What is Executive privilege?
WSJ produced this explainer video, click link to watch video. 
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I may be biased but I get the feeling the President is ill prepared to defend himself if this goes to trial. He fundamentally and consistently misunderstands how the government actually works.
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That is true. Am getting that loud and clear from "A Warning" by Anonymous. He knows NADA, ZILCH, NOTHING, ZIPPO about how government works. He does not care to know either, and many of those advisors, people in his sphere say, he often drums up ideas as to handle things that are illegal 1/3 of the time, but mostly he has not a clue as to the balance of power, and his limits of it. #WouldBeKing/Autocrat/DictatorMindSet
But would T really testify…would he have to? What kinds of dancing around would T have to do to not testify - cry foul, fake news, witch hunt etc and lastly executive privilege.
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I don’t think the President will have to testify. That would be quite a spectacle though. Trump gets up there before the world and uses the side-show bob defense. 
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White House secret internal review uncovered effort to justify Ukraine aid hold-up after the fact
This revelation demonstrates, more than ever, that the House should not hand off the impeachment process to the Senate until Mulvaney, Pompeo, and top OMB officials testify. If they continue to refuse to testify then, IMO, Democrats should dig in – if this means the impeachment process drags on into next summer, so be it. It’s the Republicans who are delaying the process by obstruction. There’s some discussion as to whether or not this would adversely impact Democratic Reps’ and Senators’ ability to campaign, but I have faith they can multi-task.
As soon as we pass control of this process to the Senate, the entire proceedings will be gamed – key witnesses will never be called. It will indeed be a “show trial,” but in this case, a “show” that is a propaganda exercise to falsely exonerate the accused. Let’s never forget the Republicans’ Kavanaugh “investigation” scam. This will be exactly the same except on a much grander scale. The only muscle we have right now is this impeachment process; we should not release it until we have uncovered much more proof of Trump’s wrongdoing from the very mouths of Trump’s closest co-conspirators.
Schiff says the evidence is overwhelming – maybe for you and me it is, but it needs to be written in massive letters across the sky to get through to voters in the Red states. It’s their willful ignorance that is enabling their Reps and Senators. We still have a long ways to go to break through that barrier.
A confidential White House review of President Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal, according to three people familiar with the records.
The research by the White House Counsel’s Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email exchanges between acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House budget officials seeking to provide an explanation for withholding the funds after President Trump had already ordered a hold in mid-July on the nearly $400 million in security assistance, according to the three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.
One person briefed on the records examination said White House lawyers are expressing concern that the review has turned up some unflattering exchanges and facts that could at a minimum embarrass the president. It’s unclear if the Mulvaney discussions or other records pose any legal problems for Trump in the impeachment inquiry, but some fear they could pose political problems if revealed publicly. …
Later in the article, an OMB spokesperson says the Administration was not “scrambling,” which, of course, means they were scrambling.
Note: Oops – just realized that @dragonfly9 posted this breaking news a couple hours ago in the Weekend thread. But I’m leaving this up because I made some opening remarks.
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All very thoughtful analysis @Keaton_James . You are right about the squeeze play the R’s will give to a Senate inquiry UNLESS we get another bombshell (hail mary perhaps)
Could his taxes be leaked after they hopefully get released??? Opening up another can of worms…
But if it were to be sent over to Senate now, we can not rely on Chief Justice Roberts to bring any further clarity by getting/subpoening those guys…Bolton,Mulvaney Pompeo…although Roberts has shown some Stand Up behavior towards T.
But with elections looming, unfortunately the timing may be off. We will get T impeached in House…and sullying his ego and name.
By delaying we lose the punch of the impact right now…R’s will continue to do their spin game.
The polls say most people do not like his behavior. Many reporters who cover the upcoming elections say this Impeachment business is NOT top of mind with voters.
I will leave it there…good points though.
