Category: JaySekulow

Prosecutors investigating Giuliani seized wider array of materials than previously disclosed

Posted on (Updated by Kerry Eleveld

Oopsies. Looks like the investigation into personal Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is broader than what was previously reported. A court document unsealed Tuesday revealed that federal prosecutors obtained correspondence from email and iCloud accounts that appear to belong to two former Ukrainian government officials, according to CNN. Additionally, prosecutors seized a cell phone and iPad belonging to a pro-Trump Ukrainian businessman.  

CNN also accessed redacted portions of the court filing by cutting/pasting it into a new document and found that federal prosecutors obtained the "historical and prospective cell site information" of both Giuliani and Victoria Toensing, an attorney who informally advised Donald Trump and aided Giuliani's dirt digging efforts. Investigators executed a search warrant on both attorneys last month.

According to CNN, the Ukrainians involved are former Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko, former head of the Ukrainian Fiscal Service Roman Nasirov, and businessman Alexander Levin.

The court filing came from Joseph Bondy, the defense lawyer for indicted former Giuliani associate Lev Parnas. It contained some juicy revelations, including the fact that federal prosecutors had described materials they obtained starting in late 2019 and extending through last month. Bondy was petitioning the judge in Parnas' case for a status conference on the seized materials, which he believed to be relevant to Parnas' defense. 

But here's the juiciest part of the CNN scoop:

Bondy wrote that the evidence seized "likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications" between Giuliani, Toensing, former President Donald Trump, former Attorney General Bill Barr, "high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as a means to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump."

Just to be clear, none of this is verified and even Bondy used the term “likely.” But wow—encrypted communications between Trump, Barr, Sekulow, Graham, and Nunes, potentially related to an effort to silence Parnas and presumably his partner, Igor Fruman, in advance of Trump's first impeachment inquiry. 

Hard to know whether Bondy is right, but any encrypted communications among that cast of characters that proved fruitful for prosecutors would certainly be interesting. 

Trump’s legal team closed out his ‘defense’ by showing that it had no defense

Posted on by Mark Sumner

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s legal team stood before the Senate to give its closing argument … and discovered it didn’t have one. Instead, Pat Philbin spent half an hour adding some footnotes to Alan Dershowitz’s Monday night muddle. Pat Cipollone devoted 10 minutes to running some 20-year-old video of Democratic representatives complaining about Bill Clinton’s impeachment. And Jay Sekulow provided America with an hour of television too incoherent even for Alex Jones.

Sekulow’s final speech wasn’t so much an argument as it was the world’s angriest tone poem, a dissociative spew that drew from more conspiracy theories than four seasons of X-Files. And if it sometimes seemed that Sekulow was channeling the robot from Lost in Space, he was most definitely lost. But Sekulow did have a theme: Why won’t everyone stop picking on Donald Trump?

James Comey, Nellie Ohr, FISA warrant, Senate floor Foreign agent, Robert Mueller, Crossfire Hurricane   Peter Strzok, phone text, CrowdStrike, what’s next? Whistleblower, Lisa Page, they don’t know in Ukraine   Adam Schiff, Hamilton, “Danger” is back again, John Bolton, Manuscript, Inadmissible   Trump’s shoes, FBI, investigate the sad guy Dossier, filed away, what else is there left to say?  

Well … quite a lot, actually. Sekulow’s speech wasn’t rambling or inarticulate so much as simply pointless. He touched on more conspiracy theories than can be composed by a whole alphabet of secret Twitter sources, but even when accepting such ideas as Joe Biden being corrupt, or Donald Trump being the downtrodden underdog, Sekulow failed to knit the threads together into something that looked more organized than dryer lint. If Adam Schiff gave a moving speech for the ages, and he did, Sekulow’s coda didn’t merit a moment.

Mostly, what Sekulow achieved in an hour was the same thing his compatriots managed in a much shorter period—a statement that he had nothing. That there was no defense of Trump’s actions. That there was no answer to the challenges posed by new evidence. And he demonstrated that Donald Trump selects lawyers by loyalty, not competence.

Not one of Trump’s attorneys could produce anything that looked like a closing argument. Because that first requires an argument.

Jay Sekulow makes a fool of himself in the Senate, so of course the Trump team doubles down

Posted on by Hunter

One of the more baffling moments of the frequently baffling defense offered up by Trump's impeachment team was an extended rant on "lawyer lawsuits" delivered by Trump personal lawyer and co-conspirator to crimes Jay Sekulow. Nobody could figure out what he was going on about. Here’s a taste:

“Lawyer lawsuits? We’re talking about the impeachment of a president of the United States, duly elected, and the managers are complaining about lawyer lawsuits? The Constitution allows lawyer lawsuits. It’s disrespecting the Constitution of the United States to even say that in this chamber. Lawyer lawsuits.”

It now looks like Sekulow's whole rant was based on him completely mishearing House manager Val Demings. So naturally Team Trump is, rather than admitting that, doubling down on Sekulow's newly discovered bonnet-bug. Of course.

What House manager Demings was talking about, in her own speech, was "FOIA lawsuits" (commonly pronounced as FOY-uh). She was referring, of course, to the Freedom of Information Act-based lawsuits that have secured redacted government documents that the administration attempted to hide from the public. The Washington Post and reporter Igor Bobic, however, report that White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland insisted that Sekulow did not mishear and that "lawyer lawsuits" was a real thing. The transcript "says 'lawyer lawsuit,'" claimed Ueland.

Wait, what transcript? We don't know. Neither of the ones the Post looked at contained such a phrase, and there is certainly a distinct possibility that Ueland is, like the Trump White House continues to do on a daily and hourly basis, simply lying about it. Inventing a new hand-waving outrage out of thin air, refusing to acknowledge those who point out it is incorrect or manufactured, and then angrily insisting the new invention is in fact a great travesty and a shameful, shameful moment for Dear Leader's critics is exactly what Trump's team would do, because it is what Trump's team did throughout the night, over and over.

Republicans were not allowed to witness "secret" House depositions, they insisted. They not only were allowed, but did. Donald Trump was not allowed to present a defense, they shouted to senators. The House invited the White House to send a legal team, produce a defense, and produce documents for that defense; Trump's legal team refused. Republicans were not allowed their own witnesses, they claimed; House Republicans produced multiple witnesses, who were questioned and cross-examined on live television. These were not mischaracterizations. They were lies about recent, extremely televised, extremely reported-on public happenings that we all witnessed.

While Republican senators prattle on about the supposed dignity of their chamber, the Trump legal team lying to the Senate outright about matters in clear public view has resulted in exactly zero outrage from those lawmakers. We can infer from that that they both expect to be lied to and, in fact, are counting on it. It doesn't matter what Trump's "legal team" comes up with during their own presentations. Jay Sekulow can simply invent new words and phrases and scream at the Senate about the outrage they represent, and most of the Republican senators will nod their heads and vote ... exactly like they intended to from the first moment.