Rudy Giuliani to “negotiate an end” to the Mueller probe

At the moment, I’m reading through the just released Comey memos, but I wanted to take a quick break, and share some good news. It looks as though our long national nightmare may finally be coming to an end. The White House today announced that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would be joining the President’s legal team, where he’d be leading the effort to bring the Mueller investigation to a successful conclusion. Giuliani, Trump said in a statement, would be working to get the whole matter “quickly resolved for the good of the country.” Echoing these comments, Giuliani told the Washington Post this afternoon that, as Trump had stated, he’d been brought onboard to “negotiate an end” to the Mueller probe. So, now, I think it’s safe to say, it’s just a matter of time. Within a few days at most, I predict all of the uncertainty and chaos of the past year will be behind us, and we’ll all be raising a glass to Rudy Giuliani… our nation’s greatest legal mind… the one man capable of sorting out the misunderstandings upon which the Mueller probe was constructed.

OK, as we all know, that’s never going to happen… This isn’t the kind of thing that one can negotiate an end to. We’re not talking about a first offense for possession of pot. The Mueller probe already has 19 indictments and 5 guilty pleas, and the charges include “Conspiracy against the United States.” You could be the best negotiator in the world… a veritable Donald Trump, if you will… and you still couldn’t negotiate an end to this. As Mueller has told us very clearly, he “like(s) putting people in jail“, and he’s not going to stop until the entire Trump crime family has been completely dismantled.

Some, however, seem to think that Giuliani might succeed where so many others have failed. [Trump’s last attorney, as you may recall, only lasted a day.] Fox News contributor Charles Lane, for example, today said, “Maybe there is honestly some new thinking in the White House about the best approach here, that maybe if you bring in Rudy Giuliani as a whole new face to sit down with Mueller and say, ‘okay let’s cut a deal of some kind here,’…You can’t rule it out.

By that same logic, why not try something really new, like hiring a mime or a circus clown to negotiate with Mueller, or maybe an actor who played an attorney on television? [The last time I checked, Scott Baio was still available.]

But, yes, let’s suspend reality for a moment and try to imagine a world in which the team responsible for this video is the team to bring us closure it what’s probably the largest, most intricate criminal probe in Department of Justice history.

All kidding aside, there is one good thing about all of this. It’ll put Giuliani in a room with Mueller, where, one imagines, the two will discuss just how it came to be that Giuliani knew that the FBI would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server just before the election, and the extent to which Giuliani coordinated with anti-Clinton agents within the New York City FBI field office to make it happen.

Oh, one last thing… Speaking of the just released Comey memos, he was on Rachel Maddow’s show this evening discussing them. I particularly enjoyed this exchange, in which the former head of the FBI confirms that Donald Trump told him, shortly after taking office, that he and Putin had spoken in the past about Russian hookers. [As you’ll recall, Trump has said in the past that he and Putin had never spoken prior to his becoming president.]

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12 Comments

  1. Josh
    Posted April 19, 2018 at 11:23 pm | Permalink

    The FBI is not your friend, even if it occasionally fucks with your enemies.

  2. Jean Henry
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 12:39 am | Permalink

    Another set of memos that seem damning to the right and I just look and think, “wha???” The disconnect is real.

    Re Trump and the Putin hooker comment, apparently Putin said that on TV in a press conference with the president of Moldavia. Trump simply watched it and imagined Putin said it directly to him. I’m wondering how many of Trumps own lies he believes… And this was after the inauguration, not before.

    Also, Comey is pretty awesome. Imperfect but solid.

  3. stupid hick
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 6:35 am | Permalink

    Maybe what Putin said on TV (I saw it in real time) are the exact words Agalarov said to convince Trump at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, and that’s how Trump knows Putin was sending a signal directly to him.

  4. Anonymous
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 6:45 am | Permalink

    The president America deserves.

  5. Meta
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 8:53 am | Permalink

    Slate: “Why Were Republicans So Desperate To Release the Embarrassing Comey Memos? Here’s One Explanation.”

    On Thursday, the Department of Justice handed James Comey’s contemporaneous memos of his conversations with President Donald Trump over to Congress. They were immediately revealed to the press.

    Among other highlights, the documents showed:

    • Comey’s Senate testimony, the story in his book, and the interviews he’s given during his publicity tour describing the details of conversations he had with Trump hew incredibly closely to what he wrote at the time of the conversations themselves.

    • During a previously unreported Feb. 8 conversation with Trump—which had been recorded in a classified memo—the president allegedly said to him that Vladimir Putin had personally told Trump “we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.” This statement was allegedly made in front of former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

    • According to that classified memo: Prior to that conversation, Priebus met Comey in his office and allegedly asked him if they were having a “private conversation.” He then asked him: “Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?” Priebus, it should be noted, was seeking information about a criminal probe that would be useful to any of Flynn’s potential confederates.