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Keep in mind; though the Democrats are moving forward, that does not preclude more coming out. In fact, more is, like these e-mails. Democrats are aware a number of decisions are dropping that could give them more ammunition, but they need to be seen to be moving forward, because there’s nothing the GOP and Trump would like more than for it to bog down and languish with nothing happening. They can’t wait and hope, but they CAN take whatever new witnesses or info rolls out and hold hearings on it while moving forward. It’s a delicate balance. We’ve only just begun to see what they’ll have to work with.
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For the House Intell Impeachment inquiry…and details from Parnas’ trove of evidence that Giuliani and T were instigating the whole thing regarding Burisma/Biden investigation. This is the type of evidence that keeps pouring in…and why Chairman Schiff is keeping the investigation open.
The House Intelligence Committee is in possession of audio and video recordings and photographs provided to the committee by Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly played a key role in assisting him in his efforts to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The material submitted to the committee includes audio, video and photos that include Giuliani and Trump. It was unclear what the content depicts and the committees only began accessing the material last week.
“We have subpoenaed Mr. Parnas and Mr. [Igor] Fruman for their records. We would like them to fully comply with those subpoenas,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told CNN Sunday, with a committee
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That’s a change from what he said on Meet the Press, about wanting to see the documents first before an interview. The documents must have been good enough to warrant drafting subpoena. The feeling on Twitter is that Parnas’s credibility is about as good as Michael Cohen’s. Should be interesting. 
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Devin Nunes Spent $57,000 on Flights to Europe to Allegedly Investigate Bidens as Ethics Complaint Filed Over ‘Abuse’ of Office
Reports filed with the Office of the Clerk for the House of Representatives show that Nunes claimed expenses for a four-day trip to Europe at the time in question between November 30 and December 3. Four entries for “commercial airfare” were claimed for Scott Glabe, George Pappas, Derek Harvey and Nunes himself.
Each claimed $14,201.43 for their visit—which included daily allowances—and came to a total of $56,805.72.
This is outrageous. That’s more than some American family’s make in year, just wasted on a fool’s errand.
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Another wrinkle…speculative of course,.WH lawyer Cipollone wants Mick Mulaney’s job?
OMB office or Chief-of-Staff…?
Not sure why…anyone hazard a guess??
Clearly Sen Graham wants Sec of State Pompeo’s job or something big.
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New York Times Editorial Board
On Impeachment and what our Founding Fathers wanted - to protect us from our own leaders who may be aligning themselves with foreign allies for personal gain, aka bribery.
Why President Trump’s Ukraine Scheme Matters
It’s what the founders warned us about.
Over the last two weeks, in sworn testimony from experienced public servants with no political axes to grind, the American people have learned that President Trump orchestrated a scheme to extract what he called a “favor” from a foreign leader by withholding a White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, against his own administration’s policy and the bipartisan wishes of Congress.
And yet the details of the Ukraine story — involving veiled threats, Latin phrases, less genteel “Trumpspeak” and “irregular channels” of diplomacy — don’t map neatly onto some Americans’ idea of obvious wrongdoing. One nagging question for many is whether Mr. Trump was really doing all this for himself, rather than in pursuit of the American national interest. It’s a crucial question; in fact, it’s at the heart of the inquiry.
After all, there’s nothing wrong with conditioning foreign aid on compliance with established foreign policy goals. But that’s not what Mr. Trump did. To the contrary, every known piece of evidence offered so far points in the other direction.
To list just a few: Rudy Giuliani, who was behind the Ukraine operation, has said publicly that he was seeking investigations damaging to Mr. Trump’s political rival in his capacity as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and to advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests.
Multiple impeachment witnesses have testified that Mr. Trump did not care about systemic corruption in Ukraine, a longstanding focus of American foreign policy, including in the Trump administration. On Thursday, David Holmes, a career diplomat working in the embassy in Kyiv, testified that Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, agreed that Mr. Trump didn’t care about Ukraine and that he only cared about “big stuff,” like investigating the Bidens.
