By Matthias Williams and Natalia Zinets
KYIV (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv on Thursday in a show of support after Russia massed troops near Ukraine's eastern border in a standoff that sent alarm bells ringing in Western capitals.
Blinken is due to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, mixing solidarity with calls for Ukraine to stick to a path of reforms and fighting corruption.
"I'm here really for a very simple reason, which is to on behalf of President Biden reaffirm strongly our commitment to the partnership between our countries," Blinken said when meeting Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv.
U.S. President Joe Biden pledged "unwavering support" to Zelenskiy in April as Kyiv and Moscow traded blame for clashes in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region and Russia deployed troops and weapons to the border.
Moscow announced a withdrawal of its forces on April 22, helping pave the way for a summit between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin that could take place as early as June.
The standoff prompted Ukraine to call for the United States and Europe to help speed up Kyiv's entry into the NATO military alliance. Blinken also discussed Russia's troop build-up at a meeting with NATO allies in Brussels last month.
Blinken said Washington had a "commitment to work with you and continue to strengthen your own democracy, building institutions advancing your reforms against corruption," according to a pool report.
Washington has been Kyiv's most powerful backer since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of the Donbass conflict between Ukrainian soldiers and Russian-backed separatist forces that Kyiv says has killed 14,000 people in seven years.
The relationship was tested in 2019 when then-President Donald Trump asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and the business activities of his son Hunter in Ukraine, and the Trump administration temporarily froze security aid to Kyiv.
The fallout from those events, which led to Trump’s impeachment trial, continued last week as federal agents raided the apartment and office of Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in relation to his activities in Ukraine.
Since Biden took office, his administration has urged Ukraine to stick to its reform commitments and Blinken is expected to press Zelenskiy's government on the dismissal of Andriy Kobolyev, a reformer, as head of the state energy firm Naftogaz.
Kyiv in turn has asked Washington to supply more military hardware to Ukraine. Kuleba told Reuters last month that this included equipment to counter Russia's capacity to jam Ukrainian communications.
In a CNN interview this week, Kuleba also said Ukraine was asking for air defence systems and anti-sniper technology.
(Reporting by Matthias Williams, Natalia Zinets and Pavel Polityuk; writing by Matthias Williams, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
On Wednesday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said that former President Donald Trump believes it is not his "call" to help his longtime ally and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with his legal expenses now that he is under federal investigation.
Giuliani faces allegations that he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — the law that prohibits individuals from lobbying for foreign governments without disclosing their relationship to the federal government — with his business dealings in Ukraine.
The reporting on Trump's reluctance to get involved with Giuliani's legal expenses dovetails with previous reporting that Giuliani's allies are frustrated at the president's lack of help for his longtime friend. It also follows Trump's refusal to pay the legal expenses he owes to Giuliani for his unsuccessful work to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election — work that saw him arguing a case in federal court before a judge for the first time in over 20 years.
On Wednesday's edition of CNN's "The Lead," former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara suggested that even if Rudy Giuliani tries to flip on former President Donald Trump to save himself from the investigation into his foreign business dealings,
"New York prosecutors are also still actively investigating Donald Trump and the Trump Organization," said anchor Jake Tapper. "If you had to guess right now do you think that potentially Giuliani might flip on Trump if it means saving himself, and is that possibly what's going on with the investigation into Giuliani?"
"That's a very difficult question to answer. We're not even at the point where he's been charged," said Bharara. "We saw ... Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen never was tied up by the Southern District of New York. He made it clear he wanted to help, but perhaps they didn't trust his willingness. Giuliani would have to come clean about not just himself, but members of his family, political allies and Donald Trump and everyone else and not everyone, even if you want to save your own skin, is up to that task. It's a significant thing to do. Rudy Giuliani seems to have changed a lot in the last period of years, so — and he's unpredictable in some measure."
"You're suggesting he might not be credible anymore as a witness against Trump, were anybody trying to push him to — to do so, and yet I can easily imagine prosecutors in New York or Georgia or D.C. or wherever thinking of Trump as a big get. Don't you think?" said Tapper.
"Yeah, no, absolutely," said Bharara. "Look. Giuliani has been quoted with that remark ... saying 'I have insurance' in the context of good-faith listeners suggesting that he has information about Donald Trump. What else would he have been talking about when he referred to insurance in that context?"
"Sounds like something out of Scorcese," agreed Tapper.
Watch below:
Preet Bharara suggests Rudy Giuliani may not be credible to prosecutors if he flips on Trump www.youtube.com
Speaking to MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell in Ukraine, a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that Rudy Giuliani heavily pressed the president's office to destroy Joe Biden as he began his presidential campaign in July 2019.
