Category: HunterBiden

Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme

Posted on (Updated by Hunter

During the 2016 elections, Russian government agents hacked into the Democratic National Committee and into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, then dumped the stolen data in an effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s election opponent. The more we learn about the supposed “Hunter Biden laptop,” a scandal meant to roil the campaign of Donald Trump’s election opponent four years later, the more it looks like somebody was following the same hack-and-dump playbook.

Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed "laptop." When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a "Hunter Biden" allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf--ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop's data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.

Marcy's post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.

Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had "limited" online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter's iCloud and email accounts, including:

  • Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account

  • Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf

  • Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device

  • Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account

  • Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account

  • Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account

  • Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account

  • Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases

…

  • Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone

  • Restored the prior trusted phone number

  • Added software that could record calls

  • Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store

The list goes on, but the changes line up almost precisely with what you'd see in the aftermath of a successful phishing attack or other security breach. Passwords and security-related phone numbers were changed, access was granted to additional devices and burner phones, there was a "full copy" made of his iCloud account, some spyware or spyware-adjacent new tools were installed, and after a full data dump was made, some of the security changes were reverted so as to obfuscate what had just gone on.

The emails from Hunter around this time period don't suggest a man deep in the weeds of tweaking his own online security details, to put it mildly, so we're left wondering just who was doing all this fiddling.

The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

The evidence is very good, then, that Hunter Biden's online accounts were successfully hacked shortly before a "laptop" purportedly belonging to him mysteriously showed up in a Delaware computer repair shop, packed with seemingly legitimate data that then was handed over to Rudy freaking Giuliani, the man in Donald Trump's orbit most intimately involved in ginning up dirt, any dirt at all, about Hunter Biden during Trump's reelection bid.

A bunch of media outlets have previously breathlessly reported that the laptop had been "verified" as belonging to Hunter Biden while simultaneously fudging what that means. It means that the laptop, or at least its alleged hard drive, does indeed contain data from Hunter's email and iCloud accounts. There's another obvious scenario, though, and that's the exact hack-and-dump scheme that the FBI was warning Twitter and Facebook off of before the New York Post reported its original scoop revealing the alleged existence of the laptop.

Government disinformation specialists were warning, in the wake of Giuliani's already exposed anti-Biden ratf--king efforts based in part on hoaxes pushed by pro-Russian interests (see: Trump's impeachment, as in the first one and not the second one) that foreign disinformation aimed at bending the 2020 elections was still prevalent. Counterintelligence specialists were on watch, especially after Russian agents successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns in 2016, "dumping" the stolen information through multiple entities in an attempt to boost Trump's chances of winning.

What we have in the Hunter laptop case appears to be an uncannily similar series of events. Hunter's email, iCloud, Venmo, and other accounts appear to have been breached in 2018 and 2019. His data was copied, spyware was installed, and cursory attempts to cover up the breach were made.

And then, lo and behold, a laptop containing a copy of that data—one that showed clear evidence of the data being tampered with—gets dumped at a computer repair shop, never to be picked up again, while a copy of its data somehow makes it to Giuliani.

The only thing that would make all of this sketchier than it already is? A bizarre Russian link—and the joke’s on you if you thought there wouldn't be one because weirdly, very very weirdly, the escort service suspected of possibly being an origin point for hacks of Hunter's Venmo account appears to be tied to Russia.

Marcy's careful to leave out speculation beyond what seems obvious: The activity surrounding Hunter's online accounts seems to strongly suggest hackers successfully breached his accounts well before the laptop ever materialized. But we can speculate where she didn't: Was this yet another hack-and-dump operation aimed, quite specifically, at damaging Trump's election opponent?

How do we explain Giuliani's front-and-center appearance here?

From the beginning, few news outlets besides the New York Post were willing to touch this story because from the computer repairman himself to the specifics of what was allegedly found and how, all of it looked like a hack and dump. Republicans have bellowed in outrage at how little traction the story is getting in the media even now that the data is supposedly "confirmed" to be Hunter's. But that's not surprising either; it's almost certainly the result of criminal hacking.

Oh, and there also hasn't been much found on the laptop that wasn't already known: Hunter Biden has suffered through addiction, has spent substantial cash on drugs and sex workers, and has muddled through his troubled life slightly better than most addicts might due to his perceived closeness to his well-connected father. But it would be a hell of a thing if this episode turned out to be exactly the Giuliani-assisted foreign operation it appeared to be from the moment the New York Post wrote it up.

RELATED STORIES:

The Republicans' 'credible' witness against Biden is a spy for China

Hunter Biden is done staying quiet about the laptop-based smear campaign. He's suing

Impeach-A-Palooza 2023: Republicans search for someone, anyone, to impeach

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

Last week, Republicans in the House were desperately seeking a reason to impeach President Joe Biden. That lead to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert exchanging insults on the House floor, competing bills that included claims that Biden was responsible for an international child trafficking ring, and Republican leadership even more desperately trying to find a way to avoid defending, again, the painful foolishness and delusional nonsense spewed by the member of its most powerful caucus.

Bobert and Greene’s struggle to one-up each other on the outlandishness of their call for a Biden impeachment came just a week after Rep. Bob Goode called for an impeachment of FBI Director Christopher Wray, which came a week after Republicans tried, and failed, to hold Wray in contempt of Congress, and a full month after Greene’s earlier attempt to impeach Wray, who was appointed by Donald Trump, for turning the FBI into “a Federal police force to intimidate, harass, and entrap American citizens that are deemed enemies of the Biden regime.” All of this came wrapped around the House decision to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (and boost his Senate campaign) because … reasons. Not good reasons. Just reasons.

Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy now seems to have picked a target to satisfy his members’ impeachment bloodlust, if he could only find a crime.

As The Hill reports, McCarthy has proposed that the Republican demand for a human sacrifice might find its ceremonial victim in Attorney General Merrick Garland, but impeachment has that pesky requirement for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” meaning McCarthy needs more than a name, he needs a justification before he can start whipping up the vote.