Then there’s the fact that, as noted in the Lawfare blog, Mr. Trump approved military aid to Ukraine in 2017 and 2018, even though Hunter Biden’s role as a director of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma was well-known at the time. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies now say that it’s in the national interest to get to the bottom of how it could be that Hunter Biden was serving for five years, at great financial benefit to himself, on the Burisma board.
This page was worried about that question in 2015. It’s interesting that Mr. Trump didn’t become fixated on it until 2019. What changed this year? Well, Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, became a presidential candidate.
And of course, there is the summary of Mr. Trump’s July 25 “perfect” call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Despite Mr. Trump’s exhortations that Americans “read the transcript,” it is not exculpatory. In fact, it provides the most direct evidence to date that Mr. Trump was seeking a bribe: When Mr. Zelensky brought up the military aid, Mr. Trump appeared to condition it (“do us a favor though”) on the announcement of investigations into Ukraine’s supposed interference in the 2016 election and the purported corruption of Mr. Biden and his son.
Not direct enough for you? Mr. Trump made it easier about a week after the release of the call summary. Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn last month, the president called on China to investigate the Bidens, too. He added, ominously, “if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.”
Mr. Trump’s more honest defenders don’t deny the basic story here. Instead, they argue that soliciting help from a foreign government for personal political gain is just not that bad. Mr. Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “inappropriate” and “not how the executive should handle such things,” said Representative Will Hurd of Texas, but he shouldn’t be impeached for them. That’s far too glib a judgment. The nation’s founders made that clear by listing bribery as one of just two specific offenses meriting impeachment.
At the constitutional convention in 1787, Gouverneur Morris agreed that impeachment was a tool Congress needed to deal with a corrupt chief executive. “He may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust, and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay, without being able to guard against it by displacing him,” Morris said. “This Magistrate is not the King but the prime minister. The people are the King.”
Another framer, George Mason, asked, “Shall any man be above justice?” He added, “Shall the man who has practiced corruption, and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment by repeating his guilt?”
Nearly a decade later, in his farewell address to the nation, George Washington warned Americans “to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
Why were the framers so concerned about bribery and foreign influence? Because they had plenty of evidence of the damage it could do. They were designing the world’s first attempt at large-scale republican self-government, and they knew its success, and even survival, would depend on elected leaders who represented the people’s interest, not their own.
In other words, Americans agree to give their elected officials power over them, and those officials agree to exercise that power on Americans’ behalf. If the nation’s leaders breach that deal by lining their own pockets and bartering the interests of their citizens, they break the trust that self-government and democracy depend on. The testimony so far indicates that it’s even worse in this case. It suggests that Mr. Trump wasn’t simply soliciting a bribe, but doing so to try to rig the next election. It should go without saying that representative democracy cannot work if its leaders are cheating to keep themselves in power.
The argument that there’s nothing to worry about because Mr. Trump’s Ukraine scheme didn’t work in the end misses the point. If Mr. Trump is allowed to get away with this blatant attempt at subverting the will of the 2020 voters, what’s to stop him from trying again? Remember, the phone call with the Ukrainian president, which is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, happened just one day after the special counsel Robert Mueller testified in Congress about the end of the Russia investigation. If the House of Representatives impeaches Mr. Trump and then the Senate acquits him, it’s reasonable to assume that he would take that outcome as exoneration — and as carte blanche to do whatever he wants to win in 2020.
Throughout the hearings, House Democrats have done their job as representatives of a coequal branch of government, attempting to get to the bottom of grave allegations of wrongdoing by the president. Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has behaved with admirable focus and restraint as his Republican colleagues have acted like children, yelling at witnesses and leaving the room when they didn’t want to hear damaging testimony.
There could well be more to come, too, if the many administration officials currently refusing to appear do the right thing and show up. Many have sent out news releases disputing witness testimony. Those witnesses were willing to testify under oath, however, at risk of perjury — and as yet Mr. Trump’s defenders have not been. If they don’t have anything to hide, why not come forward and speak under oath?
