Merrick Garland, stealth bomber

Rudy Giuliani's travails are evidence that Republicans will rue the day they denied Garland a seat on the Supreme Court.

I’ll just bet you’ll have to tickle the old medulla oblongata to remember who the hell Lev Parnas was, and what he has to do with today’s King of the News Cycle, Rudy “I was Once America’s Mayor” Giuliani.  Still having trouble pulling him out of the mists of history?  Okay, here’s a hint.  He’s one of two portly cigar-chompers regularly photographed sitting with our boy Rudy at the Trump International Hotel back in the day, the others being such stalwarts of moral rectitude as Igor Furman, indicitee alongside said Parnas; Don Jr., Trump First Son and paramour of Kimberly Guilfoye; and former Republican National Committee co-chair Thomas O. “Tommy” Hicks Jr.

Can’t recall why they would all be hanging around the cigar bar at the Trump Hotel?  Does the words “Ukraine affair” bring back any memories?  That’s right.  Old Lev and Igor and Donny and Tommy were all implicated along with “America’s Mayor” Rudy in the abortive attempts back in 2019 to dig up dirt on our current president Joe Biden in Ukraine for doing something or another, it was never really clear what the dirt was supposed to be…oh, wait a minute!  I remember now!  The dirt ended up being that Joe Biden was the father of Hunter Biden, that’s what the dirt was!

What a blast from the past, huh?  Subject of impeachment hearings involving former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, replacement Ambassador Bill Taylor, Russia expert Fiona Hill, national security council official Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and seemingly countless others, including of course our trio of scamsters, Rudy, Lev, and Igor.

And why are we dragging all these characters out of the dank corners of our recent past on this fine day?  Well, because the FBI served a warrant on America’s Mayor early this morning at both his Madison Avenue residence and Park Avenue office, where they seized papers and electronic devices including cell phones as part of an investigation into whether Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian oligarchs and former political figures who were at the time helping good old Rudy dig up his so-called dirt on Joe Biden.

Little noticed in the crush of news today was the fact that the FBI at the same time as they were digging into Rudy’s undies drawers were serving up exactly the same warrant on Victoria Toensing, a Washington attorney close to Giuliani who was intimately involved in the dirt-digging in the Ukraine.  Toensing is the wife and law partner of Joseph diGenova, yet another sterling character who was on board the Trump legal team for a brief time before he was ousted for some long-forgotten reason.  Toensing made the news during the impeachment frenzy of 2019 as the legal representative of one Dmitry Firtash, an oligarch who was one of Giuliani’s main Ukrainian contacts in the Biden dirt-digging affair.  Dmitry for his troubles ended up sanctioned and under federal indictment in a bribery scheme.  He has been characterized by the FBI as an “upper echelon” associate of Russian organized crime.

So the FBI was running around this morning gathering evidence against Rudy for shit he did more than two years ago for Donald Trump that was supposed to help him get reelected and instead got him impeached, and for which Rudy didn’t see a dime in compensation.  Remember that?  Rudy put out the word at one point that he was billing Trump $20,000 a day for his extensive legal services in filing the dozens of lawsuits to overturn Trump’s loss in last year’s presidential election, not one of which succeeded.  He announced back in 2019 that he wasn’t taking any fees for his work on the Ukraine Biden dirt scam, and Trump made a point of telling the world that he directed an associate not to pay Rudy any fees for legal services and that he “personally approve any reimbursements for expenses Giuliani incurred,” according to stories published at the time.

So poor Rudy, facing new legal troubles of his own, has had to hire his own attorney, Robert J. Costello, who told the New York Times today that “what they (the FBI) did was legal thuggery.”  Lawyers charge to give interviews on behalf of their clients, and if Costello is charging anything close to what big-time New York lawyers bill clients these days, that little quote in the New York Times probably cost Giuliani upwards of ten grand.

News that Giuliani’s cell phones had been seized by the FBI is particularly interesting because the FBI recently informed a federal judge in New York that they have been unable to open the cell phones seized from both Lev Parnas and Igor Furman when the two Rudy associates were arrested at Dulles Airport outside Washington D.C. just as they were about to board a flight over a year ago to Vienna, Austria carrying one-way tickets.  The FBI has not said whether they are having similar problems opening Giuliani’s phones, but presumably if they are able to get into any of the many cell phones they now have from the three pals, there may be plenty of evidence of the scams they were running in Ukraine back in the days when they were touching every oligarch in sight trying to dig up all of that dirt on Joe Biden that turned out not to be there.

America’s Mayor and his friend Victoria Toensing would not have been hit with search warrants at dawn today if Mitch McConnell and his buddies in the senate had done what they should have done and given Merrick Garland a hearing and confirmed him as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court way back in 2016 when he was nominated by Barak Obama.  If Merrick Garland was now sitting on the highest court in the land, he wouldn’t be sitting in his office today 10 blocks away at the Department of Justice signing off on the request for a search warrant that went to the federal judge who approved the papers that were served this morning on Rudy and Victoria. 

I think we can be comfortably assured that these won’t be the only stealth bombs Merrick Garland drops as the ongoing investigations into the not-so-distant patterns and practices of Donald Trump and his various shady associates continue to bear fruit. Buckle your seat belts, Trump pals. It’s going to be a long four years.