{UAH} Will Trump wind up blaming Giuliani for the entire Ukrainian affair?

By Roland Timmerman

Trump won't need to, Rudy G's doing a fine job of incriminating himself. Allow me to explain.

Remember when Giuliani said he was working for the President for free out of patriotic duty? That sweet deal came at a price. It turns out Roo-Roo's not providing legal services to Donald Trump. It is selling his own access to Trump to the world's wealthiest criminals and to people needing specific, important personal favors from Trump and Attorney General Barr's Department of Justice.

That explains why Giuliani has not been billing Donald Trump for his services as he combs the world for conspiracy theories favorable to Trump and damaging to his enemies: He doesn't need to. Giuliani has been doing favors for Trump to curry Trump's favor and interest, then using that as the hook to convince prospective clients that he can use his influence to bend our government in their favor. For, of course, a fee.

The New York Times and Washington Post both reported that President Donald Trump's personal attorney earlier this year sought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business opportunities in Ukraine from the same government officials he was working with to uncover dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

The Post reported that Giuliani negotiated a contract earlier this year to represent Yuri Lutsenko, then Ukraine's top prosecutor, for at least $200,000. The negotiations came at the same time Giuliani was working with Lutsenko to dig up damaging information on Biden for the benefit of Trump.

"The agreements were never executed, and there is no indication that Giuliani was ultimately paid by Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials," the Post noted. "But the negotiations proceeded far enough that legal agreements were drafted under which Giuliani's company would have received more than $200,000 to work for the Ukrainians."

According to the Times, Giuliani and lawyers close to him were engaged in a months-long effort to take on "various Ukrainian officials or their agencies as clients."

The Times reviewed "a proposal signed in February by Mr. Giuliani," which "called for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice to pay his firm $300,000."

"In return, Mr. Giuliani would help the government recover money it believed had been stolen and stashed overseas," the Times reported. "The Times could not determine whether the documents it reviewed comprise the entirety of the efforts by Mr. Giuliani and other lawyers to represent Ukrainian government officials."

Giuliani downplayed the talks in an interview with the Times and said he "never received a penny" from Ukrainian officials.

Yet Rudy G's living the grand life but he has violated that unwritten rule of American public life that you can pursue money or political power, but not both at once. Where the salary of the actual Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was $210,700 last year, until the past few years Giuliani seemed to enjoy a lavish, approximately $230,000-a-month lifestyle that includes six homes, access to private jets and 11 country-club memberships, according to his recent divorce–court filings published by the New York Times. By 2018, he was making between $5 million and $10 million a year.

His quest has been enabled by Trump, who entrusted Giuliani with Cabinet-level influence. When Energy Secretary Rick Perry pushed Trump in May to meet with Ukraine's new President, for example, Trump told him to "visit with Rudy," according to an interview Perry gave the Wall Street Journal. And Fiona Hill, an aide to former National Security Adviser John Bolton told congressional impeachment investigators that Giuliani was running a parallel foreign policy, outside the normal channels of U.S. diplomacy. Meanwhile, as Trump's cable-news defender and then his personal lawyer, Giuliani remained technically a private citizen, unencumbered by long-standing ethics rules designed to prevent officials from using public service for personal gain.

But amid the many self-dealing scandals besetting the Trump Administration, Giuliani's adventures went largely ignored, at first. And he might have happily continued his money power play but for one thing: Ukraine.

Current and former senior Administration officials worry that he has been putting unsubstantiated Ukrainian conspiracy theories into Trump's head and that Trump doesn't know or understand that Giuliani has business interests that may be served by some of the advice he is giving the President. Most of all, they blame Giuliani for Trump's push during a July 25 phone call to get the Ukrainian President to investigate Biden, his 2020 biggest political rival.

But Giuliani is confident Trump won't turn on him: "He's 100% in my corner and loyal to me as I am to him." And for now, Trump doesn't seem to be aware of, or at least worried about, what Giuliani's murky mix of business and diplomacy may have gotten him into. "Rudy Giuliani's a great crime fighter," Trump said on Oct. 28 in response to a question from TIME. "He's always looking for corruption, which is what more people should be doing. He's a good man."

At some point soon, Trump may face the reality of a trial in the Senate over charges he abused his office. Some of those allegations will be linked to Giuliani's efforts in Ukraine. Giuliani's increasingly erratic behavior suggests that his gravy train of easy deals tied to political power may come to an ugly end. The question is what else will come to an end with it.

To end on a lighter note. It is abundantly clear and more than fair to say that Trumplandia is just a massive criminal enterprise…

Sources: Giuliani was seeking $200,000 from Ukrainian prosecutor who helped him oust U.S. ambassador

'Massive Criminal Enterprise': Giuliani Reportedly Sought Ukraine Business Deals as He Worked to Dig Up Dirt on Biden for Trump

How Rudy Giuliani's Pursuit of Money and Power May Cost Donald Trump

And everyone else linked in the text

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