Giuliani In The Spotlight Over His Role In Ukraine Scandal
KING: Rudy Giuliani's controversial Ukraine role came up repeatedly in the public impeachment hearings and there's fresh evidence this weekend of White House support for that role. Documents released by the State Department Friday night detail two conversations in March between Giuliani and the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The documents show the second call was arranged with the help of the president's personal assistant at the request of a Giuliani aid. The documents are clear, but the former New York mayor insists it didn't happen that way.</s>RUDY GIULIANI, PRESIDENT TRUMP'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY: No, I'm capable of making my own calls. I actually know how to use the phone. Mike's -- of course, I'm not going to discuss my conversations with the secretary of state.</s>KING: Those calls came in the same week Giuliani shared with the State Department a packet of documents that includes unproven allegations against the Bidens and against then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. Giuliani not only led the smear campaign against Yovanovitch, he also was a driving force in pushing a long debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that hacked into the emails in the 2016 election.</s>REP. TERRI SEWELL (D-AL): Did your boss, Ambassador Bolton, tell you that Giuliani was, quote, a hand grenade?</s>HILL: He did, yes.</s>SEWELL: What do you think he meant by his characterization of Giuliani as a hand grenade?</s>HILL: What he meant by this was pretty clear to me in the context of all of the statements that Mr. Giuliani was making publicly about the investigations that he was promoting, that the story line he was promoting, the narrative of -- he was promoting was going to back backfire. I think it was backfired.</s>KING: She was scathing in her criticism of Giuliani, making the point she believes he was just peddling crazy stuff to the president, conspiracy theories about 2016, dirt from corrupt people in Ukraine, about the ambassador, about the Bidens, and that U.S. foreign policy was undermined, essentially taken over, taken prisoner, hijacked was a word used by Ambassador Yovanovitch by Rudy Giuliani.</s>SHEAR: I mean, the thing that's remarkable about the Giuliani situation and notwithstanding documents and emails that sort of people are looking at in the last 24 hours, Rudy's role played out in public. This isn't the case of a sort of presidential aide secretly going about doing something that we're all having to piece together. He was out on television, he was on this network however many times he was on there. He was quoted in news articles saying exactly what he wanted. He wanted the investigations, he connected them to the Bidens. And, of course, the president connected to Rudy in real time as well, in tweets and in comments, embracing Rudy as well. So, I mean, in some ways, it's the scandal that sort of has played out right in front of our faces.</s>BADE: Yes, I think the really interesting thing there is that a lot of people when they were hearing Rudy Giuliani talk about this on TV, they sort of dismissed it. This is crazy Rudy. I mean, it has nothing to do with what we're talking about here in Washington. That just shows how we've gone from the conspiracy theories that he's been talking about being from the outside edge, far right, what have you, so the main mainstream, because it's not just Rudy Giuliani anymore. It's Republicans who are defending the president in the House, who -- Fiona Hill specifically said, you are playing into Russia's hands right now by saying that Ukraine interfered --</s>KING: Let's listen to that, because the president did say, candidate Trump said during the campaign, maybe Russia can just keep Crimea, which infuriated Ukrainians. So, they wrote op-eds. There was public criticism. There was nothing, nothing. That was a small criticism game. Russia had this systematic from Putin on down, multimillion dollar, coordinated, systematic campaign to hack emails, spread propaganda, try to hack into machines around the country. They just don't compare. It's a small -- it's a squirt gun versus a big army here. Fiona Hill told Republicans on the committee, stop listening to this.</s>HILL: Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia security services did not conduct against our country, and that perhaps somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. And the cost of this investigation, I would just ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.</s>KING: That was her appeal, but it was ignored. A lot of Republicans afterwards saying, well, they both did it. And I just want to read the headline as we continue our conversation. This is from "The Associated Press" on Wednesday. Putin says U.S. political drama is diverting focus from Russia. Thank God, he told an economic forum in Russian capital on Wednesday, no one is accusing us of interfering in the U.S. elections anymore. Now they're accusing Ukraine. One result of this has been a big gift to Vladimir Putin.</s>BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes, and Hill also said that Russia has been engaged in a long pattern of deflection, trying to pin the blame on Ukraine for, actually, they're the ones that interfered, we didn't interfere. And, of course, Trump and Republicans, as you mentioned, John, have given them a gift by going along with the conspiracy theory. And we also find out that senators have been briefed from the intel community and the intel community has told them that all of this is a conspiracy theory, that Ukraine did not interfere in the way that Trump is saying and that it's dangerous to push this narrative.</s>KING: It's dangerous and wrong and not factual to push it. But they believe if you just dust everything up, as I call the pig pen strategy, it's hard to see straight when you got all, oh, could have been this, could have been this, could have been that, could have been this, in front of you. One of the questions is will the president bail on Rudy Giuliani here and say he went too far? In the "Fox and Friends" interview the other day, no indication of that at all.</s>MATTINGLY: No, there's no indication of that. And I think to your point, one of the things we've seen over the last four years that's been effective for the president and his allies is take threads of something, combine them into something much bigger and pitch this as the major defense of yourself. That's what's happening in Ukraine. Look, there were individuals in Ukraine who were frustrated about the president's comments about Crimea, we frustrated about certain elements of what the Trump campaign was talking about really to Ukraine, and made those concerns public. That is not the same thing. That is apples to oranges of what Russia was doing. And yet that's kind of the defense here. I think on Rudy's point, the one thing I took away -- look, there were a lot of details in the testimony, is that across the board, regardless of who came in, Kurt Volker, who Republican said was one of their best witnesses, Tim Morrison, same thing, every single person said what Rudy Giuliani was doing was problematic and undermining national security and Rudy Giuliani was not operating as a rogue. Rudy Giuliani was connected across the board with everybody. That is what Gordon Sondland made more clear than anything else. And the idea that Rudy Giuliani is going to disengage or be removed from the president's orbit, I think it's been made clear in the last 48 to 72 hours, simply is not going to happen. Even though everyone who testified said what he was pushing was wrong, said what he was pushing was problematic and said what he was pushing undermined national security for the United States.</s>KING: And that the people he was dealing with were corrupt actors inside Ukraine. Up next, we switch gears, more than 30 million reasons not to write off Michael Bloomberg's presidential ambition.