PART 2:
Another former senior White House official said it was clear from the summer of 2019 that “no one was going to stop Rudy.” “What are you doing to do? He is the president’s lawyer?” that person said.
In October 2019, Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested by federal agents. Giuliani’s relationship with the two came under federal investigation in the Southern District of New York. A person familiar with the situation says that an investigation is ongoing. NBC News reported Thursday that the FBI is investigating whether the materials leaked to the Post on Hunter Biden are the subject of a foreign intelligence operation; the AP
corroborated that account on Friday. The Daily Beast has not been able to independently confirm such an investigation.
Bolton’s desire to keep his team away from Giuliani became clear in the summer of 2019. Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser, testified during the House impeachment of Donald Trump that
Bolton had described Giuliani as “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up”. Bolton detailed his concerns about Giuliani in his book,
The Room Where it Happened.
“Giuliani was delivering what was all third-or-fourth degree hearsay; he offered no evidence on the call for his allegations,” Bolton wrote about an April 23, 2019 call with Trump and Mulvaney in the Oval Office. Bolton also said he warned Attorney General Bill Barr that someone “rein Giuliani in before he got completely out of control.”
However, none of these pleas to the White House and Trump actually worked in freezing out Giuliani, and President Trump continues to this day to actively encourage, as well as
personally greenlight from behind the scenes, Giuliani-led projects to peddle questionable or suspiciously obtained documents and salacious dirt—even though Trump’s participation in such efforts is what got him
impeached in the first place.
Giuliani met with Derkach in Kiev in December 2019, while Congress was considering Trump’s impeachment and while Derkach was accusing Hunter Biden of corruption. Months later, on Aug. 7, 2020, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center stated that Derkach, as part of Russian electoral interference efforts, “is spreading claims about corruption—including through publicizing leaked phone calls—to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”
A source who has spoken to Trump repeatedly about Giuliani and his dirt-digging efforts against the Bidens explained to The Daily Beast that the president has said on multiple occasions that he views a lot of the intra-administration concerns about his lawyer’s activities as a mere whining or lies from the supposed anti-Trump “Deep State” who want to undermine him and make everything about Russia.
“That is one of the reasons the warnings don’t work,” this person said. “The president is not going to take the [side] of intel that he is convinced is made to make him look bad over the word of Rudy Giuliani, who is doing exactly what [Trump] wants him to do.”
Just this week, Giuliani is again appearing on television and through his YouTube channel in a renewed attempt to publish dirt, including text messages from and nefarious photos of Hunter Biden. It started Wednesday with the publishing of a
New York Post report which claimed photos and emails from Hunter’s laptop had been confiscated by the FBI—materials which, the Post claimed, showed how he worked to arrange a meeting between his then vice president father and an adviser to the board of Burisma. The Biden campaign has categorically denied the report.
To Trumpworld, the former New York City mayor is just putting on a heightened performance of his chief role: as a willing Trump operative, enthusiastically willing to hurl invective and innuendo, and revel in sexually explicit, ethically dubious dirt, in ways that other lieutenants of the president can't get away with, or simply aren't willing to do.
“He's not officially part of the campaign,” said a senior Team Trump official. “It's useful to have Rudy out there just not giving a fukk and sticking it to the Bidens every day. I know it pleases the president and I know a lot of people [on the reelection effort] think it's helpful.”
Another source who has known the former New York mayor for years said that Giuliani will often comment on how much “fun” it is to wage these kinds of campaigns on behalf of “my client,” especially when the topic turns to controversy and scandal, real or manufactured. “The dirtier the better for Rudy,” this person described.
Giuliani will often comment on how much ‘fun’ it is to wage these kinds of campaigns on behalf of ‘my client,’ especially when the topic turns to controversy and scandal. ‘The dirtier the better for Rudy,’ this person described.
The Trump attorney and confidant will often take existing pro-Trump talking points and insults, including those flung around frequently by the president, and turbo-charge them; where President Trump had dialed it up to 11, Giuliani will try to kick it up to a 12. This has been especially true of Joe and Hunter Biden, where Giuliani has taken the “dementia” attack line against the former VP to even darker, more graphic territory than even the president has, and the personal-life issues and past drug addiction of the Biden son, which the Trump lawyer has gleefully promoted in ways that outpace nearly everybody else, if not everybody else, in the upper ranks of Trumpland.
Intelligence veterans view the willingness of a figure like Giuliani—a politician who once enjoyed widespread but
undeserved national respect—to spread foreign disinformation to be an unqualified Russian success.
“Russia doesn’t even need to do anything,” one former senior official said. “Trump and Giuliani just did it for them.”
Former officials also consider Giuliani’s openness to disinformation a marked evolution in Russian intrusion into American politics. In 2016, Russian intelligence used cutouts like WikiLeaks to launder hacked Democratic emails into the American information ecosystem. They also used social-media accounts that posed as Americans to spread their messages. This time, they can rely on one of the president’s closest confidants.
“Rudy is beyond an intelligence service’s wildest dreams,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who until July 2019 oversaw CIA clandestine operations in Europe and Eurasia. “He’s actively spreading disinformation, they’re feeding him this stuff and it works.”
Polymeropoulos believes his former Russian counterparts are “astounded at their success” in finding an audience for disinformation on the American right. “The idea that they have a willing participant in the president’s lawyer is what’s really astounding,” he continued. “The amazing part about it is it’s not done in secret. It’s done openly and brazenly, because the president doesn’t care.”
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Another former official said Russia’s penetration of the servers of Ukranian energy company Burisma—where Hunter Biden once sat on the board—prompted “informed speculation among professionals that this would be the entree to fabricate material connecting Hunter Biden to corruption inside Burisma, and it wouldn’t take more than 10 percent truth.” 
