Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s “lawyer,” is emerging as the key figure in the Ukraine scandal, even as his associates keep getting arrested and we just learned that he is the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation. It’s too early to say whether Giuliani is going to wind up behind bars when this is all over, but what we can say is that despite being a private citizen, he has been wielding extraordinary influence over U.S. policy.
The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, testified Thursday in the House impeachment inquiry. Sondland, a Portland hotelier, put himself in the line of a number of people who seemed dismayed at the fact that President Trump was outsourcing U.S. foreign policy to his lawyer.
Besides being erratic (to put it kindly) and consumed with conspiracy theories, Giuliani was also pursuing not the interests of the United States but two other goals: getting dirt to smear Joe Biden in order to help Trump get re-elected, and finding ways to make money for himself.
In Sondland’s opening statement, he described dealing with Giuliani as something he found distasteful but had no choice but to do, since it came at the president’s direct order:
“Please know that I would not have recommended that Mr. Giuliani or any private citizen be involved in these foreign policy matters. However, given the president’s explicit direction, as well as the importance we attached to arranging a White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelenskiy, we agreed to do as President Trump directed.”
Unprecedented
We know full well that any discussion of “corruption” coming from Trump and Giuliani was not about fighting corruption per se — you’d have trouble finding two people who care less about actual corruption — but about using anti-corruption investigations as a tool to discredit Biden.
Having Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, managing Ukraine policy is unprecedented.
Many parts of Sondland’s testimony were almost laughably self-serving. But even if you’re skeptical of him when he says he was uncomfortable with Giuliani’s involvement, that involvement is not in question. Indeed, we keep learning about more areas where he exerted influence on Trump and more (accused) criminals he was involved with.
The picture that is becoming clear is one in which Trump not only upended the ordinary way American foreign policy is conducted, he did so in order to advance his own political purposes, by essentially handing over key decisions and coordination to Giuliani, someone with no accountability and the worst possible motives.
Again and again, Trump told people that they had to talk to Giuliani. Whatever each one of those conversations entailed, you can bet it wasn’t about the interests of the United States.