Igor Novikov was asked to listen in to the call with Giuliani that gave Ukraine the implication that he was trying to create policy. Giuliani introduced himself as President Donald Trump's personal lawyer but also implied that he was a policy adviser.
Mitchell explained that the Zelensky staff "thought would be an introductory call from President Trump's former lawyer, but instead, it was something entirely different. It was a real pressure campaign."
"So at the time Rudy Giuliani is the president's friend, sometimes associate, some time lawyer. He has no role at the State Department. Was he also affecting policy?" Mitchell asked.
"Well, from our side, it seemed that was the case, unfortunately," said Novikov. "I mean, even the title changed throughout the phone call. He began the conversation by introducing himself as President Trump's personal lawyer, but then in the middle of the conversation, he already became his adviser and friend. And towards the end of the conversation, he was pretty much going in parallel with Kurt Volker saying, 'feel free to talk to President Trump about calling President Zelensky, I'll talk to him as well,' and so on and so forth. So, we were under the impression he was up there in terms of foreign policy towards Ukraine."
See the interview below:
Rudy Giuliani heavily implicated by former Ukraine aide to President Zelensky www.youtube.com
As a federal investigation into Rudy Giuliani heats up, people advising him are reaching out to Donald Trump's circle, pressuring them the former president to help out with Giuliani's legal bills, The New York Times reports.
Giuliani is also being sued for defamation by two voting machine companies for claiming that they helped orchestrate mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. Giuliani's advisers want the Trump campaign to tap into the $250 million it raised in the weeks after the election to help Giuliani with his legal expenses.
"I want to know what the GOP did with the quarter of $1 billion that they collected for the election legal fight," Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
Kerik added that "lawyers and law firms that didn't do" much work were paid handsomely, while those who worked hard "got nothing."
People familiar with the matter told the Times that Kerik made similar complaints to some of Trump's advisers in private.
"Some of Mr. Giuliani's supporters have blamed Mr. Trump's aides — and not the former president — for the standoff. However, people close to Mr. Trump said he has stridently refused to pay Mr. Giuliani," the Times reports.
Read the full report over at The New York Times.
In an interview with the Daily Beast's Molly Jong-Fast, conservative attorney George Conway got right to the point and explained that the way in which the Justice Department is going after former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is indicative that they already have a solid case against him and, in Conway's words, the man once called "America's mayor" is in "deep shit."
In the "New Abnormal" podcast, which can be listened to below, the husband of Kellyanne Conway said the DOJ doesn't take going after a lawyer lightly, much less one who has been representing the president of the United States.
After a discussion about Donald Trump, who Conway referred to as "the big liar," the conversation turned to Giuliani's legal problems after last week's raid where his phones and computers were confiscated.
"The Justice Department doesn't like to execute search warrants on lawyers, right?" Conway began. "And the reason why they don't like that is because they don't want to get into messy disputes about attorney-client privilege."
"So they basically, if there's a way to get evidence without going to a lawyer there, it's basically incumbent upon them to do that. And if they ever seek to execute a search warrant on a lawyer, they have to go to the Main Justice [the headquarters of the Justice Department] and get permission from senior people in the criminal division on Pennsylvania Avenue," he added. "That tells you a lot here. Because even though there's a probable cause standard for any search warrant—where you have to show that there was probable cause that a crime was committed and that there's a basis to believe that executing the search warrant will provide evidence of that crime—in this case, they had to do much, much more than that."
Conway also had a few things to say about Giuliani's decision to seek legal advice from attorney Alan Dershowitz, saying the Harvard Law professor has already made multiple false statements about Giuliani's chances of surviving the investigation.
"He's [Dershowitz] been off the rails for a long time... In the first impeachment trial, Dershowitz made crazy arguments, to the effect that if the president does something, it's for the benefit of the nation and therefore can't be a crime, it can't be impeachable. Which was just insane," he told host Jong-Fast. "And now he's arguing that lawyers are immune from the execution of a search warrant, and that's just not true either."
You can listen below or here:
Last week former attorney to President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, was raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into work he allegedly did on behalf of foreign countries. Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi and former senior prosecutor to Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, explained why nothing about the story is good news for Giuliani.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace began by saying that major news outlets are withdrawing their reports that Giuliani was briefed by the FBI about his actions being possibly illegal. In fact, a briefing was prepared with the anticipation of giving it to Giuliani, but it was never actually conducted as a debate spread through the Justice Department about whether it would compromise the investigation. It all happened in the final months of the Trump administration, the AP reported last week, before Attorney General Merrick Garland took over.
