former mayor and onetime U.S. attorney who oversaw that office. Two of Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are contesting campaign finance charges. Investigators are reportedly examining Giuliani’s consulting business as part of a broad probe of possible crimes, including wire fraud and foreign lobbying violations. He categorically denies any wrongdoing.

Trump hasn’t cut off Giuliani, whom he twice described as a “warrior” in last night’s interview, but several of the president’s allies think it’s only a matter of time. Many who are closely following this saga suspect that Trump will seek to make his lawyer the fall guy for what former national security adviser John Bolton notoriously likened to a “drug deal.”

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Here are five other reasons why it would be untenable for Trump to pin the blame on Giuliani:

1) Trump told several U.S. government officials they needed to “talk with Rudy” about Ukraine, according to sworn testimony.

Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, then-special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) went to the Oval Office on May 23 to brief Trump about a meeting they had just returned from in Ukraine with Volodymyr Zelensky. They wanted to assure Trump that the new guy in Kyiv was a reformer whom the United States could work with. But Trump wasn’t interested and told the men they should “go talk to Rudy” about Ukraine as he cut the meeting short, Sondland testified last week during a public hearing in the House impeachment inquiry.

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