(Bloomberg) -- A top Defense Department official who advised against cutting off U.S. military aid to Ukraine has resigned after President Donald Trump asked for his departure.John Rood, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in a letter to the president dated Wednesday that he’ll step down Feb. 28 “as you requested.” Rood, who had been in his post since January 2018, didn’t say why the president sought his ouster.“It’s my understanding from Secretary Esper that you requested my resignation from serving as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy,” Rood said in his letter, which was confirmed by Pentagon officials. “I leave with the utmost admiration for the outstanding team with which I worked at the Defense Department.”Some senior national security officials had lost confidence in Rood’s ability to carry out Trump’s agenda, according to multiple officials who asked not to be identified discussing a personnel matter.Rood drew attention because he was the official who certified in May to Congress that Ukraine was eligible to receive $250 million in security assistance. That aid was later temporarily blocked by the White House, a decision at the center of Trump’s impeachment.The president had recently asked some associates whether Rood should be released, according to a person familiar with the matter. Trump wished Rood well in a tweet.CNN reported earlier this month that Rood warned Defense Secretary Mark Esper against withholding military aid to Ukraine in an email on July 25, the same day Trump asked the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a phone call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.Trump was acquitted by the Senate earlier this month of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his pressure campaign on Ukraine.After the trial ended, Trump quickly moved to oust some members of his administration who testified in the House impeachment inquiry, including Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the White House National Security Council and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.Rood will be replaced by deputy under secretary James Anderson until a permanent replacement is named, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters. The post is one of the most important at the Pentagon, managing the office that translates and implements policy set by senior defense civilian leaders. The office uses as its benchmark National Security Strategies published by incoming administrations and companion National Defense Strategies issued by the Pentagon.Despite a decade in the private sector, some of Trump’s associates considered Rood a bureaucrat who would delay execution of the president’s policies. Trump likes his directives to be implemented rapidly and national security aides believed Rood never fully agreed with the president’s positions, according to two people familiar with the situation.One Republican national security official who asked not to be named said some of Rood’s colleagues disliked his performance as a leader. During Rood’s tenure, several other people in the Pentagon’s policy shop departed. In July, Rood’s deputy, David Trachtenberg, resigned after less than two years. The departure of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver was announced in December. He had been in the role since January 2018.Rood joined the department after having served as a vice president at Lockheed Martin Corp. He previously had worked in a variety of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and as a Senate staff member and adviser to former Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona.To contact the reporters on this story: Jennifer Jacobs in Washington at jjacobs68@bloomberg.net;Jordan Fabian in Washington at jfabian6@bloomberg.net;Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Bill FariesFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

President Donald Trump has ousted the Pentagon's top policy official who had certified last year that Ukraine had made enough anti-corruption progress to justify the Trump administration's release of congressionally authorized aid to Kyiv in its conflict against Russian-backed separatists. John Rood resigned Wednesday, saying he was leaving at Trump's request. The Trump administration's delay in releasing the aid to Ukraine was central to the president's impeachment by the House on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The Pentagon's top policy official is reportedly on his way out.Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon John Rood will reportedly step down from his post — which Bloomberg notes is one of the most important in the Defense Department — two sources familiar with the matter said. Rood apparently lost support among senior national security leadership, and White House officials reportedly considered him an impediment to the Trump administration's defense policies. He has served in the role since 2018.In President Trump's impeachment saga, Rood was the official who initially certified to Congress that Ukraine's reforms justified sending Kyiv $250 million in military aid in May 2019. Subsequently, CNN reported Rood exchanged emails with Defense Secretary Mark Esper on July 25 last year (the same day as Trump's infamous call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky) where Rood expressed concern over the White House's plan to halt the aid.In the email, Rood wrote the freeze "would jeopardize this unique window of opportunity and undermine our defense priorities with a key partner in this strategic competition with Russia."There's no indication the email is the reason behind Rood's forthcoming resignation. Read more at CNN and Bloomberg.More stories from theweek.com How to ensure it's a boy (according to 100-year-old pregnancy guides) Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils Turkish president says a new military intervention in Syria is 'imminent'

Maine's 2020 Senate race is uncharted territory for Republican Sen. Susan Collins.Colby College released the first poll of this year's Maine Senate race, and it shows the four-term incumbent statistically tied with her Democratic challenger, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon. While 42 percent of respondents said they'd vote for Collins in the fall, 43 percent said they'd opt for Gideon, marking an unusually tough road ahead for Collins."This could be the kind of race Sen. Collins has not had to deal with before," said Dan Shea, Colby College's lead researcher on the poll. Collins secured her first Senate election in 1996 by about six points and won far more easily in her three re-elections since. Yet with Maine's second congressional district flipping to Democrat Jared Golden in 2018, it looks like the rest of the state could follow suit.Collins infuriated many Democratic voters when she voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The tight margin could also stem partly from Collins' vote to acquit President Trump during his impeachment trial. A total of 37 percent of poll respondents said they were disappointed with her role in the impeachment process, while 30 percent said they were proud and 31 percent said they had mixed feelings. When asked if the Senate's acquittal was the right decision, 48 percent said yes and 49 percent said no.Colby College surveyed 1,008 registered voters from Feb. 10–13 with a margin of error of 3 percent. About 30 percent of surveys were conducted via cell phone and landline, while 70 percent were conducted online.More stories from theweek.com Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils The Democratic Party is weak. Mike Bloomberg could break it. What if Trump stopped tweeting?