"Ultimately, you do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether it's sensible to do [the briefing]," explained Figliuzzi. "Does it help or hurt the investigation? Here's how that conversation may have gone with regard to Rudy Giuliani and the briefing that wasn't given. First question, is this: what's the purpose of the briefing? Somebody would have said, 'we do them to raise awareness,' 'we do these briefings to warn people that they're in over their heads with the Russians.' And then somebody might have said, 'Rudy Giuliani was an Associate Attorney General of the United States. He was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He knows how foreign intelligence services operate, so this doesn't really give him a heads up or a warning about anything he doesn't already know."
Figliuzzi went on to say that another question would be that Giuliani could ask if he's under investigation or claim he doesn't need a briefing because he's an expert.
"Then last question, what do we get out of this?" he asked. "Do we have evidence on Giuliani right now? Do we need him to say something and monitor him after the briefing to see if he changes his conduct? The answer, probably not. We probably have enough. This is probably more harmful to give the briefing than not. He is going to come out publicly if we give it and say that they never told me to stop doing what I was doing and, therefore, I thought it was okay. Let's not give the briefing. That's how that goes."
Weissmann explained Giuliani's excuse that he was acting as a lawyer on behalf of a client.
"So, he has a really good defense if he was solely acting for a U.S. person and if the only client was the president of the United States, now, the former president," said Weissmann. "Then that cannot be a violation because that requires that he act for a foreign person either a foreign government or any foreign individual."
As Weissmann explained, Giuliani can do both, serve clients from multiple sides, so the Southern District of New York will have to essentially follow the money to find who Giuliani was truly acting on behalf.
"If he has foreign clients, they clearly were asking him to do something and so all you have to do is trace that out as to what he was doing for them," said Weissmann.
Figliuzzi closed by explaining that when the FBI conducts a raid, it means that the evidence is available to go public with the investigation and they're merely looking for evidence to corroborate the information they already have.
"I think it's wrapping and nearing an end, but let me respond to what Claire [McCaskill] said," he continued. "This sets up a fascinating tension between Trump and Giuliani because, as Claire said, Giuliani was probably getting money from the Ukrainians or elsewhere. And now he's going to claim — Giuliani — 'I was just working for Trump. He is my client. Not for a foreign power or people.' And Trump will have to say, 'Yes. He was just working for me. I knew everything he was doing.' Trump's not going to say that. Rudy will be hung out to dry."
See the full conversation below:
the truth about rudy giuliani's troubles www.youtube.com
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who is acting as a legal adviser to Rudy Giuliani, says that he hopes former President Donald Trump will help block federal prosecutors from accessing material seized in a raid by federal agents that Giuliani believes is protected by attorney-client privilege, CNN reports.
"Hope the people whose information is privileged, like Donald Trump, would join the lawsuit and say look you can't see my stuff," Dershowitz told CNN.
Speaking on the radio after the raid, Giuliani denied wrongdoing and said that the search warrant that was carried out against him was "unconscionable."
"I was representing my client when I did this -- I wasn't representing any Ukrainians, I was representing Donald J Trump, President or not, an innocent man who was being framed by a bunch of crooks," he said.
Former Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani says federal investigators "driven by Trump derangement syndrome" are trying to "frame" him, while claiming the former president "doesn't have constitutional rights."
In what appears to be a rambling and at times nonsensical interview with Fox News, Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and former U.S. Attorney, insists he did not break federal law by lobbying for Russian interests or on behalf of Ukraine.
"Giuliani claimed the investigation itself was spurred by federal investigators' 'hatred of President Trump,'" Fox News reports.
"They are beyond the ability to control their rational thinking or their decency, and they have a serious, serious ethical issue, driven by Trump derangement syndrome," Giuliani said. "They are trying to frame me."
"They are trying to find something they can make into a crime, some technical violation, some mistake I made," he claimed. "They'll take anything."
"The only lawyers they raid are lawyers for Donald Trump," Giuliani told Fox News, which is false. "I can't think of another lawyer that has been raided other than lawyers for Trump."
"Trump is in a special category because he doesn't have constitutional rights," Giuliani falsely claimed.
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The recent raid on Rudy Giuliani's home and office by federal agents should be a signal to Donald Trump and his "cronies" to beware, Norman Eisen wrote this Monday in USA Today.
According to Eisen, the search warrants "mark a leap forward in the Department of Justice's look into the past four years of potential illegalities," signaling "turbulent waters ahead for Giuliani and his former client alike."
The warrants, as Eisen points out, are not easily obtained, considering the fact that a judge needs to be convinced of probable cause and the warrants must pass the highest levels of scrutiny at the DOJ.
"From what is public so far, including an acknowledgment from Giuliani himself, federal investigators are looking into whether he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by acting as an unregistered foreign agent for his Ukrainian 'sources.'" Eisen writes. "The evidence I helped present as counsel in the first Trump impeachment showed Giuliani was advancing the agenda of those in Ukraine trying to oust U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch — a staunch corruption fighter who was eventually pushed out."