So what does he have?

McCarthy wants to impeach Garland because a “whistleblower,” apparently from within the IRS, claims to have knowledge of a private WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden tried to extract money from a Chinese businessman. That whistleblower also accused the Department of Justice of giving Hunter Biden “preferential treatment” in an examination of his taxes.

“If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true, this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ,” said McCarthy.

Unfortunately, for all the times that Republicans sling it around, there is no such crime as “weaponization of the DOJ” or the FBI or of any other department. It’s certainly true that these departments can be and have been aimed at individuals—see Martin Luther King Jr. and just about anyone who ever offended J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon—but impeachment requires a crime, not a buzzword.

They need to find evidence that Garland has done something like intervene to repress evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Hunter Biden. That could be hard considering U.S. Attorney David Weiss just came off a five-year investigation into Hunter Biden that resulted in two minor charges of late payment of taxes and a charge of owning a gun while using drugs.

Weiss was appointed to this task by then-Attorney General William Barr, and the first two years of the investigation were carried out under Donald Trump. If there is anything unusual in the charges, it’s that Biden is being charged at all, because these are very rarely applied charges.

McCarthy admits that there are “clear disparities” between what Weiss found and the unsubstantiated reports Republicans are waving around as part of their fundraising campaigns. He’s demanding that Weiss come back to the House and explain the issues. Garland has said he’d be happy for Weiss to make such an appearance and talk about any issues with the IRS.

While he’s at it, maybe Weiss can explain how the reported attempt to extort a Chinese billionaire happened in 2017 while President Joe Biden was no longer vice president, no longer in the Senate, and not running for anything. As Garland explained on Friday, Weiss had full authority to pursue any evidence he found, including "more authority than a special counsel would have had." He also noted that the IRS whistleblower had claimed Weiss was prohibited from looking at evidence outside Delaware, which was untrue.

While McCarthy has Weiss at the House, he might also get in a few questions about why the last “key informant” that Republicans claimed to have, this one also throwing around unsubstantiated claims about Hunter Biden, turns out to be dead. And the guy who was at the center of that supposed deal turns out to have died over three years before Hunter Biden became involved.

Of course, the requirement for McCarthy to produce a crime on which to base impeachment is only what’s in the Constitution and the law. No big deal for this crew. Republicans can write up an impeachment because they don’t like the pattern on Garland’s tie and likely find a majority to pass it.

Donald Trump was impeached, twice, on clear crimes. First he was impeached for his attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into providing false evidence against then-candidate Joe Biden. That effort not only caused delays in military assistance to Ukraine, it sent a clear signal that the United States wasn’t interested in stopping corruption. It was interested in causing corruption.

Trump’s second impeachment came from his involvement in the events of Jan. 6. Trump not only provided consistently false statements about the 2020 election, he incited violence and delayed necessary assistance to protect members of Congress and Capitol Police.

Republicans want to impeach someone, anyone, in order to gain a measure of revenge concerning Trump. That includes McCarthy voicing his support for expunging Trump’s twin impeachments. Everything they are doing is about showing their support for Trump and showing Trump supporters how willing they are to smite anyone who opposes him.

But this chart from last week shows their basic problem.

It’s not that Republicans aren’t getting plenty of opportunities to investigate their opponents. It's that Republicans keep doing all the crime. Whether it’s a special counsel or a U.S. attorney, years of investigations into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have found no grand conspiracy or serious crime. But just a few months’ worth of investigating Trump turned up felonies literally in the dozens.

For that, Republicans want to prosecute the investigators. Maybe their “tough on crime” theme would work better if it were actually aimed at the criminals. Like Trump.

House Republicans desperately seeking reason to impeach Biden

Posted on (Updated by Laura Clawson

House Republican leadership isn’t happy with Rep. Lauren Boebert’s current impeachment shenanigans, but that’s not because they don’t plan to impeach Biden. They just don’t like the timing and the specifics. Speaker Kevin McCarthy knows that his members and the Republican base will demand a baseless impeachment while the party has a House majority, but he wants to at least pretend it’s not a foregone conclusion, and that Republicans only went where the evidence lead after sober consideration. (Ha ha ha.)

McCarthy’s line, offered to reporters on Wednesday, is: “What I am saying is these investigations will follow the information we get wherever it will take us.” He also repeated uncorroborated accusations against the president, though, in case you were tempted to believe that the fix wasn’t in.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, who is leading a series of “investigations” into the president and his son Hunter, is similarly pretending that impeachment is a giant question mark.

“We’ve never said impeachment, yes or no,” Comer told Punchbowl. “If it leads to impeachment, it leads to impeachment. Our investigation, we’ve still got several more months of work to do before I can issue a report … I don’t think what happens tomorrow [on the Boebert resolution] will have any impact. Nor will the plea-bargain deal with the president’s son.”

House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry insists, “The goal is not impeachment.” The real goal, he said, was information. “But if the information leads you to facts that require and demand accountability, that’s the only accountability.” And “yes,” Perry believes Republicans will uncover said “information” against Biden and support for impeachment will build.

Other Republicans are being even less circumspect.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see Biden impeached,” Rep. Andy Ogles told Punchbowl. “The question is when and is it soon enough for the American people?” Ogles, like Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has introduced an impeachment resolution. Rep. Eli Crane said impeachment will “absolutely” be an outcome of the investigations.

The likelihood that McCarthy will be able to stifle the demands for Biden’s impeachment is only slightly higher than the likelihood that McCarthy will be remembered as an effective speaker. Under his leadership, House Republicans have few legislative accomplishments to tout, and the promised bombshell hearings on Hunter Biden and anything else they could dig up to undermine the president have flopped. Impeachment is what Republicans have left to pander to their base, mollify the people whose support McCarthy lobbied and traded for through 15 speaker votes, and pretend they have gotten something done.