President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to 11 people, including several convicted felons who are either Fox News regulars or have been championed by the president’s favorite cable-news network.Among those granted pardons or sentence commutations were former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was sentenced to four years in 2010 for tax fraud and lying to the feds; and Michael Milken, the “junk-bonds king” whose early-'90s insider-trading conviction made him a poster boy of white-collar crime.Unsurprisingly, a key influence that led to Trump’s decision, particularly as it related to Blagojevich, was Fox News. The same could partly be said of the decision on Kerik, a frequent Fox News guest whose pardon was backed by several of the network’s stars; Milken, whose pardon was supported by Fox Business Network host and Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo; and Angela Stanton, an occasional pro-Trump TV pundit whose pardon was pushed by frequent Fox News guest and evangelical leader Alveda King.Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Trump made the Fox News connection abundantly clear, telling reporters that he decided to commute the rest of Blagojevich’s sentence because he’d seen the ex-governor’s wife Patti Blagojevich pleading her husband’s case on Fox. “I watched his wife on television,” Trump declared, adding that he didn’t know the ex-governor “very well” despite Blagojevich’s appearances on The Celebrity Apprentice years ago.In mid-2018, the president repeatedly asked close advisers to explore a Blagojevich pardon and, while doing so, emphatically referenced clips he’d seen on Fox, including a segment on informal Trump adviser Jeanine Pirro’s weekend show, according to two sources who independently discussed the matter with the president at the time.According to liberal media-watchdog Media Matters for America, Patti Blagojevich took to Fox programming in April 2018 to push for her husband’s sentence to be reduced, making at least seven appearances on some of Trump’s favorite primetime shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Ingraham Angle.The hosts, meanwhile, didn’t even bother with subtlety during the interviews. For instance, Tucker Carlson asked Mrs. Blagojevich what she would say “if you could speak to the president.” Kerik, meanwhile, has been a frequent guest of Fox News primetime programming for several years, generally offering on-air criticism of how Democrats handle New York City’s police department and criminal justice in general.In what can generously be described as ironic, Kerik appeared the evening before his pardon on Tucker Carlson Tonight to rail against bail reform in New York while urging for harsher punishment for criminals, claiming crime was down when the police department increased arrests for “jumping turnstiles” and other low-level misdemeanors.Kerik has also been used as a Trump-friendly critic of the so-called “deep state” on Fox News airwaves, at one point advocating for the arrest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) for trying to carry out an “attempted coup” of Trump with the whistleblower complaint and impeachment inquiry.According to the White House, Kerik’s pardon was supported by Fox News stars like Geraldo Rivera and Judge Andrew Napolitano. Additionally, the administration said, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani—a frequent Fox News commentator and Kerik's one-time boss—backed the decision.Pirro, meanwhile, celebrated Kerik’s pardon and Blagojevich’s commutation on Twitter, personally thanking the president while declaring that “political prosecutions have no place in this country.”The pro-Trump Fox News star, who brushed off Blagojevich’s crimes as “just practicing politics” in an April 2018 interview with Patti Blagojevich, has something of a sordid history with Kerik. Back in 2006, Pirro—who was then running as a Republican for New York attorney general—admitted she asked Kerik to bug her then-husband’s boat to see if he was having an affair after federal prosecutors began investigating whether she and Kerik illegally taped conversations.While junk-bond king Michael Milken is not a Fox News regular by any measure, his pardon was backed by Bartiromo, yet another Fox star who has morphed into an unofficial mouthpiece of and adviser to President Trump. Additionally, Angela Stanton, who was pardoned for her role in a stolen luxury-vehicle ring, has appeared on Fox News as a pro-Trump commentator—much like her godmother Alveda King, who backed her pardon—often arguing that Democrats want more poor women of color to have abortions.Appearances on Fox News and Fox Business—two of Trump’s favorite networks—are popular vessels for those seeking to make their cases for pardons or clemency directly to the president, a voracious consumer of TV and cable news. The most prominent example was the sustained, successful on-air and behind-the-scenes campaign on Fox to lobby Trump to grant clemency to accused and convicted American war criminals. Fox & Friends Weekend host Pete Hegseth was a ringleader of that highly controversial effort.“[Trump] knows how people play this game,” said one source close to the president. “He’s even told me before something to the effect of, ‘All these people keep getting themselves on Fox News begging me for a pardon,’ so he’s self-conscious about this stuff. But it doesn’t matter, it still has an effect on him.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

