Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

It would seem Donald "Impeachable Me" Trump's loose lipped consigliere Rudy "Ghouliani" Giuliani is getting the attention he craves so much, though not the kind he would prefer.  He's already reportedly under criminal investigation, but he keeps digging that hole deeper and deeper.

Trump's staff wants Ghouliani to shut up:

The constant sniping from staff could ultimately force Trump to dump his long-valued fixer, as he has done with former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and countless other ousted officials, like ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“Rudy Giuliani needs to stop talking,” said a former campaign official who remains close to Trump’s team.

Ghouliani, something of a narcissist himself, hasn't been able to stay away from a tv camera or microphone for more than a few days at a time.  He won't self- gag.  Thankfully.

Former U.S. Attorney Elie Honig sees Ghouliani boxed in:

“First, Rudy Giuliani working in the United States to further the interests of Ukraine, requirements are that he be registered as a foreign lobbyist — he is not,” Honig explained. “If he’s working for President Trump, he’s got problems too because we know the charges of the two other [Ukrainian] individuals, money was pouring in.”

“Either way, Rudy Giuliani’s got a legal problem,” he continued.

This leads to a question to be resolved as this unravels: who's throwing who under the bus first? 

“One really interesting thing is there have been people talking about President Trump throwing Rudy Giuliani under the bus. We could see at some point Rudy Giuliani throwing President Trump under the bus,” former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said.

“He said today he was acting with authority of the president of the United States. He is going to have an opportunity if he is charged to flip and tell what he knows. If it’s the president of the United States putting him up to these things, that could be a serious matter,” she explained.

Former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi said Giuliani had already thrown Trump under the bus in an attempt to defend himself against violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

“And as is usually the case when Rudy opens his mouth, he may have defended himself on a FARA charge but certainly threw Trump under the bus saying, ‘I was working at the direction of the president of the United States.’ That’s a problem,” Figliuzzi explained.

 Meanwhile, Trump and Ghouliani are circling each other warily:

Earlier on Friday, Trump wouldn't say whether Giuliani was still his personal attorney.

"Well, I don't know. I haven't spoken to Rudy. I spoke to him yesterday briefly. He's a very good attorney and he has been my attorney, yeah, sure," he said.

When asked later by CNN if he was still Trump's attorney, Giuliani responded, "Yes."

He added, "There are no Ukraine issues. I finished that in March. I'm still representing him."

Can you represent him from under a bus?  From jail?

This could get as messy for Trump as the Michael Cohen debacle, but with immediate consequences.  We hope.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Here's some Ukrainian corruption that Rudy "Ghouliani" Giuliani, consigliere for narcissistic numbnut Donald "Rump" Trump, can investigate:

 As Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials last spring to investigate one of Donald Trump’s main political rivals, a group of individuals with ties to the president and his personal lawyer were also active in the former Soviet republic.

Their aims were profit, not politics. This circle of businessmen and Republican donors touted connections to Giuliani and Trump while trying to install new management at the top of Ukraine’s massive state gas company. Their plan was to then steer lucrative contracts to companies controlled by Trump allies, according to two people with knowledge of their plans.

Their plan hit a snag after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko lost his reelection bid to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose conversation with Trump about former Vice President Joe Biden is now at the center of the House impeachment inquiry of Trump.

But the effort to install a friendlier management team at the helm of the gas company, Naftogaz, would soon be taken up with Ukraine’s new president by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, whose slate of candidates included a fellow Texan who is one of Perry’s past political donors.  (our emphasis)

So it wasn't the Bidens in the kitchen with a lead pipe!  It was Ghouliani in the Ukraine with a monkey wrench!  Ghouliani has lawyered up;  maybe Rick "Oops" Perry should do the same (hey, maybe he could retain Ghouliani and keep it in the crime family!).

A former White House National Security Council staff member highlights the significance of the White (Supremacist) House ordering transcripts of Trump's shakedown calls with foreign leaders to be placed in a code word server:

I served under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and worked for four advisers on the National Security Council’s staff. I have staffed presidential meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders and spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in the White House Situation Room. It is difficult to overstate just how abnormal and suspicious treating the call in that manner would be. It strongly suggests White House staff knew of serious wrongdoing by the president and attempted to bury it — a profound abuse of classified systems for political, and possibly criminal, purposes. (our emphasis)

Conversations with the Ukrainian president as well as with Russian thug and Trump handler Vladimir Putin and Trump crime family cash cow Crown Prince Mohammed Bin "Bone Saw" Salman.  Nothing to see here, move along, move along.  (But read the article;  it makes what these jamokes are doing even more putrid.)

In related news, at least one court isn't giving the White (Supremacist) House the benefit of the doubt when it comes to destroying evidence:

A federal judge has ordered the White House not to destroy records relating to President Donald Trump’s interactions with foreign heads of state, some of which have now become the focus of a formal impeachment inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued the order Thursday to safeguard records of Trump’s “meetings, phone calls, and other communications with foreign leaders” — as well as “records reflecting policies and practices” regarding such record-keeping.

Keep in mind this is a lawless crime family that, to protect itself, would stoop to any means necessary.

Virginia has been trending blue for several election cycles, especially on the presidential level, but it's House of Delegates and Senate are held by Republicans by the slimmest majorities. The upcoming off- year legislative election will be a test of the public mood and an early referendum on Trump and Republican obstruction at the state level:

By a hefty margin, Virginia voters favor having Democrats take control of the General Assembly in November elections over leaving it in GOP hands, according to a poll released Monday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University.

Fifty-three percent of likely voters say they want the Democrats to lead the legislature, the poll found, compared to 37 percent who’d like to keep Republicans in power.

The GOP is defending slim majorities in the state Senate (20-19) and House of Delegates (51-48), with one vacancy in each chamber. All 140 seats are on the Nov. 5 ballot.

We could still expect to see, as a result of Republican gerrymandering, less of a blowout than the polls would indicate.  But our uneducated guess is that there's another blue wave coming that's going to hit on November 5 all across the Old Dominion.

As always, we recommend you check out Infidel 753's link round- up -- a thinking person's buffet of links to all manner of interesting, amusing, horrifying, edifying "stuff" that Infidel has curated over the past week.