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Rudy Giuliani

'What About Bill Clinton?': Giuliani Erupts Over PossibleTrump Indictment

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and erstwhile defense counsel for ex-President Donald Trump, pulled the whataboutism card in an appearance on Newsmax's Saturday Report.

Giuliani was incensed over reports that Trump is likely to be arrested and indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) next week for allegedly paying $130,000 in so-called hush money to adult film entrepreneur Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election in order to keep her from talking about their purported personal relationship.

Trump's long-time attorney-turned-state's witness Michael Cohen went to prison for facilitating the illicit transaction (along with other crimes) which experts believe violated campaign finance laws. Since his release in 2021, Cohen has vociferously demanded that Trump be held accountable for commanding the illegal payoff.

There is also burbling speculation that if Trump is indeed prosecuted in New York, a cascade of additional charges may be close behind. These include Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis' (D) investigation into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election in her state as well as the United States Department of Justice's ongoing probes into the hoard of classified documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago from the White House toward the end of his term and Trump's ringleading of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

But Giuliani, whom Trump "ordered" to represent him for free, is insisting that Trump is an innocent victim of political persecution at the hands of Bragg and Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros, one of the right-wing's favorite boogeymen.

"Bragg in his office must have a, a thousand non-disclosure agreements, and plus this is a personal sexual situation. What about Bill Clinton? That wasn't worse? This guy allegedly, and I'm telling you, it's untrue as his personal friend. I'm gonna tell you categorically, she's lying, categorically, and I don't know why I'd say that all the time," Giuliani sniped. "I can tell you, and I can tell you personally why I know that she's a damn liar."

Trump "also recovered money from her. This is ridiculous. It's completely ridiculous," Giuliani continued. "It's a complete indication that Bragg – when he, uh, declared he wasn't gonna enforce the law – about half of them should have been dismissed. And meanwhile, let's not forget the fact that Manhattan has suffered under unbelievable levels of crime under this incompetent and communist."

Giuliani then referred to Bragg as a "Soros-paid-for piece of, I don't know what. This is the – this has gotta be the nail in the coffin of this DA."

Watch below or at this link.



Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Biden -- And Every Democrat -- Must Stand Strong Against Debt Blackmail

Biden -- And Every Democrat -- Must Stand Strong Against Debt Blackmail

While Speaker Kevin McCarthy demands transparency from the Biden White House, he has concealed crucial facts from the American public ever since he forged the "corrupt bargain" that greased his ascension to the constitutional post he now holds. The details of the agreement that allowed McCarthy to scrape together the barest majority are said to be set down in a three-page memorandum, which remains hidden.

What we already know, however, is that McCarthy arranged for ordinary Americans to subsidize his sleazy deal with the far Right when he promised to withhold approval of a higher debt ceiling until Democrats agree to enormous budget reductions — including harsh cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Unless Senate Democrats and the White House surrender to those absurd demands, and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, too, House Republicans insist they will force the United States to repudiate its debts and wreck its credit.

Debt repudiation would have devastating consequences for the national economy, the global economy, and America's position in the world. The only beneficiaries would be the adversaries of the United States. That much is obvious. And if it is, then aren't those politicians who constantly proclaim their own patriotism but seek to drive the country into ruin shouldn't even contemplate such acts — unless they're not so patriotic after all?

The Republican crazies say these extreme measures reflect their deep concern about budget deficits and the national debt. Their worrying would be more plausible if they had bothered to speak up on any of several occasions during Donald Trump's presidency when Congress had to raise the debt ceiling as a matter of course. Not once did Democrats even whisper about blackmailing Trump over the debt increase. And not once did Republicans protest the Trump spending and tax policies that ballooned the debt by trillions.

Now, of course, Donald Trump is for welshing on the debt ceiling. This would not be the first time he has encouraged financial chicanery. Ask the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to felonious fraud in Trump's service and is now taking up residence on Riker's Island.