    None of this actually seems to be good for Trump. Which is why it’s so odd, as Business Insider’s Josh Barro noted on Twitter, that House Republicans had gone to such enormous lengths to pressure Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to reveal the memos.

    Some House Republicans had gone so far as to threaten Rosenstein with impeachment if he didn’t release the memos (his reason for not wanting to do so seems to have been a legitimate desire not to break longstanding protocol by revealing the details of an ongoing investigation).

    Ultimately, there were only two substantive things that Republicans could seem to affirmatively point to from the memos, which were highlighted in a joint press release from Republican chairmen of the three relevant House committees. First was the fact that Comey never explicitly said in the memos: “Trump obstructed my investigation.” This is not something Comey ever claimed to have written, nor is it actually evidence of anything. Second, the press release argued that the “cloud” Trump wanted to clear up was a cloud surrounding the “pee tape” and not the Russia investigation itself. That interpretation is debatable, but again doesn’t seem like a particularly positive bombshell that would bolster Trump.

    Again, the question remains: Why would they want to reveal the “Trump told Comey about Putin’s personal hooker recommendation” and “Reince Priebus privately sought investigatory details about Mike Flynn” stories in order to get those two tidbits out?

    One ungenerous theory would be that they wanted the details of the investigation revealed to potential witnesses in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe—such as Priebus and the president himself—in order to help protect these witnesses from lying to investigators. I don’t believe this is the reason. Given that Priebus has already been interviewed and that Trump’s legal team has indicated in recent days that he won’t submit to an interview, this wouldn’t actually seem to accomplish much.

    There’s a second theory, though, that I believe makes much more sense.

    Since the start of the year—but particularly since the start of the book tour—Republicans have suggested that the memos Comey had leaked were actually classified documents and that he had perjured himself about this in Senate testimony. This was the only actual substantive “lie” that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was able to point to last week when she was asked to justify the Republican campaign calling him a liar. “Even the media has reported that officials have determined that Comey leaked four memos—at least four that we know about—with classified information,” Sanders said. (This gets a bunch of alleged facts wrong, but see below to understand what Sanders likely was trying to say.)

    [continued]

    This all ultimately seems to explain why House Republicans were so eager to get these memos into the public. It seems as though they thought the memos would prove Comey had illegally leaked classified information and lied about it. It seems as though they were basing this entirely on a bit of contradictory—and likely inaccurate—Fox News reporting. And it seems that this contradictory, likely inaccurate reporting was done by Fox News to help validate this Donald Trump tweet, which was sent two days after Comey’s Senate testimony.

    Read more:
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/why-were-republicans-so-desperate-to-release-the-embarrassing-comey-memos-heres-one-explanation.html

  6. EOS
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 9:09 am | Permalink

    Why Were Republicans So Desperate To Release the Embarrassing Comey Memos?

    1) There were redacted portions which proves Comey shared confidential material with persons who did not have proper clearance, which is a prosecutable offense.

    2) In Comey’s own writing, he reveals that Trump asked him to find out if anyone in his administration/campaign had inappropriate contacts with the Russians and if he finds anyone to reveal that information. Hence, proof of no collusion or cover-up.

    3) They were most embarrassing to Comey. Comey admitted in his recent TV appearance that he reopened the investigation of the Clinton emails only after he was assured that she would win the election – therefore tainting the FBI with partisan politics. He was incompetent and deserved to be fired and should be indicted for his crimes.

  7. Kyle Griffin by proxy
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 9:42 am | Permalink

    Some close to the president tell NYT that they believe Trump could try to replace Jeff Sessions with Rudy Giuliani in the coming months.

    https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/987333833891688452

  8. EOS
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 10:44 am | Permalink

    Mueller is DYING to get fired. Then he’ll be a martyr! A hero! Otherwise, he’s just a loser who couldn’t find any crimes by Trump.

    Ann Coulter

  9. Jean Henry
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 1:20 pm | Permalink

    For a person who highly values morality and decency, you choose some strange bedfellows, EOS.

  10. Anonymous
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 2:57 pm | Permalink

    Here’s an even funnier headline/quote.

    Giuliani predicts Mueller’s going finish his investigation in “a week or two” bit.ly/2vvpXAz

  11. nick
    Posted April 20, 2018 at 4:11 pm | Permalink

    https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-34-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-msnbc

    citations needed is a good podcast, listening to it is better for u than watching msnbc.

  12. iRobert
    Posted January 18, 2019 at 2:58 pm | Permalink

    Jean, you’re confusing EOS’s with his cosplay character. Leonard Nemoy wasn’t a Vulcan in real life.

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