Donald Trump's working-for-free lawyer Rudy Giuliani is now engaged in, says this horrifically bad NBC News headline, a "new push to flip the script on Trump's impeachment." The actual story under that headline both goes to some lengths to describe what Giuliani is actually doing and tiptoes around the obvious conclusions.
Rudy Giuliani is working with a collection of Ukrainians previously identified by the international community as corrupt to push a new set of conspiracy theories in which those disgraced Ukrainians claim to be innocent and the real corruption in Ukraine was caused by Joe Biden, somehow, and Democrats, somehow, and the International Jew.
As NBC News details in the second half of the piece, most of his claims have already been disproven, and others are simply asinine. Timelines have been fudged; documents of dubious origin have been produced that do not fit the other known facts. It is all, quite obviously, a grift.
Giuliani has allied himself with the same collection of crooked Ukrainians that ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort siphoned money from, and it isn't just for the benefit of Donald Trump. Trump might actually be the secondary beneficiary of Giuliani's new day job. The more prominent focus appears to be on destabilizing the current Ukrainian government.
For now we can only guess who is paying Giuliani, since Trump isn't. Giuliani isn't saying.
What NBC does not do, however, is connect the dots to explain what it means if Giuliani is pushing known-false conspiracy theories. It means he is lying. He is peddling disinformation. He is propagandizing. It is not "Ukrainians whose credibility is questionable at best" that form the basis of Giuliani's claims, but individuals pegged as corrupt and dishonest long before Rudy Giuliani discovered them. NBC's headline says that Giuliani wants to "flip the script" on impeachment; the actual story is that Giuliani is peddling known-to-be-false misinformation to the American public and counting on media outlets, as accessories, to both-sides his false claims into the public consciousness.
The majority of Giuliani's claims revolve, to one degree or another, on the theory that the U.S. embassy in Ukraine is secretly controlling and protecting corruption in the country and that Giuliani's new bestest pals (and Paul Manafort, currently rotting in jail) were framed, framed I tells ya. About half of those conspiracies suppose that the Actual Wrongdoing is being done by various forces connected to George Soros. It is George Soros' associates who discovered Paul Manafort's criminality. It was George Soros who was controlling Ambassador Maria Yovanovitch and other U.S. officials, and who was behind the United States not granting visas to Rudy's corrupt buddies so that they could give "evidence" about the "real" corruption on American soil. (Why the f--k this collection of criminals cannot give their evidence without getting U.S. visas remains, as always, unexplained.)
This is because Rudy Giuliani is a piece of shit. In a new New York magazine piece, Giuliani directly claims that Yovanovitch is "controlled" by George Soros, who "put all four ambassadors there. And he's employing the FBI agents." Asked to answer for the obvious anti-Semitism of this theory, Giuliani oozes, "Soros is hardly a Jew. I'm more of a Jew than Soros is." And he then elaborates on his theory.
This is not Rudy Giuliani attempting to "flip the script" of Trump's impeachment. This is Rudy Giuliani, current ally of and partner to international criminals, proudly spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claiming that a Jewish billionaire is secretly the mastermind of both true corruption and the attempt to detract from Trump's obvious genius. It is equal parts corrupt and batshit insane, relying on a mix of Russian propaganda and white supremacist pamphlets to concoct a notion that he hopes to inject into the American public before the next election.
Giuliani is relying on the media obsession with faux neutrality even when faced with overt propaganda. So, NBC, might a different headline be in order?