But an impeachment could very well backfire on Republicans. They’ll be going into it, after all, with scant evidence and screamingly obvious partisan motivations. And unless they conduct impeachment hearings with a much higher level of professionalism than they’ve shown to this point, it’s going to be a clown show that reveals again and again that this is about revenge against Democrats for impeaching Donald Trump and about undermining the Biden presidency after Republicans failed to overturn the 2020 elections. Comer says his report won’t come out for “several more months,” which would likely put any impeachment proceedings into 2024. It might motivate their base, but it’s unlikely to be what independent voters want to see from the House of Representatives.

”How can you impeach someone with no evidence?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Raskin is pretty smart, so I’m going to assume that was a rhetorical question. He knows Republicans don’t care about evidence, and if they move forward on impeachment, even voters who aren’t paying very much attention will realize that.

Joining us on "The Downballot" this week is North Carolina Rep. Wiley Nickel, the first member of Congress to appear on the show! Nickel gives us the blow-by-blow of his unlikely victory that saw him flip an extremely competitive seat from red to blue last year, including how he adjusted when a new map gave him a very different district and why highlighting the extremism of his MAGA-flavored opponent was key to his success. A true election nerd, Nickel tells us which precincts he was tracking on election night that let him know he was going to win—and which fellow House freshman is the one you want to rock out with at a concert.

Embedded Content

Conservative columnist explains why the GOP is so obsessed with Hunter Biden: Guilt over Trump

Posted on by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

For seven long years, Republicans have serially debased themselves at the altar of Donald Trump—a ramshackle shrine that isn’t as ornate and gold leaf-gilded as you might think. Actually, it’s just like a traditional altar, except if God ever asked Trump to sacrifice his firstborn son on it, Trump would be elbows deep in failson viscera before Yahweh had a chance to tell him He was kidding.

But hey, some might say it’s out of bounds to go after an ex-president’s children—unless they work for his administration, campaign for him endlessly, or repeatedly show up on Fox News as his surrogate. So Barron is off-limits—at least until he’s caught on camera riding Rudy Giuliani around the West Palm Beach Spearmint Rhino like a horsey. Until that day, don’t you dare even mention his name.

But Republicans—they have no such forbearance. Their strategy for fighting inflation, creating jobs, and promoting democracy both here and abroad is single-pronged and simple: investigate Hunter Biden. After all, he has, well, nothing at all to do with his father's administration—but like millions of Americans, he’s battled a substance abuse problem, and so Republicans think they can embarrass our president to the point where he loses it and starts prescribing bleach shots for respiratory diseases and squirreling away top secret nuclear documents in his neck wattle.

Never mind that when it comes to Hunter Biden, all that Republicans are likely to find are some peccadilloes that are personally embarrassing—to Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner skipped town with a $2 billion loan from Prince Bone Saws, and No. 1 child Ivanka scored some sweet trademarks from China as her dad threatened and menaced its government with tariffs. 

So why are Republicans doing this? Because they’re a waste of time, carbon, and oxygen? Yes, of course—but that’s only part of the answer. The real reason, according to conservative columnist Mona Charen, is pervasive guilt.

In a new column for The Bulwark, Charen argues that Trumpland is so up to its oleaginous teats in gaudy scandal, it has no choice but to paint its opponents with the same off-brand, lead-based paints its been marinating in for most of the past decade.

For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding, and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the other side is worse. Or you can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome” whereas you are a man of the world who knows nobody’s perfect. But then Trump will do what he always does—he’ll make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-A-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who’ve compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for “terminating” the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office.

Yup. Whatever fever dream you can conjure about Joe Biden and his family, Trump’s real life will eventually top it. Guaranteed. And it’s not even close. So Republicans’ only option now—other than embracing truth and belatedly attempting to salvage some modicum of dignity (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha … whoo! … *wipes away tear*)—is to try to make Biden look just as bad as the guy they gifted with a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card. Unfortunately, Trump keeps fouling up their plans by continuing to breathe and speak.

President Biden is hardly the first president to have troubled family members. But Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter at the White House, and if there is any evidence of the president using official influence on Hunter’s behalf, we haven’t seen it. The Department of Justice under President Trump opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. President Biden has left it alone. It’s ongoing. 

So even though Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds have nothing at all to do with Joe Biden’s administration, the president has refused to intervene on his son’s behalf. Contrast that with Trump, who used the DOJ to spin the Mueller report, tried to use it to steal the 2020 election, and openly criticized his first attorney general for refusing to act as his mob consigliere.

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in [GOP Rep. Elise] Stefanik’s words, “a crime family” because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d’etat.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I couldn’t have said it better myself—because if I’d said it, I would have felt compelled to compare Trump unfavorably to a pumpkin-spiced whale placenta, and that may have lacked the necessary gravitas.

But whatever we on the American side of our country’s current political divide have to say, Republicans will likely go full Republican regardless. Their interminable Benghazi investigations surely contributed to Hillary Clinton’s eventual defenestration, and they can’t wait to perform the same black magic with Joe Biden’s troubled son.

The fact that there’s very little “there” there will hardly dissuade them. But maybe, just maybe, the American people will be wise to their tricks this time around. After all, Donald Trump’s trail of corruption is hard to miss—and Republicans will no doubt be slipping on that slug slime for many years to come, no matter how many distractions they try to throw in our path.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

McCarthy hands the detonator to the bomb-throwers

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Republicans have been promising for weeks that if they took the House of Representatives, it would be payback time for Democrats. Sure, they had a big show around releasing their “Commitment to America” to attempt to show that they had some kind of intent to act like real responsible adults put in charge of a nation, but it was all show and no substance.

Now they have their teeny-tiny majority, they’re doing exactly what they said they’d do: seek revenge on Democrats for winning and doing popular stuff. This was the first public statement from the House GOP after securing their gerrymandered, tiny majority.

Hunter Biden's laptop is REAL.

— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) November 17, 2022

That’s previewing the first official press conference where Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky, the incoming chairs of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees respectively, announce their ridiculous probes into Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. They gave a preview—where else—on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday. “We are going to make it very clear that this is now an investigation of President Biden,” Comer told Hannity. Because bogus investigations have worked out so well for them.

It is of course not just Biden, but also Anthony Fauci who is retiring this year. Jordan’s “FBI & DOJ politicization” allegations include his 1,050 page “report,” 1,000 pages of which are copies of the letters they’ve sent to the Biden administration. (This includes 470 pages that are all the same five-page letter sent to U.S. Attorneys.) There’s also Afghanistan and the border and, of course, impeachment investigations from Biden on down.

Speaking of investigations, The New York Times reports: “In a closed-door meeting of Republicans on Monday, right-wing lawmakers including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia extracted a promise that their leaders would investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for their treatment of defendants jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”

Over at NBC News, Scott Wong says: “McCarthy and other leaders will have their hands full as they try to keep their wafer-thin majority united and corral conservative bomb throwers who are clamoring to shut down the government and impeach President Joe Biden and his top allies.”

News flash: McCarthy and the other leaders are the bomb-throwers.

Oh, and that bit about taking the debt ceiling hostage to force Social Security and Medicare cuts? They mean that, too. Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, told Wong, “As it relates to the debt ceiling, Americans rightly expect that their elected officials will use every tool we have to fix whatever crises the country faces—whether it’s the spike in prices, an unsecured border, rising debt, you name it.

“Republicans will use every tool we have to bring relief to Americans and put the country back on the right track.”

They mean it. Which means it is imperative that Democrats use this lame duck to keep them away from the most dangerous weapons.

RELATED STORIES:

House Judiciary Republicans release lie-packed, inflated 'report.' Will the media bite?

House GOP promises vengeance on Democrats for doing good stuff while in power

We're now in the second week of election overtime and there are still plenty of major races yet to be decided—as well as tons more great news for Democrats to exult over on this week's episode of The Downballot. On the uncalled races front, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard dive into a pair of House races in California and several legislatures that could flip from red to blue, including the Pennsylvania House. Speaking of legislatures, the Davids also go deep on what the astonishing flips in Michigan will mean for progressives and particularly organized labor.

Embedded Content

Democracy in peril: Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign began months before Zelenskyy took office

Posted on by Charles Jay

Ukraine may have saved our democracy and its own back in 2019 by resisting Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the country’s government into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden.

What many people don’t realize is that Rudy Giuliani had already begun pushing to get the Ukrainian government to announce such an investigation as early as January 2019, when he met in New York with Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko. That’s months before Volodymyr Zelenskyy, running on an anti-corruption platform, won the April 21, 2019, presidential run-off election against incumbent Petro Poroshenko. Biden officially announced his candidacy just four days later.

I would recommend that everyone read the Ukrainegate timeline prepared by Just Security, an online forum that analyzes U.S. national security policy. It outlines the complex chain of events in the campaign to pressure Ukraine that eventually resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. And there was a a quid pro quo offered to Poroshenko—although it did not involve withholding weapons, according to the Just Security timeline.

The Wall Street Journal reported that in late Feburary 2019, Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met with Poroshenko to press him to initiate an investigation of Hunter Biden and a debunked theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton. They said if Poroshenko went along he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House. That would have been a boon to Poroshenko, who was in a tough campaign for reelection against Zelenskyy.

Now imagine an alternate history in which Ukraine’s top prosecutor had announced an investigation of the Bidens in March 2019. Poroshenko was pushed to the brink, but did not yield to the pressure.

Poroshenko and Trump in 2017

It would have come completely out of the blue, since there was no “perfect” phone call or whistleblower at the time. Just think about how CNN or The New York Times would have reported on the investigation. How would Biden have reacted to a nasty smear campaign against his sole surviving son, who was in a fragile state as he struggled to recover from substance abuse problems? 

A New York Times story dated Feb. 26, 2019 said Biden had held a family meeting earlier that month in which there was a “consensus” that he should run for president. But at the same time, Biden acknowledged in a speech at the University of Delaware that he had been uneasy about “taking the family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” against Trump. “I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Biden said.

If Ukraine had done Giuliani’s bidding, Biden might very well have decided against entering the race. At best, Biden would have entered the campaign as a weakened frontrunner, with a dark cloud hanging over his head. Either way, Democrats would have faced an even more contentious primary contest, which might have yielded a weakened candidate whom Trump would have had a better chance of defeating.

A second Trump term would have posed an undeniable threat to our democracy. As for Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s puppet would have continued undermining NATO and done little to help Kyiv resist Russian aggression.

In Trump’s mind, Ukraine, not Russia, was his enemy. 

***

Let’s look more closely at what happened in the months before Zelenskyy’s inauguration on May 20, 2019. What happened after his inauguration was well-documented by Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson in March 14’s “Trump’s Ukraine extortion campaign didn’t begin or end with `I would like you to do us a favor.”

In August 2018, polls showed that Biden was leading Trump in a head-to-head matchup, and also leading the potential Democratic primary field. Biden indicated that fall that he was strongly considering a 2020 presidential bid. Around the same time, Giuliani Partners was hired by the Boca Raton, Florida, company Fraud Guarantee, co-founded by Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman. Giuliani ultimately was paid $500,000 for undisclosed business and legal advice, according to Reuters.

Lev Parnas in 2020
Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were later convicted in a campaign fraud finance case, for using funds from a foreign investor to try to influence political candidates through campaign donations. There was a $325,000 donation to the pro-Trump American First PAC from a shell company set up by Parnas and Fruman. That was enough for both men to get invited to an exclusive donors’ dinner in April 2018 with Trump at his Washington hotel, at which both men urged the president to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption crusader, claiming that she was unfriendly to Trump, The Washington Post reported
Parnas and Fruman became Giuliani’s facilitators and translators as he revved up efforts to go after Biden, even though he had yet to declare his candidacy.
 