Republicans complain that this is all a partisan attack, or a “hoax,” as the president calls it. There’s no question that Democrats have their own partisan interests. But that’s no excuse for the Republicans to ignore all this evidence. In conducting this inquiry, the Democrats are doing what people concerned about protecting the nation would do. It is the Republicans who are turning this process into a partisan dogfight, attacking lifelong public servants, implying they have dual loyalty and misstating testimony they heard the day before. Rather than listening to what witnesses were telling them, some of them chose to pound the table and regurgitate conspiracy theories about Ukraine that were long ago debunked by American intelligence as Russian disinformation and misdirection.
Put this in some perspective: A party that was more than happy to impeach a president for lying about a sexual affair has refused to cast even a single vote in favor of an inquiry into whether to impeach a president who, by the credible accounts of his own appointees, has undermined national security for political advantage.
For the record: This page supported the impeachment inquiry into President Bill Clinton, as it has supported this inquiry into President Trump.
This Republican display of herd instinct is part of the broader unwillingness of the party’s leaders, and their hypocritical supporters in the partisan press, to check Mr. Trump’s most disturbing tendency of all. From the beginning of his term in 2017, President Trump has asserted broad, even monarchical, powers. He can use the extraordinary force of his office to strong-arm other countries into serving as his political pawns. He can run a protection racket with military alliances and pull out of international organizations and treaties. He can profit off the presidency. The Justice Department’s guidelines bar the indictment of a sitting president.
According to his lawyers, he can’t even be investigated, no matter what he has done or might do. Now, he’s being asked to defend his behavior before a coequal branch of the government, an exercise that he chooses, in his kingly manner, to deem illegitimate. So he refuses to participate and stops others from doing so.
In July Mr. Trump said that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” Those are the words of a despot, not an American president. As the impeachment inquiry proceeds, Republicans who claim they have no problem with this sort of talk should ask themselves how they would feel if it were coming from a President Joe Biden.
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And worse yet, they were committing a crime on our dime.
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I hadn’t heard this point yet.
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Giuliani associate wants to testify that Nunes aides hid Ukraine meetings on Biden dirt from Schiff
The lawyer for an indicted business associate of Rudy Giuliani said his client is prepared to testify under oath that aides to Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, scrapped a trip to Ukraine this year when they realized it would mean notifying Democratic Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff.
Lev Parnas would tell Congress that the purpose of the planned trip was to interview two Ukrainian prosecutors who claim to have evidence that could help President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, Parnas’ attorney, Joseph Bondy, told CNBC. Nunes is one of Trump’s most outspoken defenders in Congress. Giuliani is one of the president’s personal lawyers.
But when Nunes’ staff realized that going to Ukraine themselves would mean alerting Schiff to their plans, they instead asked Parnas to set up the meetings for them over phone and Skype, which he did, according to Bondy.
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Double posting!!! @Pet_Proletariat… 
More details (still to be confirmed) that some of Nunes’ team were in fact in touch with Ukrainians this year, in March in search of dirt on Joe Biden’s son but used Skype in lieu of travelling there so that Chair Schiff would not have to be notified.
Thx @rusticgorilla
Lev Parnas, a business associate of Rudy Giuliani, wants to testify to Congress that aides to Rep. Devin Nunes called off a trip to Ukraine this year when they realized they would be required to notify Democratic committee chairman Adam Schiff.
The purpose of the trip was to interview two Ukrainian prosecutors who claim to have evidence that could help President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, according to Parnas’ lawyer.
- Parnas also alleges that Nunes, a leading Trump ally, himself traveled to Vienna last year to interview a potential source of political dirt on Joe Biden.
…
For more than a year, Parnas has also worked closely with Giuliani to dig up dirt on Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine in advance of the 2020 presidential election, according to Bondy. During that time, Trump and his allies in Congress have pushed unfounded claims that Biden intervened in a Ukrainian criminal investigation, and that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Nunes team’s scrapped trip to Ukraine has not been previously reported, nor have the meetings that Bondy said his client arranged in place of the overseas trip. The meetings took place in late March, and Derek Harvey, a senior investigator for Nunes, represented the congressman, according to Bondy. One of the meetings was with Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, and it was held over Skype, Parnas would tell Congress. The second, Bondy said, was a phone call Parnas arranged for Harvey with a deputy in Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office, Konstantin Kulik.