It is especially obnoxious for Trump to encourage a debt ceiling default when so much of the debt was incurred during his presidency. A higher debt ceiling isn't needed to enable future spending, but to cover spending that already occurred. Legal scholars would add that repudiating the debt would violate the Constitution, which protects "the full faith and credit of the United States," and the 14th Amendment, which stipulates that "the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law... shall not be questioned."

Trump may believe a default wouldn't matter. After all, his deadbeat approach to business always involved shafting his creditors, walking away from his debts and escaping accountability through bankruptcy. That may be how life works for a small-time swindler, but it isn't what great nations do — and the price would be unacceptably high.

The Republicans always say they want to operate government more like business — but they didn't say they want to run it like Trump's crooked company.

For now, the Treasury can manage the debt ceiling by shuffling various accounts and delaying certain payments, even though the nation officially passed "Debt Ceiling Day" on January 19. Sometime in the next several months a reckoning will loom.

Appropriately enough, the renewal of the debt ceiling debate is coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of Bill Clinton, the only president in living memory who actually reduced deficits and debt. He did the opposite of Trump, raising taxes on the rich and setting the country on a path toward budget surplus (until the Republicans returned to power and blew it all).

The last time congressional Republicans (including McCarthy) made menacing noises about the debt ceiling was in 2011. Clinton wisely urged President Barack Obama to stand firm — just as he did when congressional Republicans led by Speaker Newt Gingrich tried to kill Medicare and shut down the government. Ultimately even the impetuous Gingrich refrained from threatening a debt default, although Clinton knew that his nemesis had considered deploying that terror tactic.

"I think (the Gingrich Republicans) figured I'd be smart enough to explain to the American people that they were refusing to pay for the expenses they had voted for when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were president," Clinton recalled in 2011. "And that would make them look bad."

"The Constitution is clear and this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy," he added. "You can't say, 'Well, we won the last election, and we didn't vote for some of that stuff, so we're going to throw the whole country's credit into arrears."

Clinton took the measure of the extremists on Capitol Hill during his second term, facing them down during two government shutdowns. He wasn't impressed by their sudden enthusiasm for balanced budgets, and he knew that standing up to their bullying and lying was the only way forward. Biden should study and heed the example.

The urgency now may be even greater, with the current gang of Republican extremists even more reckless than their irresponsible predecessors.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

What We Can Still Learn From Kenneth Starr

What We Can Still Learn From Kenneth Starr

For anyone who criticized the late Kenneth W. Starr in life, it might be prudent to observe the ancient Latin injunction: Say nothing but good of the dead. Or to step by in silence.

Yet the career of the former federal appellate jurist who served as Whitewater independent counsel and instigated the impeachment of President Bill Clinton merits rigorous attention, if only because his story illuminates so starkly the hostility of the religious right and the Republican Party toward American women.

No doubt Starr would protest that assessment and instead call attention, as he so often did, to his pietistic moralism. He always peppered his speech with phrases like “as we say in the New Testament,” and once sent forth a flack to inform Washington reporters that as he jogged along the Potomac River every morning, he sang Christian hymns.

That posturing went on full display during the Whitewater probe that he steered into a sex hunt. He was appointed by a panel of right-wing Republican judges after they forced out the moderate Republican Robert Fiske, who was about to end the fruitless investigation. From the beginning, Starr was tainted.

Whitewater was in fact a dry hole, because the Clintons had lost money on the ill-fated land deal and done nothing wrong. Having promised and failed to bring down both Bill and Hillary, he tried to resign– and then was forced by outraged conservatives to resume the hunt with his tail between his legs. It was not long before he started searching for a way to shape the prurient gossip about Bill Clinton into a criminal prosecution.