WAS RUDY A “USEFUL TOOL” FOR A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN BY RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE?

Now there’s one big unanswered question: Was Giuliani wittingly or unwittingly acting as a “useful tool” to spread disinformation prepared by Russian intelligence aimed at derailing Biden’s presidential campaign? It’s not implausible, because U.S. Intelligence has already confirmed that Russia was spreading disinformation about Biden’s mental health. 
Giuliani and Trump in 2016
The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that U.S. intelligence agencies had warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence and being used to feed disinformation to Trump. Giuliani did ask Ukraine to probe accusations that Ukrainian officials plotted to rig the 2016 presidential election in Hillary Clinton’s favor, by leaking evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. Giuliani wanted Ukraine to investigate a mysterious Democratic National Committee server that Trump believed was hidden in Ukraine.
During the November 2019, House Intelligence Committee hearings, Fiona Hill, the former Russia expert for the National Security Council, called out House Republicans for pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” Hill said.
Giuliani was pushing allegations that Biden, while vice president to Barack Obama, pushed to get Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin dismissed, in order to avoid a corruption investigation of Ukraine’s Burisma energy company, whose board members included Hunter Biden. But Giuliani could not have come up with this conspiracy theory on his own, because it was totally baseless. It’s logical to assume that this notion was spoon fed to Giuliani, who eagerly swallowed it.
One method used by Russian intelligence operatives is to put ideas into the head of someone who is receptive to the same goal—in this case derailing Biden’s candidacy. The notion that Biden stood a good chance of defeating Trump in 2020 must have really stuck in Giuliani’s craw. It was Biden who turned “America’s mayor” into a national laughingstock in an October 2007 Democratic presidential debate.

“Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president,” Biden said.

At the time, Giuliani was the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He ended up running one of the most humiliating campaigns in modern U.S. political history, raising more than $60 million and winning only one delegate before dropping out. Giuliani then vanished into the political wilderness for eight years, only to reemerge as Trump’s personal lawyer and hatchet man.

Giuliani had access to Trump, who had repeatedly expressed his willingness to get dirt on his political opponents from foreign sources. Giuliani’s international consulting practice had clients in Ukraine dating back to at least 2008, including Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Giuliani put out this intriguing tweet:

...incriminating documents. It was already a fully-intact bribery/extortion case. The reason you don’t know about it is because of the cover up by the corrupt Democrats and their establishment media!

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) January 27, 2020

The dossier was allegedly handed to Giuliani sometime in the fall of 2018. That raises some obvious questions: Who prepared it? What were its contents? Who were the witnesses? And who gave the dossier to Giuliani?

There are many possible suspects. A month before Trump’s first impeachment trial, NBC News published a guide to the controversial figures helping Giuliani dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. The story noted that “most of them have ties to pro-Russian political figures or oligarchs.” Three names stand out in this rogues’ gallery: Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine’s parliament; Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former prosecutor; and Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon with deep ties to Russia.

Derkach studied at the FSB intelligence service academy in Moscow in the 1990s. Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote that a top-secret CIA assessment had concluded that Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation which involves Derkach, identified by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, who has been providing anti-Biden information to Giuliani.

Kulyk did prepare a seven-page, English-language dossier in late 2018 that accused Hunter Biden of corruption related to his service on Burisma’s board, according to The New York Times. The dossier also made the dubious claim that U.S. diplomats covered up for crimes committed by the Bidens. Ukrainian officials said Kulyk had ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine, accused of working for the Russian intelligence services. It’s not clear whether this was the same dossier that Giuliani was referring to in his tweet.

Firtash has been fighting extradition from Austria to the U.S. on bribery and racketeering charges. Parnas has alleged that Giuliani offered help with Firtash’s U.S. legal problems, in exchange for helping with the hunt for compromising information on the Bidens. Federal prosecutors also alleged that Parnas received a $1 million loan from a lawyer for Firtash. 

Firtash was also involved in investment projects with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who previously was paid millions of dollars to work as a political consultant for Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

HOW GIULIANI PUT THE SQUEEZE ON UKRAINE BEFORE ZELENSKYY’S ELECTION 

At the annual White House Hannukah party on Dec. 6, 2018, Parnas and Fruman held a private meeting with Trump and Giuliani. CNN reported that Trump tasked them to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, according to associates of Parnas. 

Parnas and Giuliani in 2018

In December 2018, Parnas and Fruman arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and Shokin, the former Ukraine prosecutor general who was the source of the debunked reports that Joe Biden had him fired to stop him from investigating wrongdoing in Burisma.

Biden actually was among multiple Western officials who had urged Ukraine to dismiss Shokin from his post at the country’s top prosecutor because of his insufficient efforts to combat corruption.

Bloomberg News reported that Giuliani met for the first time with then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko in New York on Jan. 25-26, 2019. Giuliani held another meeting with the Ukrainian prosecutor in Warsaw, Poland, in mid-February. Parnas and Fruman attended both meetings.

And then in late February we get to the quid pro quo, with Giuliani’s associates telling Poroshenko that if Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens, he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House.

Yet why didn’t the Trump administration try to extort Poroshenko by withholding shipments of lethal weapons? Perhaps because there might have been a previous quid pro quo.

In March 2018, the Pentagon approved the sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. In early April, a Ukraine anti-corruption prosecutor froze four cases involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, The New York Times reported. Ukraine also announced it was halting all cooperation with the Mueller investigation. One of the cases resulted from the mysterious black ledger. In August 2016, Ukraine officials revealed the existence of a secret ledger, which appeared to detail payouts totaling $12.5 million to Manafort for his work as a consultant to Yanukovych.

But there was a catch that rendered the Javelin sale mostly symbolic. The U.S. insisted that the missiles be stored in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the frontlines in the eastern Donbas region, where Ukrainian forces were battling pro-Russian separatists, The Atlantic reported.

