RUDY GIULIANI ASKS UKRAINE TO INTERFERE IN U.S. ELECTION TO HELP RE-ELECT TRUMP

“There’s nothing illegal” about it, according to the president’s lawyer.

By Tina Ngyugen @ The Hive @ VanityFair.com, May 10

There may be less to Joe Biden’s Ukraine conflict-of-interest “scandal” than meets the eye. It’s true that the optics of the vice president urging Kiev to fire a prosecutor who was investigating an energy company that counted his son Hunter Biden as a board member are not ideal. But, counters Bloomberg, the timeline doesn’t add up. According to a former Ukrainian official and documents from the time, the investigation into Burisma Holdings had ended by 2015, the year before Biden began pressuring the government to fire its corrupt prosecutor general. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against” Burisma, said former official Vitaliy Kasko. Biden defenders say the Obama administration was cracking down on corruption in Ukraine anyway, and Joe and Hunter say they never discussed the matter with each other.

Nevertheless, Fox News is all over the Biden-Clinton-Manafort-Ukraine conspiracy. (Yes, there are also connections to Hillary Clinton and Paul Manafort, which my colleague Abigail Tracy details here.) At the center of the effort to make Bidengate the next Benghazi is Rudy Giuliani, who sees nothing wrong with pressuring the Ukrainian government to reopen the investigation into Burisma. “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” he told The New York Times in a story published Thursday, on the eve of a trip to Kiev to launch his charm offensive.

The irony is so rich it could give you a heart attack. Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine are, of course, precisely what Republicans accuse Clinton’s campaign of doing in 2016, when Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele went fishing for Ukrainian dirt on Donald Trump.On Thursday night, Giuliani told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that there had been “massive collusion” between “the Democratic National Committee, officials of the Obama administration, Clinton people, and the Ukrainian officials” to “create false information about Trump, about Manafort.” Naturally, then, Giuliani wants to counter that with some collusion of his own [....]