International Man of Stupidity Rudy Giuliani is back at it again, folks. It's been a rough ride over the last few weeks for the artist formerly known as America's Mayor, though he long ago squandered any goodwill still remaining from the period in his life when he was graded on a curve. Giuliani, you see, has gotten himself deeply embroiled in the president's latest impeachable offense, a shakedown of the Ukrainian government for Donald Trump's personal political gain. While the president himself was asking Ukraine's president for a "favor"—to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and muddy the waters around Russia's attack on the 2016 election—and Trump's "diplomats" were making it clear to the Ukrainians that the military aid they needed was contingent on this "deliverable," Giuliani had his own role.

On Monday, the White House's former Russia and Eurasia adviser, Fiona Hill, reportedly testified before Congress that Giuliani was running a "shadow foreign policy" in Ukraine that circumvented the official channels tasked with promoting American interests. The most likely explanation for this is that Giuliani and his boss had no interest in American interests. (Last week, we learned the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine was likely shoved out because she wasn't cooperating with Giuliani's chicanery over there.) Among other things, Giuliani and Gordon Sondland—the ambassador to the European Union who, thanks to some texts presented to Congress, we now know was at the center of the shakedown efforts—pressed the Ukrainians to issue a public statement specifically announcing the "investigations" into Biden and 2016. This would have been seized on immediately by Trump and his allies as primo ratfucking material.

More than that, Hill quite cleverly roped in John Bolton, the bloodthirsty warmonger Trump formerly employed as his national security adviser. According to The New York Times, she quoted Bolton repeatedly in her testimony, which should make a congressional subpoena of Bolton himself inevitable. Here is what she quoted.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition. (Another person in the room initially said Mr. Bolton referred to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mulvaney, but two others said he cited Mr. Sondland.)

It was not the first time Mr. Bolton expressed grave concerns to Ms. Hill about the campaign being run by Mr. Giuliani. “Giuliani’s a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up,” Ms. Hill quoted Mr. Bolton as saying during an earlier conversation.

That doesn't sound great for America's Mayor! And neither does what we learned this morning thanks to Reuters.

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was paid $500,000 for work he did for a company co-founded by the Ukrainian-American businessman arrested last week on campaign finance charges, Giuliani told Reuters on Monday.

The Ukrainian-American businessman is Lev Parnas, one of Giuliani's two henchmen who are now in serious legal jeopardy for allegedly funneling foreign money into U.S. political campaigns, a violation of whatever's left of our campaign-finance laws. Presumably the feds will be interested in flipping these two goons in order to go after Giuliani himself, who is reportedly the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In a nice bit of twisted symmetry, that was Giuliani's first big job while he was styling himself as a tough-on-crime type in the late '80s. Now he's finding it tough to do crimes!

Oh, and we almost missed the best part. Giuliani was paid half-a-million by the Ukrainian-American henchman's company while meddling in U.S. foreign relations with Ukraine for the president's personal benefit. (This, of course, is far more straightforward corruption than they've even tried to conjure up about Biden.) Do you know what that company was called?

"Fraud Guarantee."

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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