During their early 2019 meetings, Lutsenko fed some information to Giuliani, including bank records that detailed Burisma’s payments to Hunter Biden. But the records did not indicate any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, according to a New Yorker profile of the Ukrainian prosecutor. Lutsenko told The New Yorker that he suggested to Giuliani that, if U.S. authorities opened an investigation into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, the prosecutor-general’s office would share any relevant information.

But Lutsenko soon realized that what seemed most important to Giuliani was to get him to announce investigations into the Bidens and into claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to The New Yorker. Lutsenko said he didn’t have any grounds to open such investigations under Ukrainian law. Lutsenko said he sensed that Poroshenko was worried that publicly announcing such investigations would damage Ukraine’s relations with the Democratic Party.

Ukraine had enjoyed strong bipartisan support until Trump came along. Trump’s Republican loyalists were already spouting conspiracy theories put forth by Russian intelligence that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.

“I was near the red line, but I didn’t cross it,” Lutsenko told The New Yorker. “I was wondering what kind of game he (Giuliani) was playing. I felt like we were getting scammed.”

WE NEED A COUNTERESPIONAGE INVESTIGATION OF TRUMP, GIULIANI, MANAFORT, ET AL.

Imagine the consequences today if Poroshenko and Lutsenko had crossed that red line back in early 2019.

Instead, Giuliani and his associates were back at square one with Zelenskyy’s election. That set in motion the series of events leading to Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelenskyy, the arms-for-dirt extortion plot, and the president’s eventual impeachment (the first one, anyway).

The Mueller probe barely uncovered the tip of the iceberg, because its scope was limited to looking only into collusion between Russia and Trump during the 2015-2016 presidential campaign.

The DOJ should make a deal with Parnas and/or Fruman to reduce their sentences in exchange for information about whether Russian intelligence used Giuliani to interfere in the 2020 election by undermining Biden’s campaign. It is also high time that a counterespionage investigation be opened against Manafort, if it is not already under way.

And above all else, we need a comprehensive investigation of Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs over the decades. With the help of former Attorney General William Barr and others, Trump has been able to escape any consequences for his ties to Russia.

Our nation will never be secure until these criminals are exposed and held to account.

Giuliani’s home searched, phone seized, as investigators finally get past roadblocks laid by Trump

Posted on (Updated by Mark Sumner

Multiple sources are reporting that federal investigators executed a search warrant at a Manhattan apartment owned by former mayor, current Trump surrogate, and leader of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani. According to The New York Times, that search is directly connected to an investigation of Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine.

For literally years, Giuliani has been pushing false stories about President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and actions that were taken in Ukraine during the Obama administration. The stories that Giuliani brought back from Ukraine led directly to the dismissal of a talented ambassador, generated a whole series of congressional investigations, and encouraged Donald Trump to make a phone call to the Ukrainian president that led directly to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2021 · 7:08:34 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

The New York Times is now reporting that investigators have extended their search to Giuliani’s office, and to the home of Guiliani associate Victoria Toensing, who also worked with Giuliani on several of his efforts to convince former Ukrainian officials to create false charges against Joe Biden or Huntet Biden. Toensing is closely associated with Russian organized crime figure Dmytro Firtash, who was also connected to Parnas and Fruman.

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2021 · 7:13:39 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Rudy Giuliani is not appearing on his 3 pm radio show on 77 WABC today.

— lvl 46 dog-faced pony potus (@thetomzone) April 28, 2021

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2021 · 7:17:27 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

And Giuliani has now deleted this tweet: https://t.co/2RCWwXy4E8 pic.twitter.com/U6rfPLJR6c

— Will Steakin (@wsteaks) April 28, 2021

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2021 · 7:19:42 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

I concur that Rudy Giuliani is in deep trouble

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) April 28, 2021

Wednesday, Apr 28, 2021 · 8:10:56 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

A reminder of the legal standard: A federal magistrate judge concluded there was probable cause evidence of a crime or crimes would be present at the residence of Victoria Toensing. https://t.co/U0LJV9G8IX

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) April 28, 2021

Despite multiple denials, Trump eventually admitted that he sent Giuliani to Ukraine specifically for the purposes of finding—or creating—dirt Trump could use against Biden. In the process, Giuliani worked worked with a pair of scam artists who were arrested trying to leave the country and charged with bribery, conspiracy, and funneling foreign funds into U.S. elections. Considering all this, it’s not surprising that as far back as October of 2019, Giuliani was known to be the subject of a criminal investigation.

What’s amazing is that it’s taken this long for investigators to get around to searching Giuliani’s East Side apartment. But then, as people say, elections matter.

There’s an irony in The New York Times breaking the news that Giuliani is being investigated for his actions in connections with Ukraine, because it was the Times which provided Giuliani with breathless reporting in which they pasted pages of unverified charges made against the Biden family. Some actual investigation by Bloomberg in May of 2019 showed that there really was a scandal, but it didn’t involve Biden. It involved Giuliani and a cohort of pro-Russia Ukrainians working to create a deceptive image of what had happened that was exactly backward from actual events.

Somehow, despite what seemed to be heaps of evidence that ensnared Giuliani into the schemes for which his associates Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas were indicted, Giuliani was left free to wander about the country, spreading lies about the election and heading up the team that generated the second Trump impeachment.

For a guy who once said he was worried about becoming a “laughingstock,” it’s really hard to see how Giuliani could have done much better.

According to reporting both the Times and at CNBC, investigators have been trying to get a search warrant for Giuliani’s residence “for months.” However, those attempts were repeatedly blocked. Now that Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr aren’t in place to keep the wheels of justice stuck in the mud, it seems that investigators have finally gotten around to not only searching Giuliani’s apartment, but seizing all his electronic devices.

