Tag: rudy guiliani
Endorse This! Kimmel Lays Into Drunk Giuliani's Election Night Scheme

Endorse This! Kimmel Lays Into Drunk Giuliani's Election Night Scheme

Jimmy Kimmel didn't waste any time laying into the latest revelation about lispy, gassy, leaky, and now tipsy Rudy Giuliani and the revelation that he was drunk on election night. Kimmel devoted his entire monologue to “Episode 2 of CSI: I Can’t Believe Donald Trump’s Not in Jail Yet”—otherwise known as the January 6 congressional hearings.

Trump’s absolutely insane and authoritarian decision to “reject the advice” of members of his team and declare victory on Election Night when even Fox News said he’d lost came from “an apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani.

“Apparently inebriated—which, by the way, is the title of Rudy Giuliani’s biography,” joked Kimmel. “Rudy Giuliani told him to go out and say he won. The way that you can tell Rudy is drunk is his breath smells more like booze than cigars and cat turds for a change.”

The claim that Rudy was as lit as the Capitol on January 6 was backed up by former Trump aide Jason Miller who, when asked whether there was anyone that night who “in your observation had had too much to drink,” replied, “Um… Mayor Giuliani.”

As Kimmel said, but then what was Trump's excuse?

Watch the entire segment below:

Capitol Riot Indictments Closing In On Trump Inner Circle

Capitol Riot Indictments Closing In On Trump Inner Circle

Last week's indictment of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes for seditionist conspiracy revealed more than simply the mountain of evidence that the Justice Department has acquired in the prosecutions of key players in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It also made clear the DOJ’s larger strategy of moving up the food chain of players in the historic attack—with Donald Trump and his inner circle now only steps away.

Much of the attention has focused on former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose connections to the “Patriot” movement—and particularly to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who spearheaded the siege of the Capitol—are well established; indeed, earlier on Jan. 6, two Oath Keepers now charged alongside Rhodes with sedition in the conspiracy were part of Stone’s personal security detail. But as Marcy Wheeler incisively reports, more recent court documents also make clear that the investigation into militia groups’ activities that day now encompasses Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Stone’s connections to the Oath Keepers and Rhodes, as Jennifer Cohn recently laid out, date back to at least 2014, when he was part of the scene at the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada, where the Oath Keepers formed a significant presence. After Trump was elected, Stone became an ardent proponent of issuing a pardon for the Bundys in both the Nevada standoff and 2016 Malheur standoff prosecutions, appearing onstage with them in Las Vegas.

Those prosecutions ended up failing, so Trump instead pardoned the two Oregon ranchers whose imprisonment had fueled the Malheur standoff. Stone nonetheless remained a public ally of the Bundys; when Ammon Bundy announced his campaign for the Idaho governorship in 2021, Stone proudly endorsed him.

Stone also had a long relationship with another group that played a key role in the conspiracies to besiege the Capitol—the Proud Boys. In 2018, he was photographed flashing a white-nationalist “OK” sign with a group of Oregon Proud Boys in a tavern. He also was investigated by the FBI in 2019 for posting a message on Instagram that appeared to threaten a federal judge, which he blamed on Proud Boys, including national chairman Enrique Tarrio, who had been “helping” him with his social-media account.

Both Stone and Tarrio live in Florida and appear to have had multiple associations, including a meeting on December 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C., during the “Stop the Steal” rally that served as a warmup for January 6. Stone was seen in the video conferring both with Tarrio—who was arrested by D.C. police two days before the insurrection—and with Ethan Nordean, one of the key leaders of the group of Proud Boys who attacked the Capitol.

As Wheeler reported earlier, Stone also met with Kelly Meggs—leader of the Florida Oath Keepers and one of the key figures in the seditionist conspiracy case—two days before telling his cohorts that he was working out a cooperative agreement with Proud Boys leading up to what Meggs himself described as an “insurrection.”

However, most of the evidence introduced in the Oath Keepers conspiracy case so far offers little information about that connection on January 6, and there’s little in the evidence to suggest that Stone was directing or assisting them while they were providing security for him at the Ellipse, where Trump was speaking that morning. The most tantalizing clues involve the period when Stone was embedded in the Trump “War Room” at the Willard Hotel earlier that day.

Key figures in Trump’s circle—including Giuliani, as well as Steve Bannon, John Eastman, and other hardcore defenders of Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election—were circulating around the “command center” they had set up at the Willard. As it happens, so were members of a militia group called the 1st Amendment Patriots, who also had members stationed around the Capitol.

Oath Keepers, as Wheeler has reported, were providing security for the operations at the Willard. And after Stone departed for the Ellipse, according to text messages from indictee Joshua James—the Oath Keeper overseeing the detail—he complained bitterly that the detail at the Ellipse had failed to provide him with “VIP treatment.”

The Willard Hotel “War Room” happens to be the same nexus that has drawn Giuliani into the investigation, as Wheeler observed this week. While a Washington Post story last weekend concluded that the FBI doesn’t appear to be investigating the activities at the Willard, it also contained information indicating that FBI investigators have been pressing several defendants—all Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—about key figures at the morning rally and later at the Willard, including both Stone and Giuliani.

Rob Jenkins, a defense attorney representing multiple people linked to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, another far-right group, said prosecutors have been “pretty aggressive” in “seeking out information … that points to others’ involvement and culpability.”
They are interested, he said, in “preplanning, and participation in those preplanning on the part of the individuals who may not have come to D.C. on January 6 but were certainly part of the planned effort.” That includes both leaders in the groups and people who spoke at the rally on January 6, including close Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone, he said.

The DOJ, of course, already possesses most of Giuliani’s communications from that period as part their investigation into his business dealings, and maybe hunting for further corroboration of evidence already in hand or perhaps suggested in his texts. And if Trump’s personal lawyer is in their sights, the former president himself may well be next. Giuliani also has been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, but it is not known how he will respond.

What’s become abundantly clear, however, is that DOJ is moving through these indictments strategically—only including evidence that builds their case publicly as well as internally, with the intent of inducing other defendants to turn state’s evidence as cooperating witnesses. It’s being extraordinarily careful about tipping its hand regarding its targets or its long-range strategy. It may be wisest to allow them to keep gathering and sifting, because that approach has proven the likeliest way to win in court and bring the insurrectionists—hopefully, all of them, all the way up the ladder—to accountability.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos

Giuliani Hit With Subpoenas Over Capitol Attack

Giuliani Hit With Subpoenas Over Capitol Attack

By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The congressional committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas on Tuesday to three lawyers who joined former President Donald Trump's unsuccessful attempt to overturn his election defeat: Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis.

The House of Representatives committee demanded the pro-Trump lawyers hand over documents and sit for depositions on February 8.

Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee's chairman, said in a statement that the panel expects the lawyers to join the nearly 400 witnesses who have spoken with the Select Committee as part of its investigation into the causes of the deadly attack by Trump supporters.

The committee also subpoenaed Boris Epshteyn, a Trump political adviser.

Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, said in an interview that the subpoena was "political theater" and that his client was constrained by the legal doctrines of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.

"I don't think there's anything here he can testify about," Costello said.

Powell, Epshteyn, and Ellis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"The four individuals we've subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes," Thompson said in the statement.

Powell, Giuliani, and Ellis jointly spoke at a Trump campaign news conference on November 19, 2020, where they vowed to overturn President Joe Biden's election victory. Powell promised to "release the Kraken," likening their effort to a mythological sea monster.

The Trump campaign distanced itself from Powell after she claimed without evidence at the news conference that electronic voting systems had switched millions of ballots from Trump to Biden.

Giuliani's New York law license was suspended in June, after a state appeals court found he made "demonstrably false and misleading" statements that widespread voter fraud undermined the election, won by Democrat Joe Biden.

The committee is aiming to release an interim report in the summer and a final report in the fall, a source familiar with the investigation said last month.

CNN reported on Tuesday that the committee has subpoenaed and obtained records of phone numbers associated with one of Trump's children, Eric Trump, as well as Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to Donald Trump Jr.

The Select Committee's members have said they will consider passing along evidence of criminal conduct by Trump to the U.S. Justice Department. Such a move, known as a criminal referral, would be largely symbolic but would increase the political pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland to charge the former president.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Scott Malone, Bill Berkrot and Bernard Orr)

Giuliani Says State Department Helped Him Dig Dirt On Biden

Giuliani Says State Department Helped Him Dig Dirt On Biden

If Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is to be believed, the U.S. State Department aided his efforts to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on Trump’s political enemies, according to a report from ABC News on Thursday.

Giuliani claimed the State Department put Ukrainian official Andriy Yermak “in contact with me.” Giuliani insisted it was the State Department that helped him reach out to Yermak, “Not the other way around.”

Giuliani alleges that he told Yermak, a close ally of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Ukrainian government “should not be cowered [out of] fully investigating serious possible crimes like bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and illegal interference in 2016 election.”

If Giuliani’s claim is true, it amounts to him receiving aid from taxpayer-funded Trump officials to collude with a foreign government.

Giuliani was trying to persuade Ukrainian prosecutors to dig up dirt to use against both the Democratic National Committee and former Vice President Joe Biden. The entire effort was intended to help Trump’s 2020 election effort, according to a May report from the New York Times.

Later that month, Giuliani was forced to cancel a planned trip to the Ukraine where he had planned on more collusion.

“This is the first instance of which I am aware in which a private lawyer for the president of the United States has, in his own words, ‘meddled’ in a foreign criminal investigation of a third party in order to politically benefit the president,” Tim Meyer, an international law expert at Vanderbilt University, told the Washington Post in May. “Mr. Giuliani’s actions undermine the long-standing U.S. foreign policy of promoting the rule of law in Ukraine generally and in the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office specifically.”

The State Department has not commented on Giuliani’s recent statements, thus far refusing to confirm his account.

Giuliani has a long history of questionable claims since he started working for Trump.

In August 2018, Giuliani asserted that “truth isn’t truth” after being asked if Trump refused to testify before Robert Mueller because Trump is a habitual liar.

That same month, Giuliani denied reports that Trump had conversations with then-FBI Director James Comey about dropping an investigation into Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser. In fact, Trump pleaded with Comey to stop investigating Flynn, one of several instances where Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

Giuliani made so many unhinged statements on television that at one point he insisted he was not drunk when speaking to reporters.

In the 2016 election, the Trump campaign welcomed the help of Russian criminals. In 2020, Trump’s personal lawyer, allegedly aided by Trump’s State Department, is seeking out foreign agents to interfere with the election.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

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