If prosecutors can prove Giuliani committed crimes such as bribery, he could charged as a co-conspirator under the federal conspiracy statute.
"The raids of Giuliani's home and office last week could produce additional direct, contemporaneous evidence tying him directly to Trump's alleged shakedown of Ukraine," writes Eisen. "Texts, calls, notes or other evidence might very well be on the devices that were seized. Normally, the two men's communications would be privileged as part of the attorney-client relationship."
Read the full op-ed over at USA Today.
According to a report from Politico, Republicans salivating at the prospect of reclaiming the governorship in New York due to Governor Andrew Cuomo's troubles are having trouble coming up with a candidate who is not closely associated with Donald Trump, who is deeply unpopular in his home state -- more so in New York City.
With one eye looking back at 2020's presidential election results where Trump only managed a meager 38 percent of the vote, Republicans would prefer a candidate in a much more moderate mold like former Gov. George Pataki, but none appear to be coming forward.
Cuomo had been buffeted by accusations of misconduct with women as well as his handling of the CIVID -19 crisis and Republicans smell blood in the water as an election looms in 2022.
That said, one New York Democratic campaign consultant compared finding a Republican candidate not tainted by Trump, thereby making them palatable to voters, to "searching for a unicorn."
According to Politico's Anne Gronewold, "The GOP is nearly decimated across the state, and with a polarized landscape on the heels of a Trump presidency, it might be impossible to find a GOP candidate who can appeal to center-right Democrats and independents."
That, she reports the field open to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), a Trump supporter who has already amassed a large war-chest almost two years in advance to the state-wide election.
Zeldin, she reports, may have company in the primary if another notable Trump supporter with an eye on higher office jumps into the race.
"Party leaders from across the state, looking to avoid a potential civil war, have been rallying around Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island — a Donald Trump-loving conservative who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has fought ardently to oppose abortion rights. Other contenders look much the same and include upstate firebrand Rep. Elise Stefanik and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's son, Andrew Giuliani." the report states before adding the caveat, "Both are also backers of Trump, who lost the state by some 2 million votes last year."
According to Marc Molinaro who lost to Cuomo in 2018, New York's Republican Party has its work cut out for them.
My message is very simple: We just have to be unified. This is not going to be easy no matter who the candidate is," he explained.
According to Zeldin, known for his defense of Trump as well as his strident opposition to a woman's right to choose, Republicans in the state are insisting that he be the candidate --even considering the odds.
"They are saying, 'if you don't run, and you don't win, I'm leaving,'" he told reporters in mid-April. "And I'm telling you the issues that they are citing are issues related to the economy, issues related to public safety, issues related to education, and being embarrassed about the governor. And I'm just going to continue to focus on what New Yorkers are telling me they want me to be focused on."
However, as Gronewold notes, it is going to take a lot more than Republicans voting for a member of their party to reclaim the statehouse in Albany.
Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino (R) who lost to Cuomo in 2014 -- and may jump into the trace too -- said the eventual candidate will need to have broad appeal to oust Cuomo if he is the Democratic candidate.
"Hablo español y esto es muy importante: because I'm going to be able to go into neighborhoods and espouse our virtues as a Republican, and talk about issues that are important, not just in the Hispanic community," he explained before adding, "That's how I won in Westchester."
Party registration also weighs heavily on GOP chances ins state-wide election with Politico reporting, "There are about 6.7 million registered Democrats in New York, about 3 million registered in no party, and about 2.9 million registered Republicans."
You can read more here.
Former President Donald Trump is now retaining legal counsel to defend him in a lawsuit filed against him by Capitol police officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby.
The Daily Beast reports that Trump is retaining attorney Jesse Binnall, who is also representing the former president against a civil suit filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), in the suit filed by the Capitol officers.
The lawsuit filed by the two officers directly blames Trump for actions that "inflamed, encouraged, incited, directed, and aided and abetted" an angry mob that stormed the United States Capitol building and left five people dead.
The two officers in the lawsuit allege that they "suffered injuries to their heads, necks, and backs from assaults by the rioters and continue to struggle with the emotional toll of having been overwhelmed by the rioting mob that day," the Daily Beast reports.
Although Binnall isn't as well known of a Trump attorney as Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell, he is a veteran of the multiple legal battles that took place during Trump's administration.
As the Daily Beast reported earlier this year, Binnall "previously represented former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn, alongside attorney Sidney Powell, after prosecutors charged him with lying to the FBI about his communications with Russia's ambassador to the U.S.," and more recently "filed a lawsuit in Nevada on behalf of the Trump campaign which sought to overturn President Joe Biden's electoral victory there."
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