The Wall Street Journal reports that investigators arrived at Giuliani’s place at 6 AM before beginning their search. So expect Fox News to be filled with the same umbrage that greeted a search of Roger Stone’s home before his arrest, and the offices of Michael Cohen, before his arrest. 

The investigation into Giuliani is, as might be expected, directly connected to the cases against Parnas and Fruman. Both of those indictments featured false names to cover what was clearly Giuliani’s involvement. The investigation is expected to extend from illegal lobbying for Ukrainian officials in the United States, to Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine, and his involvement in the removal of experienced ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

The story of Giuliani’s attempt to manufacture dirt on Biden, assist a collection of foreign criminals, and thwart the will of American voters isn’t over. But the lawyer who helped get Trump impeached—twice—may finally be getting his real day in court.

Trump and the right are buzzing with hatred toward Hunter Biden … and Bill Barr

Posted on by Mark Sumner

To be absolutely clear: Bill Barr is a terrible attorney general who has used his position to grossly distort the whole purpose of the Justice Department. He auditioned for the role with a letter claiming the Russia investigation was illegal, substituted his own “summary” for the findings of the actual Mueller report, and personally signaled for his prison guard shock troops to begin a violent attack on unarmed protesters. Barr has spent most of the last two years trying to fulfill Donald Trump’s every conspiracy theory dream by appointing special investigators, providing an endless stream of disinformation to right-wing media, and traveling the world in an attempt to find an ally willing to roast U.S. intelligence agencies. And all of that is on top of Barr’s previous star turn in which he played a central role in dismissing charges resulting from Iran-Contra. He’s a bad attorney general, a bad American, and simply a bad man.

But just because Barr is determinedly malevolent, and saved Trump from what should have been an impeachment over the plain fact that his campaign engaged in every form of cooperation with the Russian government in order to subvert the outcome of a U.S. election, it doesn’t mean that Trump is always going to be happy with him. And now, in the twilight of both their careers, Trump is increasingly treating Barr as an enemy.

In Trump’s mind, there are only two possible roles anyone can serve: Completely subservient bootlicker, or infuriating opponent. There is no in between.

So the fact that Barr didn’t wholeheartedly join in with Rudy Giuliani and his parade of Hunter Biden laptops as confirmed by blind shop owners before the election had already made Barr suspect. Trump repeatedly tweeted a mixture of disdain and distaste for Barr in the weeks before the election as it became clear that, unlike 2016, there was not going to be some last-minute statement from the DOJ or FBI to provide Trump a last-minute vote infusion. And now a story from The Wall Street Journal has Trump hammering away at Barr again while Trump supporters are calling Barr a traitor and Republican senators are demanding yet another very special counsel. 

The claims from the WSJ began with a story in which Hunter Biden admitted that his federal income taxes are under investigation. Of course, Donald Trump has claimed that he could not reveal his tax returns for the last ever because he’s perennially under audit. It’s also widely known that Trump’s taxes are the subject of investigations by the State of New York. However, what’s routine for Trump is apparently supposed to be scandalous for Joe Biden’s surviving son—a son who will have no role in the upcoming administration. The investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes apparently predates both Barr and Trump’s phone call to Ukraine but is said to be restricted to tax issues and “doesn’t implicate other members of his family or the president-elect.”

But what has the whole right wing in an uproar is the idea that … Barr knew. Barr knew, and he didn’t make a statement that Trump could use before the election. For Trump, this isn’t just an excuse to attack Barr for failing to come through the clinch, but also to claim that Biden’s term is going to be “so plagued by scandal” that the Supreme Court just might as well hand the election to Trump and save everyone some time and embarrassment.

And of course, Barr did know. He knew that while Hunter Biden’s taxes were being investigated by an office of the department he controlled. Barr also knew that no crime has been alleged, no one has been indicted, and that nothing appeared to be connected to the actual candidate for office. A fuming Trump supporter inside the DOJ also complained that Barr knew about another investigation involving Hunter Biden, an investigation that the WSJ was quick to highlight … before reaching the point where it admits that its sources indicate Hunter was “never a specific target for criminal prosecution.” Connected to the first investigation, this appears to be more a matter of looking at a bank that may have made some shady deals rather than anything specifically done by Hunter Biden.

So what Barr knew was that Hunter Biden’s taxes were being examined in one investigation, and Biden was not the target of a second investigation. Still, Barr’s failure to jump up and down and scream about a family of criminals is apparently all that was required to toss him from the good graces of Trump and his supporters.

Of course Barr may think that trying to at least approximate normal behavior on this one topic at a time when Trump is about to depart center stage might be enough to get him accepted back into normal society. He’s going to be disappointed.

Trump expected splashy Wall Street Journal coverage of Hunter Biden’s emails. He was disappointed

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Rudy Giuliani’s ridiculous waterlogged laptop story wasn’t supposed to be the way the public learned about an alleged trove of Hunter Biden emails. It was supposed to come from a much more reputable Rupert Murdoch-owned publication. Not even Fox News, which passed. No, some ostensibly more reputable Trumpsters were trying to sell the email story—minus the laptop angle—to The Wall Street Journal. 

Eric Herschmann, the former Trump impeachment lawyer turned White House adviser, former deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, and a public relations person who’s buddies with Don Jr. met with WSJ reporter Michael Bender in early October, The New York Times’ Ben Smith reports. At that meeting, they handed over Hunter Biden emails—including some of the same ones Giuliani supposedly got from the laptop—and put his former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, on speaker phone to make allegations that Joe Biden had profited from Hunter’s corrupt use of the family name. That effort to sell the story ran into one big problem: The Wall Street Journal took its time investigating and decided there wasn’t a lot of there there.

While that investigation was ongoing, Giuliani got the New York Post to run his laptop story, which quickly came under question. (Questions like “Are you f’ing kidding me?” and “So Rudy’s basically a Russian asset now, right?)

But Donald Trump knew that The Wall Street Journal was supposedly going to be doing a story on the emails, and he was excited, telling aides that an “important piece” was coming in the paper. While “The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a reporter told Smith, the investigation into the emails continued. But it didn't go on Team Trump’s schedule, which called for a major, splashy article before last week’s debate. Instead, the eventual WSJ article came after Bobulinski went to the press himself, and Trump tried to make him an issue in the debate. The headline of the short article eventually published? “Hunter Biden’s Ex-Business Partner Alleges Father Knew About Venture.”

That’s not exactly what the White House lawyer and former White House lawyer were looking for—they wanted the New York Post insinuations laundered through the respectability of the WSJ. And of course the whole story is further discredited by having multiple overlapping sets of Hunter Biden emails being pushed around by different parts of Team Trump. The laptop story is dubious enough on its own—man from California delivers laptop to Delaware repair shop where blind Trump-supporting owner can’t identify him as Hunter Biden but figures it out from Biden-related sticker on the laptop, etc etc etc, improbability stacking upon improbability—but when you know that that wasn't the only set of supposed Hunter Biden emails, well, it really screams Russian influence campaign. And it screams Trump desperation for any game-changer in the campaign, however illegitimate.

Giuliani’s smear on Hunter Biden is so ridiculous, Fox News passed on it … then covered it 24/7

Posted on by Mark Sumner

Once upon a time—also know as 2019—Donald Trump tried to blackmail the president of Ukraine into making false claims about Hunter Biden. Trump got caught, got impeached, and got not even a slap on the wrist from Senate Republicans who were willing to allow Trump to do anything in exchange for a flood of conservative judges. After all, when you’ve already waved off the Hatch Act, ignored federal laws over nepotism, and blown off an endless stream of lies … what’s a little extortion of an ally for political advantage?

When Trump didn’t get what he wanted from from Volodymyr Zelensky, he put both U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and Rudy Giuliani on the case. Barr grabbed U.S. attorney John Durham and opened up an investigation that saw him flying around the world in an attempt to find someone reputable who would lend the slightest credence to Trump’s incredible claims. Giuliani … just skipped out on the “reputable.” Instead, he grabbed a pair of foot soldiers for a Russian oligarch, latched onto some officials who had been kicked out for corruption, and worked directly with an “active Russian agent” to produce a whole series of false claims and fake evidence. 

That brings us to now. Barr’s efforts have apparently come up dry. One part of his investigation has already shut down, Durham’s top assistant has resigned, and there’s no report worth even a patently false summary before Election Day. The Giuliani side has produced a hard drive. A hard drive supposedly dropped off in Delaware by a man who lived in California, at a shop owned by a vocal Trump supporter, where the security footage was mysteriously wiped, the blind shop owner could not identify the person who dropped it off, there was no name or contact information provided, and no one ever returned for it. 

Giuliani’s story is so ridiculous that both Fox News and the New York Post reporter who was forced to write it both disowned it. After years of trying to smear Biden, this really is the best they can do.

As Mediaite reports, the New York Post was hardly Giuliani’s first choice in trying to get this contemptible last-ditch effort into the media. It’s unclear how many other places he went first, but it is clear that he came to Fox News with his story of an unclaimed laptop. Fox News looked at the story, got out their 10-foot pole, and carefully pushed the whole pile back to Giuliani.

After all, this is far from the first time that Giuliani has come up with supposedly shocking information that just happens to support Trump’s every delusional claim. In September, it became clear that Giuliani was working closely with U.S. Sec. of State Mike Pompeo. It’s since come out that the packet of information that Pompeo shared with Republican lawmakers, but not with Democrats, did not come from sources within the State Department. He was simply laundering pages for Giuliani. Naturally, Trump’s personal attorney could not stop bragging about this. At the start of October, he told CNN that he was the source for the Biden information in Republican’s hands. 

This information was enough that Louie Gohmert and Paul Gosar, DDS were willing to scrawl their signatures on a letter to the Justice Department, along with nine other Republicans out of 250 in the House and Senate. But the many, many places where the Giuliani’s claims weren’t just wholly unbelievable but clearly connected to a known Republican disinformation campaign against Biden did bother a few other people.  

Not only is there the little problem of there being absolutely no provenance concerning the hard drive itself—everything about the story of where it was found has holes the size of ocean liners. The shop owner has given various accounts about how the laptop (or laptops, since he at one point claimed there were three), entered his shop; he’s been completely contradictory about how it came to the attention of the FBI; and when and how Giuliani became involved in the affair is as clear as mud. Also, there’s a little matter of how dates on the files found on the machine seem to be from months after the machine was supposedly dropped off.

But just because Fox News wouldn’t take it directly, that doesn’t mean that Rupert Murdoch wasn’t willing to step in to help out his pals. After the story was turned away from Fox News, it was shuffled over to the Murdoch-owned paper where New York Times reports reporter Bruce Golding was tasked with taking the documents, and Giuliani’s ravings, and turning them into an article. But once he heard the whole tale, Golding refused to put his name to the piece. So did other journalists in the Post news room … and this is a paper that just last year went with a front page emblazoned “Bezos exposes Pecker.”

Instead, the story eventually ran under the byline of Emma-Jo Morris. Morris is a former booker for Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, who made the trip across to the Post just in time for Giuliani’s Russian fabrication to be her very first article. A second name on the article was Post reporter Gabrielle Fonrouge. Fonrouge’s name ended up there in the most efficient manner. The Post’s editors put it there, and didn’t tell Fonrouge until after it was published.

All of this works perfectly for Fox, for the Post, for Giuliani, for Trump, and most importantly, for Putin. Fox doesn’t have to front the story. With the story in the Post, Fox can report on it. They can ask Republicans to comment on it. They can construct great rambling opinions from Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The Post can then report on the comments their story is getting on Fox. Trump can retweet it all. Republicans in the House can cite all of the above as justification for demanding William Barr whip up a special investigator. And Vladimir Putin … can laugh.