The International House of Ratfcking apparently is opening a franchise in Ukraine—Rudolph Giuliani, manager. From The New York Times:



Mr. Giuliani said he plans to travel to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in the coming days and wants to meet with the nation’s president-elect to urge him to pursue inquiries that allies of the White House contend could yield new information about two matters of intense interest to Mr. Trump. One is the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other is the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

Mr. Giuliani’s plans create the remarkable scene of a lawyer for the president of the United States pressing a foreign government to pursue investigations that Mr. Trump’s allies hope could help him in his re-election campaign. And it comes after Mr. Trump spent more than half of his term facing questions about whether his 2016 campaign conspired with a foreign power.



To say nothing of his having only the day before called for the prosecution of John Kerry under the Logan Act.



(This also comes after the NYT, apparently trolling for the next Whitewater/Clinton Cash/Uranium One/EMailllllzzzz blockbuster that it could ride for a couple of years, ran a story about Biden's son that was quickly confounded by a mistake in its timeline. So find a handy salt lick before reading it.)



International Men of Mystery. The Washington Post Getty Images

Of course, Rudy has an authentically batshit explanation for what he's up to.



“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Thursday when asked about the parallel to the special counsel’s inquiry. “There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

They're doing it right out in the open this time around. It's amazingly ballsy in a deeply crazy way.

Mr. Giuliani’s planned trip, which has not been previously reported, is part of a monthslong effort by the former New York mayor and a small group of Trump allies working to build interest in the Ukrainian inquiries. Their motivation is to try to discredit the special counsel’s investigation; undermine the case against Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s imprisoned former campaign chairman; and potentially to damage Mr. Biden, the early front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Who knows what the Ukrainians will feed him? He'll believe almost anything and sell absolutely everything to the president*, who will make sure it gets laundered into the campaign. Then will come the Covering The Questions moment, to be followed by the Clouds and Shadows over the campaign which will linger for god knows how long. Elite campaign journalism likely will fail miserably (again). It can be argued that Biden is less vulnerable than Hillary Rodham Clinton was because nobody has a 25-year running head-start in creating a supervillain out of him, but I don't have much faith in that outcome. It only took about a year for people to put Clouds and Shadows over the Clinton campaign in 1992 and they lingered and thickened in 2008 and 2016.

Right out in the open.

No excuses.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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