(Bloomberg) -- Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department designated a U.S. attorney’s office in New York state to coordinate and handle investigations and material related to Ukraine, including receiving information from President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.The department assigned Richard Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to be its point person for handling and sorting Ukraine-related matters, according to a letter sent Tuesday to House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler.“Any and all new matters relating to Ukraine shall be directed exclusively to EDNY for investigation and appropriate handling,” according to a memo accompanying the letter.The memo stated that “there currently are several distinct open investigations being handled by different U.S. Attorney’s Offices and/or Department components that in some way potentially relate to Ukraine.” The subject of the memo is “Coordination of Investigations.” It indicates the Justice Department is involved in far more Ukraine-related probes than may be publicly known.The policy could open a new line of attack against Barr and the Justice Department leadership after a tumultuous week in which the top U.S. law enforcement officer seized control of cases tied to Trump, prompting a team of prosecutors to step down in one high-profile case. Over the weekend, more than 2,000 former Justice Department officials signed a letter condemning the attorney general.Trump has repeatedly called for investigations regarding Ukraine, including into the activities of a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has also given voice to discredited theories that Ukraine, not Russia, led efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.Read More: Trump, Barr Fuel DOJ Turmoil Over Cases Tied to White HouseThe memo released Tuesday says existing matters related to Ukraine will remain with the offices and components where they’re currently being handled but are now “subject to ongoing consultation with EDNY.”Any move to widen or expand existing matters will require prior consultation with Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s office and the Eastern District, according to the memo. That could create tension with ongoing investigations, especially in the Southern District of New York office in Manhattan, which is investigating Giuliani and two of his business associates.The department assigned Donoghue “to coordinate existing matters and to assess, investigate, and address any other matters relating to Ukraine, including the opening of any new investigations or the expansion of existing ones,” according to the memo.Stealth CampaignBarr acknowledged last week that an intake process had been established for Giuliani to give the department information he collected in Ukraine, essentially bringing what was a stealth campaign into official government channels. The attorney general didn’t initially provide more information.Giuliani previously said he was collecting information about the activities of Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukraine. Giuliani’s efforts became a central factor in Trump’s impeachment for pressuring the Ukrainian government to announce investigations into the Bidens to help the president’s re-election. The president was acquitted by the Senate in early February.Barr has not discussed matters related to Ukraine with Giuliani, according to the letter, which was signed by Stephen Boyd, assistant attorney general for legislative affairs. U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania Scott Brady has been assigned to assist in receipt, processing and analysis of information provided by the public relating to Ukraine, according to the letter.To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Strohm in Washington at cstrohm1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Anna EdgertonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Hunter Biden, son of former vice president Joe Biden, was on the board of a trade group that lobbied the Obama administration for increased U.S. aid to Ukraine, according to a report Tuesday.From 2012 through 2018, the younger Biden served as a director for the Center for U.S. Global Leadership and was connected as well with its affiliate, the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Daily Caller reported. The two groups, which include about 400 larger corporations and non-government organizations, lobbied for increased spending abroad by the State Department’s International Affairs Budget, including a special focus on Ukraine.At the time, Joe Biden was also advocating for increased U.S. spending in Ukraine.Hunter Biden's small private equity firm, Rosemont Seneca, featured other well-connected politicos as well, including his partner Devon Archer, who was a former adviser on Obama Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, and another partner, Kerry’s son-in-law Christopher Heinz.“Hunter Biden works for [Archer]. So we’ve got the top level politicos with us. All of my guys, is as top tier as it gets,” a businessman named Bevan Cooney wrote in text messages released in connection with an unrelated criminal case against Archer. “You don’t get more politically connected and make people more comfortable than that.”In 2013, the groups held an event honoring Joe Biden for his work supporting increased spending abroad, an event Hunter Biden was also introduced as having a "very special relationship with our honoree."Biden's separate lucrative position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings while his father was vice president and in charge of addressing corruption in Ukraine has also drawn scrutiny and featured prominently in the impeachment proceedings against President Trump. That position earned Biden at least $50,000 a month for his advice on “transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities.”During a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked Zelensky to help his administration investigate allegations that Joe Biden used his position as vice president to help the Ukrainian gas company avoid a corruption probe soon after Hunter Biden was appointed to its board of directors. That phone call led to an Intelligence Community whistleblower complaint that ultimately sparked a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump’s actions.Biden has said that in the spring of 2016, during his tenure as vice president, he called on Ukraine to fire the top prosecutor investigating the energy company paying his son. Biden suggested he would withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine if the country did not fire the prosecutor, who was accused by the State Department and U.S. allies in Europe of being soft on corruption.

Former national security adviser John Bolton criticized the White House on Monday for what he termed its efforts to censor his memoir on working in the Trump administration."For all the focus on Ukraine and the impeachment trial and all that, to me, there are portions of the manuscript that deal with Ukraine, I view that like the sprinkles on the ice cream sundae in terms of what’s in the book," Bolton told an audience at Duke University. "This is an effort to write history and I did it the best I can. We’ll have to see what comes out of the censorship." Bolton also said he hoped the book would survive the pre-publication review process."I’m hoping ultimately I can get the book published,” Bolton said. “I hope it’s not suppressed."Information from Bolton's book, The Room Where it Happened, was leaked towards the end of the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. Bolton reportedly wrote that Trump had specifically conditioned military aid to Ukraine on a commitment by that country to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.Republican senators including Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) called on Bolton to publicly state whatever information relevant to the trial he had written in the book. However, Bolton declined to do so, and Democrats failed to convince enough Senate Republicans to vote to call witnesses in the impeachment trial, dashing Democrats' hopes that Bolton could be called to testify.

I don't know if Attorney General William Barr will bow to a new pressure campaign to get him to resign. But I do know that whether he leaves office or whether he stays, it doesn't matter: As long as Donald Trump remains president, the Department of Justice will be compromised.The fish rots from the head, after all.The effort to force Barr's resignation has picked up a great deal of steam in the aftermath of Trump's successful push to get federal prosecutors to reduce their sentencing recommendation for his crony, Roger Stone. More than 2,000 former officials of the Department of Justice — a mix of both Republicans and Democrats — have signed a letter urging Barr to step down."Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies," the officials said in the open letter, adding: "Mr. Barr's actions in doing the president's personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice's reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign."Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, added his support to that effort on Monday, with an Atlantic article also calling on Barr to resign."Bill Barr's America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go," Ayer wrote. "It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached."Fine words. But Barr's resignation would be meaningless.He isn't Trump's first attorney general, remember. That distinction belonged to Jeff Sessions, the former U.S. senator from Alabama who was among the first prominent Republicans to endorse Trump's 2016 presidential run. He was rewarded with stewardship of the Justice Department — and immediately set about implementing the new president's pro-police anti-immigrant agenda.For his troubles, Sessions was rewarded with little but Trump's contempt. Behind closed doors — and sometimes even in public — the president mocked the attorney general's diminutive stature and Southern accent. He even reportedly called Sessions a "dumb Southerner."And Trump bullied Sessions mercilessly for the lawyer's decision to recuse himself — as required by the department's ethics guide — from the Russia investigation, setting the stage for Robert Mueller's special counsel inquiry. Mueller's inquiry didn't end up with any legal action against Trump, nor did it provide the basis for the president's recent impeachment. Nonetheless, Trump was enraged."Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else," Trump told The New York Times in 2017.Trump ultimately fired Sessions.Barr knew that history. He knew Trump's very public expectation that the attorney general serve as his de facto personal lawyer. And he knew that Trump expects the federal legal system to follow his whims and wishes, putting aside any notion of equality before the law in favor of greasing the wheels for the president and his associates. He knew hat Trump believes he has the "absolute right" to order special legal treatment for his friends. Barr took the job anyway.Yes, Barr complained last week that the president's tweeting makes it difficult for him to do his job. But his protest was disingenuous — Trump is exactly the same man now as he was when Barr became attorney general last year. His expectations of personal loyalty from the federal bureaucracy haven't changed one bit. And until last week, it appeared Barr was very happy indeed to serve the president's wishes.That will remain the case if Barr resigns. Trump will either pick a replacement attorney general who is all too happy to do the president's bidding and continue the degradation of justice at the federal level — or he will accidentally pick a lawyer with integrity, then bully that person into complying with his wishes. Neither scenario is great for the independence and reputation of the Department of Justice.The well-intentioned people trying to replace Bill Barr should be aiming a little higher. If you want competent, honest leadership in the attorney general's office, the Oval Office must be cleansed of its current occupant. Unless voters kick out President Trump in November, any replacement for Barr will simply be a new face for the same old corruption.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils The Democratic Party is weak. Mike Bloomberg could break it. Trump claims he knows anonymous administration official's identity, but 'I can't tell you'

Even though internal Fox News documents caution that frequent guests Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon traffic in “disinformation,” the network can’t seem to quit booking them.Since The Daily Beast first reported on the 162-page document, produced by the network’s research division known as the “Brain Room,” Giuliani—who, according to the briefing, has a “high susceptibility to disinformation”—has made at least four separate appearances on Fox. And Solomon, whom the documents accused of playing an “indispensable role” in Team Trump’s Ukraine “disinformation campaign,” has popped up twice on the Fox Business Network.The internal briefing, titled “Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration,” accused the former New York City mayor Giuliani of amplifying disinformation pushed by bad-faith Ukrainian actors like former Ukrainain prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko and indicted oligarch Dmytro Firtash. The document also noted Giuliani’s ties to indicted associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who Murphy writes had “strong reported financial links to Firtash.”“Reading the timeline in its entirety—not a small task—makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation,” the briefing added.Despite the network’s own research team preaching caution over Trump’s personal hatchet man peddling conspiracies and agitprop through the media, shows on Fox News and Fox Business Network have continued to host Giuliani for freewheeling interviews in which he has repeatedly (and baselessly) claimed he is in possession of “smoking gun” evidence that proves former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter was involved in criminal activity in Ukraine.Days after the president was acquitted of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in the Senate impeachment trial, Giuliani appeared on Trump-boosting host Jesse Watters’ weekend Fox News program to declare that he had three witnesses who were ready to “name names” in a Hunter Biden investigation.During the Feb. 8 interview, Giuliani said he wanted to make sure that Trump was “totally vindicated” following the impeachment proceedings in which the president was accused of withholding military aid in order to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens. "I want to prove what happened because I believe if we prove what happened, he will be totally vindicated,” Giuliani told Watters.Later in the interview, Giuliani insisted he was in possession of documentation that would be the “smoking gun” for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham’s potential probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.“Lindsey, get started,” Giuliani laughed. Interestingly, the following morning, Graham announced on CBS News’ Face the Nation that Attorney General William Barr had established an “intake process” to gather any information Giuliani has collected on the Bidens. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, have continued to gather additional information in its investigation of Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman.Fox News Internal Document Bashes Pro-Trump Fox Regulars for Spreading ‘Disinformation’While Graham was revealing Barr’s process for taking in Rudy’s Biden dirt, the ex-mayor also made an appearance on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, hosted by Trump loyalist Maria Bartiromo. Much like his Watters interview, Giuliani claimed he was in possession of all kinds of documentation that would nail the Bidens and Democrats.“The amount of crimes the Democrats committed in Ukraine are astounding,” he shouted while waving around a piece of paper. “If there were a document about you or me like this. I think we’d be in jail by now.”Another assertion he made to Bartiromo and Watters was that the so-called black ledger, which triggered then-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s resignation in 2016 after it alleged Manafort received million of dollars in undisclosed cash payments from Ukraine’s former pro-Russian government, is a “forgery.” Giuliani’s frequency of appearances on network, despite the “disinformation” documents being made public, isn’t entirely surprising. Fox News was dismissive of the significance of its own research team’s accusations about the ex-mayor, along with pro-Trump columnist Solomon, and pro-Trump lawyers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing.“The research division of FOX News produces a briefing book for all major stories, which serves as a standing collection of extensive data on major topics for internal use by all those in editorial functions. The Ukraine briefing book is nothing more than a comprehensive chronological account of what every person involved in the Ukraine controversy was doing at any identifiable point in time, including tracking media appearances of major players who appeared on FOX News and in many other outlets,” Mitch Kweit, senior vice president of the Brain Room, said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “The 200-page document has thousands of data points and the vast majority have no relation to FOX News—instead it’s now being taken out of context and politicized to damage the network.”And since that internal Fox briefing was made public, Solomon has continued to appear at least on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight. The first of those appearances came on Feb. 7, in which the disgraced “investigative reporter” pushed allegations from former Manafort associate Rick Gates that the aforementioned black ledger is a “fabrication.”Indeed, both Solomon and Giuliani have argued for months that the ledger is a fake as part of an effort to cast doubt on the origins of the Russia investigation. Despite their repeated claims that the document is fraudulent, the FBI and American media outlets have corroborated many of its details, specifically the payments received by Manafort.In two additional Fox appearances last week, Giuliani continued to beat the drum that he had “smoking gun” evidence that would take down the Bidens, clear Manafort’s name, and reveal that Democrats sought interference from Ukraine in the 2016 election to stop Trump.And in a Wednesday night interview with Fox News anchor Shannon Bream—one of the network’s so-called “straight news” hosts—Giuliani confirmed that he was feeding information on the Bidens to Barr, but said he wasn’t receiving “special treatment.”“Not only am I not—I’m not getting special treatment, I’ve been getting terrible treatment,” he exclaimed. “This should have been investigated three years ago. If President Trump had gone on the stage and said, ‘I pressured the president of another country to dismiss a prosecutor,’ there’d be an investigation the next day.”Calling for Bream and her viewers to tune into his podcast to get the “facts” of Biden’s alleged corruption in Ukraine, Giuliani repeated his baseless claim that the ex-veep bribed the Ukrainian government to end an investigation into his son.“They are lying and lying and lying, and the corrupt media just repeats it,” Giuliani fumed while wildly asserting at the same time that former top Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin—whom the Obama administration called upon to be fired over corruption allegations—had been poisoned. (The implication, which Giuliani has made before, was more than clear.)It was one recent appearance on the Fox Business Network, however, where the network played host to Giuliani truly taking his disinformation campaign to a whole other level—again, all despite internal documents warning of his susceptibility to such propaganda.Waving around an iPad he claimed was full of evidence that proved a “Democratic scam” in Ukraine, Giuliani told extremely sympathetic host Trish Regan—one of the most overtly pro-Trump hosts on the network—that Democrats actually want to assassinate him over his Ukrainian smear campaign.“That’s why they’re so crazy on the subject of Ukraine, and why they want to literally kill me,” Giuliani yelled to Regan after alleging he could show proof that the Obama administration funneled $5.3 billion of unaccounted aid to Ukraine, adding that’s “how all those oligarchs become oligarchs.”Furthermore, Giuliani claimed that the person alleged to be the whistleblower at the center of Trump’s impeachment was involved in some byzantine plot to use Ukrainian dirt in early 2016 to hurt the Trump campaign and stop Trump from becoming president.“How about the whistleblower? I mean, we need to know how long the whistleblower was involved in conspiracies to take out President Trump,” a wide-eyed Giuliani bellowed. “I have a suspicion that the whistleblower was there at the beginning.”“Uhhh, January of 2016, there was a meeting at the NSC,” he continued as Regan nodded along. “Staff members, they asked the three Ukrainian prosecutors to go get dirt on Manafort and the Trump campaign. The NSC doesn’t ask you to go get dirt! They wanted to turn them into the producers of political garbage, which they did. One of the people there who spoke up very, very strongly and made a follow-up telephone call to collect the dirt seems to be the whistleblower.”Manafort, meanwhile, wasn’t even a member of the Trump campaign in January 2016, as he didn’t join until late March 2016 as campaign convention manager. He wouldn’t be promoted to campaign chief until May 19, 2016. Giuliani & Co. Plot New Biden Probes as Trump’s Ukraine Team Lies in RuinRead more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.