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An attorney for Lev Parnas, a client of Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani under indictment for allegedly making illegal political contributions, made an unusual claim in court on Wednesday: Some evidence in the investigation could fall under executive privilege.

The legal concept being promulgated here is that executive privilege behaves according to something like the transitive property—that the president’s privilege extends to Giuliani and thus extends to the goons to whom Giuliani had subcontracted the actual ratfucking work. That’s a wild stretch, but the more significant thing about the argument is that it explicitly ties the case to Trump.

Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman have pleaded not guilty to federal campaign finance charges. As my colleague Dan Friedman has reported, Giuliani, who has represented Parnas and Fruman, has said that his clients “have helped him seek political dirt in Ukraine on former Vice President Joe Biden and other matters,” an effort at the core of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

Via the New York Times: