So, I am moved, foolishly, to write a thing about Kiev-A-Lago, a thing which is probably wrong-headed, but it’s this.
I find it very easy to believe that at some point Paul Manafort was told something like “We will give you a large amount of money to do things that are dishonest, illegal and bad for the national security of your country. If you succeed, you will be very rich and also the United States will both lose influence and respect around the world and also be wracked with internal divisions that will potentially destroy it.” And that Paul Manafort said something like “How much money exactly?” I totally buy that Mr. Manafort was identified by the Russians as someone who would sell out his country for money, approached because of that, and then did so.
I find all that difficult to believe about Rudy Giuliani.
Now, that’s not because I ever thought of Rudy Giuliani as a hero of any kind. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of him as anything but an asshole. But I think of him as the sort of self-righteous asshole who would not just take money to betray his country’s interests—that is, who would not want to think of himself as someone who would do that. I believe that Paul Manafort would think of anyone who put patriotism over profit as a sucker; I believe that Rudy Giuliani thinks of himself as a patriot.
And I’ll add that I don’t think Rudy is a moron. I think that Our Only President, for instance, is a dolt and a dupe, someone who is easily manipulated and has neither the ability or the interest in resisting obvious bullshit. But I have never thought that Mr. Giuliani was easily duped. A clever, patriotic asshole. I think that’s what I would have said about him in 1995, and in 2001, and in 2016.
But surely at some point when Viktor Shokin and the Shmenge Brothers (Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, that is, who I call the Shmenge Brothers for reasons that are probably less obvious than I think they are) and Dmitry Firtash were feeding him a line of obvious bullshit that was—let’s say perhaps—directed from Moscow, surely at some point he must have understood when he was taking their money that he was working for Putin. Right? No? After everything that happened in 2016, did this former tenacious prosecutor just think that these wads of money were just normal business and not in any way suspicious? I really do hate to think that he deliberately sold himself and his patriotism. And sure, maybe his loathing for Hillary Clinton has blinded him to what the Russians have actually been doing. Or maybe his disappointment at being so soundly rejected as a Presidential candidate has warped him enough to let him think screw this country, anyway. Or maybe it’s that thing that sometimes (but not always) happens in people’s seventies, when their personalities change substantially. Or, of course, I was always wrong and he was always either a schmuck or a scoundrel in addition to being an asshole.
I have no idea. But one thing that has been, I think, neglected a bit in the Kiev-a-Lago story so far, despite Fiona Hill’s attempt to bring it out, is how the only evidence of the stuff Our Only President was on about (the Biden stuff and the 2016 stuff) was from people who were obviously peddling Putin’s wares, and that nobody who knew anything about anything should have been listening to them. And, I mean, maybe that’s overly strong, but at the very least a clever ex-prosecutor should have suspected that this was Moscow bullshit, particularly when the people in the Ukraine who were strongly anti-Putin all said it was Moscow bullshit. So what was Rudy Giuliani doing?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I don’t know much about anything, but I suspect that Rudy Giuliani has always been a power-hungry politician like any other, and that his reputation as a patriot has a lot to do with a bunch of patriotic speechifying after 9/11, when it made for good politics and increased his power. But I’m pretty inclined to believe that most politicians are more like power-hungry opportunists than like sincere patriots, so, grain of salt and all that.
I guess one question is: If you thought Rudy Giuliani’s was a sincere patriot, what would you expect that he would have done differently, prior to 2017, if he’d been a power-hungry opportunist all along?
I’m not sure what you mean by power, or why being a power-hungry opportunist is distinct from being a sincere patriot (or from considering one’s self a patriot).
Of course Rudy Giuliani is ambitious. Of course he is an opportunist. But I don’t see anything that he did up to and through 2016 that involved taking large sums of money to spread Muscovite strategies to undermine the US. Or even doing it for free, honestly—while it’s tempting to imagine that the post-2001 strategy in Iraq and its neighbors, as well as the statist paranoia of the so-called Patriot Act, was deliberately designed to weaken US influence around the world, I haven’t seen any actual evidence that it was, and I find it easy to understand how the proponents could and did make such errors when all choices were in fact terrible.
There’s a huge, huge difference in my mind between being a power-hungry opportunist and being a stooge for your country’s enemies, and I remain surprised to find Rudy Giuliani in the stooge category. Particularly as I fail to understand how being a stooge for the enemies of the United States was an opportunity for him to grab power.
Thanks,
-V.
I think the distinction I’m going for is something like “wants to acquire and retain power, for its own sake, unguided by any principles”. Following your principles might well lead you to seek power, but if you don’t have any principles for which you would say “I would gladly give up some of my own personal political power in service of this principle”, then you’re a power-hungry opportunist.
My suspicion isn’t so much that Rudy Giuliani cares specifically about advancing Russian interests, or that he’s a “stooge” exactly, depending on what you mean by that; but more than he doesn’t really care about Russian interests *or* US interests, he cares only about his own power. And at the moment, his power is based on doing Trump’s bidding, which means serving Russian interests.
So, part of it for me is that he hasn’t so much been doing the President’s bidding on the Kiev-a-Lago stuff as leading him around—pretty much everyone who testified at the impeachment hearing believed that it was coming from Rudy Giuliani getting the President worked up about it, not the other way around. So it’s still a question, for me, why his particular kind of opportunism made him buy the story the Shmenge brothers were selling—that is, pushing the President into a swamp was not very clever opportunism at all, and this whole thing really could only work (where work means make Mr. Giuliani more indispensable to the President) if the Shmenge Brothers actually did have real evidence that Hunter Biden was laundering money and that Joe Biden used his office to cover it up. Which, you know, they didn’t.
The other aspect of it, for me, is that it’s still unclear to me why Rudy Giuliani would, in the interests of his own power and ego, be stooging for the Russians. What power do you think he intends to get from them? For that matter, what ‘power’ has he been getting since becoming Trump’s personal lawyer? Getting on TV? He could be on TV whenever the hell he wants. He could have his own show. Other than the TV stuff, how does being on Team Trump get him more power than jumping ship? Or signing on as a lobbyist? Or doing whatever private-sector nonsense he has been doing for the last decade and a half? He’s not going to become the Secretary of Homeland Security now.
I certainly don’t mean to defend Rudy Giuliani or his principles, but I honestly don’t see how his hunger for power, by whatever measure you are using, explains any of this in itself.
Thanks,
-V.
You speak as if you know what the interests of the United States are, as if you get to say what a patriot should do! /snark
So here’s the thing. Rudy Giuliani has been benefiting from financial and political support from post-Soviet kleptocrats since the 1990s. Back in the day, one could take large sums of money from kleptocrats without one’s patriotic conscience being troubled by it, because the money at that time didn’t come with requirements that the recipient “spread Muscovite strategies to undermine the US.” At that time, the main goal of the kleptocrats was to get their money out of Russia, and it was fairly easy to facilitate that by not looking too closely at what was happening in the New York real estate market, and that permissive attitude gained an ambitious politician a lot of loyal financial support from the sectors of the emigre community who were making their fortunes by facilitating the money laundering. These loyal financial supporters gradually also became Giuliani’s friends and direct business associates. The KGB long game of cultivating assets was at work, but that was in the deep background back in the 1990s.
The inflection point for Giuliani with respect to U.S. policy and national interests came when the United States began to view Russian money-laundering as a serious problem and when Russia began to become a more aggressive actor against U.S. interests on the world stage. By this point, Giuliani is tied to the Russian kleptocrats/Russian mob/Vladimir Putin by financial interest, political interest, long association, and plenty of Kompromat. What interest or ability does such a man as he have to recognize or be bothered about the idea that Russia is now undermining American democracy? He’s a patriotic American, and he’s been working closely with the Russians for years! What’s the problem? It’s just a vicious attack on him by his political opponents, like Hillary and Biden, who are themselves corrupt and who don’t love America! 9-11!
It’s important to recognize also that a certain segment of the right wing doesn’t see alliance with Russia as counter to “patriotism.” All it takes to come to that view is to believe in America as a white nation more than/instead of believing in America as a democratic republic founded on a principle of equality. If one’s own political ambitions are inextricably entangled with Russian money and fomenting anti-Muslim hysteria, how much easier is it to come around to that view?
Manafort was a corrupt political operative who was looking for opportunities to sell out U.S. interests because that’s where the savvy political operative could find the best money. Giuliani is a egocentric, power hungry politician who has benefited from Russian support for his entire political career and from anti-Muslim hysteria for most of his career. They are different men, so their prices are different. But they both had their price, and Putin bought them both.
Rudy Guiliani may believe in his heart that he is a patriotic American, and that the best thing for the U.S. is to build closer ties with our natural ally, Russia, and that democracy is failing America. Or he may be thinking about nothing but his own ego and his desire for revenge on political enemies. If he believes that he is patriotic in his heart, well, then for himself he is still a patriot, but he can only believe that because he is completely corrupt and thoroughly racist, just like the criminal *President he serves. If he is thinking about nothing but his own ego and his desire for revenge, then he is even more like the criminal *President he serves.
This seems very plausible to me. And I suppose that having gone all-in on this particular candidate in 2016, for whatever reasons he felt he had at the time, there’s a sense in which at the very least he would have trouble believing that the election of his client was bad for the nation and its future—so the obvious (to me) benefit to Putin and the Russian end of the global balance of power is less obvious to him. And if you start from that point of view, perhaps it’s less obvious that the Shmenge Brothers are selling Moscow’s bullshit—that is, it’s less obvious that Moscow sees a benefit in this particular bullshit being sold to him. I guess?
And of course it’s not like they were trying to sell me anything. I know them only from the hindsight that includes knowing they were arrested, which Rudy Giuliani did not have. Perhaps they were smoother, more persuasive, less risible in person. Although it does kinda seem like almost everybody they did dupe was either a complete schmuck or a sell-his-own-granny cynic (I am reminded of the line in The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade tells the woman I think of as Brigid O’Shaugnessy that they never believed her story, but they believed her money—she gave them too much for the story she was telling them and enough too much for them not to care) and the was the only person who seems (at least) to have actually believed them that wasn’t already listed under gullible in the Congressional Record.
Thanks,
-V.