How Deep the Rot Goes

.@murraywaas on Giuliani: "The Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation." Wow. https://t.co/LrBOcAxgo9 @nybooks

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) September 26, 2019

Saw this last night, but didn't take the time to read it.  Here's the nut:

The effort by President Trump to pressure the government of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son had its origins in an earlier endeavor to obtain information that might provide a pretext and political cover for the president to pardon his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, according to previously undisclosed records.

These records indicate that attorneys representing Trump and Manafort respectively had at least nine conversations relating to this effort, beginning in the early days of the Trump administration, and lasting until as recently as May of this year. Through these deliberations carried on by his attorneys, Manafort exhorted the White House to press Ukrainian officials to investigate and discredit individuals, both in the US and in Ukraine, who he believed had published damning information about his political consulting work in the Ukraine. A person who participated in the joint defense agreement between President Trump and others under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including Manafort, allowed me to review extensive handwritten notes that memorialized conversations relating to Manafort and Ukraine between Manafort’s and Trump’s legal teams, including Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

There's more to the article, including a timeline showing Giuliani went to Ukraine and came across this Biden story, but link that up to this:

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.” 

First, is this something about white men of NYC that we should be concerned about, or is Trump just a contagion all his own?  Second, didn't Giuliani just release himself from any claim of attorney-client privilege, a privilege which protects Trump far more than the lawyer?  Meanwhile busses are being lined up for people to be thrown under:

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”

Except we have Waas' report, and the "memorandum" (it's not a transcript) that the White House released:

Giuliani met with Andriy Yermak (a top aide to Zelensky) in Madrid in early August, and on Monday, Giuliani told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the State Department wanted them to meet. But Rogin asserts that the “rough transcript” of the July 25 Trump/ Zelensky conversation “reveals Giuliani’s various attempts to characterize his activity as a State Department initiative to be extremely misleading at best and outright lies at worst.”

The “rough transcript,” according to Rogin, demonstrates that Giuliani met with Yermak not because of the State Department, but because Giuliani and Yermak were “simply following up on Trump’s request…. Yermak was following up on Trump’s suggestion, not responding to actions of the State Department.”

The rats in the barrel are going to start eating each other.