At that point, Monica Lewinsky fell into his clutches, thanks to Linda Tripp, a vindictive “friend” who also happened to be a conservative zealot, and Lucianne Goldberg, a scheming literary agent who had once spied on reporters for Nixon. Starr mercilessly exploited the young woman who had entered into an affair with the feckless president. Rather than accept a proffer that had been given to his own prosecutors, Starr tormented Monica (and her mother!) for months with threats of prison, unless she told the untrue story he wanted to hear, and wore a wire into Oval Office.

He concluded the investigation by humiliating both her and the president with the publication of The Starr Report, described aptly by critic Renata Adler as “a voluminous work of demented pornography.” By then Starr’s manic invasion of what many Americans regarded as private behavior had turned the public decisively against him. His inquisition crashed, along with his lifelong yearning for a seat on the Supreme Court.

In the ensuing episodes of his life, Starr confirmed all the suspicions about him aroused by the Lewinsky debacle. His professed concerns with morality and the protection of womanhood proved time and again to be a scrim for his worldly priorities of profit and power.

In 2007, Starr joined the defense team of Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy pedophile who had raped many underage girls and ultimately committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. He arranged for Epstein to obtain a sweetheart plea deal from US Attorney Alex Acosta, who had worked under him at Kirkland & Ellis, Starr’s longtime law firm. When exposed a decade later, this revolting scheme forced Acosta’s resignation from his Trump administration post as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Yet Starr’s “morality” easily accommodated this lucrative and depraved bit of lawyering.

Even so, a few years later Baylor University, a Baptist religious institution, named Starr as its president and chancellor. The university had reason to regret that choice soon enough, when Starr was revealed to have repeatedly concealed an epidemic of rapes at the school between 2012 and 2016. The Baylor regents bounced him from the presidency after an independent investigation of his conduct, and he subsequently quit his posts as chancellor and law professor in disgrace.

When Starr returned to the public stage as a lawyer for Donald Trump during his first impeachment, nobody could still pretend to be surprised by his hypocrisy. Untroubled by Trump’s history of boastful adulteries and serial abuse of women --including his first wife, who had accused him of marital rape -- or his hush payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Starr liked to talk about how proudly he had voted in 2016 to prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency. Naturally, Trump eulogized him as “a great American patriot.”

How did Starr’s perverse style of conservatism, supposedly motivated by Biblical rectitude, inform his abuse of the heroic Lewinsky and his subsequent excusal of rapes and rapists? Apparently, he justified it all in the name of his godly mission. But now we have the whole sordid record of how he used virtue as a cover for vice. It is impossible to find in this reactionary figure even a trace of respect for female dignity and equality.

And now we know just how deeply embedded his pious misogyny is in the modern Republican Party that still admires Ken Starr.

If There's A Crime Wave, That May Well Be Trump's Fault Too

If There's A Crime Wave, That May Well Be Trump's Fault Too

On June 8, San Francisco voters recalled the city’s most recently elected district attorney, Chesa Boudin, because of perceptions of rising crime in the city. Two days later, the public hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol began.

Associating increasing crime and evidence of wrongdoing by former President Trump is not a coincidence.

There’s some debate whether crime rates have, in fact, increased. In San Francisco, for instance, the number of rapes and assaults fell below pre-pandemic levels while Boudin oversaw prosecution of crime in that city. Across the country, crime rates hardly crested in ways that suggest a wave; datapoints for all sorts of crimes, from the severe to the silly, are scattershot.

But the murder rate is the bellweather of crime data — homicides can’t easily be reclassiffied as other crimes that don’t end in death — and murder is up in San Francisco and elsewhere, rising from 5.1 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 6.5 per 100,000 people the next year, so something is happening although clear explanations elude us.

Until 2020, most blame for rises in crime landed on the so-called Ferguson Effect: the theory that public disapproval of law enforcement, as evidenced by mass protests, causes police officers to either fear enforcing the law because of criticism or legal liability, or to refuse to do their jobs without broad public support. Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, championed this explanation of crime. Former Director of the FBI, James Comey, reinforced the same idea in 2016; instead of calling it the Ferguson Effect, he called it the “viral video effect.”

“There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” he told reporters.

But right now, criminologists don’t know why violent crime is up in certain places. Inflation explains the increase in property crimes, but the increase in violent crimes is somewhat of a mystery, one that finds convenient explanation for the unprecedented chaos of 2020-21: The pandemic, stupid.

“A change in routine activities is related to a change in crime,” says Richard Rosenfeld, Curator’s distinguished professor emeritus of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

“One criminologist has referred to the pandemic as the greatest criminological experiment in history,” Rosenfeld continued. “I don't know if that's the case, but it certainly did fall in line with, in my business, what we refer to as the routine activity theory of crime. That is how crime patterns are tied to the day to day activities of the population.”

It makes sense to invoke COVID commotion to explain the unexplainable. But other historical events occurred simultaneously with the pandemic: namely, impeachments of the president.

The House of Representatives voted to impeach then-President Donald J. Trump on December 18, 2019 and the Senate acquitted him on February 5, 2020, two days after the Trump administration declared COVID-19 a public health emergency and twenty days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of a pandemic.

That was just the first impeachment. The second iteration of impeachment — when the House voted to impeach Trump again on January 13, 2021 and the Senate acquittal happened exactly a month later — coincided with the pandemic's second wave of infections.

The causation that some criminologists are attributing to the pandemic might well belong to the formal accusations against the leader of the free world.

Understanding why the crimes of a president could inspire or unleash crime amongst the electorate is where political sociology and the study of deviant behavior collide. Researchers from Washington State University went directly to that intersection, hypothesizing that, after the Watergate scandal, government institutions’ perceived loss of legitimacy would cause an “increased risk of revolution, rebellion, and/or wholesale violations of the laws.”

While the attitudes of people surveyed didn’t adhere to the hypotheses exactly, crime did increase after Watergate; the researchers weren’t wrong. After the crimes and cover ups committed by the various personalities connected with the scandal revealed themselves starting in 1972, rates of lawbreaking — outside the White House — rose, and significantly. Between 1973 and 1974, the number of overall crimes committed increased by 1,535,000, one of the largest jumps in the country’s history. Between 1974 and 1975, that same count went up by over one million again: 1,039,000 more crimes overall.

To be clear, the idea that a public exposure of wrongdoing at the highest levels of government and society delimits deviance doesn’t track entirely. In 1998, President Bill Clinton underwent the same House indictment-Senate acquittal two-step Trump did, but crime decreased in 1999 and thereafter.

But Clinton’s impeachment was different; institutions didn’t lose their legitimacy during that process— despite unethical and unorthodox behavior by special counsel Kenneth W. Starr and the three judge panel in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that appointed him.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was about what a man did in the Oval Office, not the office itself. A president can ethically get his joint copped while occupying the position. Clinton was a classic case of sexual indiscretion, perhaps even harassment. His behavior was inexcusable, for sure, but nothing that the average cad hadn’t already done or couldn’t do in his own workplace.

Orchestrating break-ins on political opponents – whether in some swank Northwest Washington apartment complex or the House of Representatives — is never legal or ethical. These indiscretions are rarefied, almost impossible for the average American to conceive, much less pull off. It would make sense that exposing them could unleash mass repudiation of the criminal code.

This explanation of crime spikes doesn’t debunk the Ferguson Effect, which posits that police recede in the face of criticism of their treatment of the public. Rather, it’s the flip side of Ferguson; that criticism of police is just a symptom of law enforcement’s loss of institutional legitimacy. Crime follows the fall, like it did after Watergate, and as it’s likely doing now.

There’s not quite enough evidence — mercifully, the United States Congress hasn’t completed enough impeachments for a robust study sample — to conclude that indicting and tossing a president of office can set off a crime spree. It’s still just a theory. But it’s not an outlandish one.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.