Both Kulik and Kholodnytsky have repeatedly claimed they witnessed corruption by Democratic operatives in Ukraine during the 2016 election. Neither official has produced evidence to support his account. A Nunes spokesman did not respond to several requests for comment about what Parnas would reveal to Congress.
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The Bad Arguments That Trump Didn’t Commit Bribery
In this article they dig into the common law meaning of bribery vs the modern federal statute and more! 
I’ve been looking for quality reading on this very subject. Why didn’t I think to check Lawfare? 
This understanding of bribery has persisted since the Founding. For example, in 1868, the Supreme Court of New Jersey, relying on Founding-era treatises and English common law, held that “any attempt to influence an officer in his official conduct, whether in the executive, legislative, or judicial department of the government, by the offer of a reward or pecuniary consideration, is an indictable common law misdemeanor”—specifically, the common law offense of bribery. State v. Ellis , 33 N.J.L. 102, 104 (Sup. Ct. 1868). And in 1896, the Maine Supreme Court observed that “[b]ribery at common law is the crime of offering any undue reward or remuneration to any public officer or other person intrusted with a public duty, with a view to influence his behavior in the discharge of his duty. The taking as well as the offering or receiving of such reward constitutes the crime, when done with a corrupt intent.” State v. Miles , 36 A. 70, 72 (1896).
And while the definition of bribery under the Impeachment Clause is not reliant on federal statutory law, there, too, the solicitation and offering of a bribe is bribery. As a federal appeals court explained, the statute “is violated even though the official offered a bribe is not corrupted, or the object of the bribe could not be attained, or it could make no difference if after the act were done it turned out that there had been actually no occasion to seek to influence any official conduct.” In other words, as many criminal law experts pointed out when Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham suggested that attempted bribery did not rise to the level of impeachability, the modern crime of bribery includes attempted bribery.
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The anticipated ruling on McGahn testimony is 
today.
Impeachment inquiry live updates: Court ruling on McGahn testimony expected; more transcripts could be released
A federal judge has said she will rule by the end of the day on whether former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify before Congress. House investigators could release transcripts of two more witnesses deposed behind closed doors. And the House Intelligence Committee is pulling together a report on what was gleaned from public testimony to send to the Judiciary Committee ahead of the drafting of articles of impeachment.
Democrats are seeking to build a case that Trump leveraged military assistance and an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in exchange for investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and a debunked theory alleging Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
●White House review turns up emails showing extensive effort to justify Trump’s decision to block Ukraine military aid.
●House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) says Democrats will press forward despite lack of testimony from key impeachment witnesses.
●Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) denies allegationhe met with top Ukrainian prosecutor about Bidens.
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FBI and US District Attorney (in NY) subpoenas documents from Giuliani & Associates which may lead to indictments on money laundering, campaign finance malfeasance, Obstruction of Justice and a whole host of crimes linked to Ex Major Rudy Giuliani and thereby T.
Subpoenas issued to people with ties to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his associates indicate a broad federal investigation into possible money laundering, obstruction of justice and campaign-finance violations, and suggest that prosecutors are looking closely at the work of Mr. Giuliani himself, according to people familiar with the matter.
In recent weeks, prosecutors have sent subpoenas and other requests to potential witnesses seeking records and information related to Mr. Giuliani and two of his associates, according to the people. The investigation, led by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has already led to campa ign-finance charges against the associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
The subpoenas offer the clearest indication yet that federal prosecutors are examining Mr. Giuliani’s consulting work. Among the entities named in the subpoenas are Giuliani Partners, a security-consulting firm founded by Mr. Giuliani in 2002 that had multiple foreign clients, including a city in Ukraine. The subpoenas also sought information on a company co-founded by Mr. Parnas that paid Mr. Giuliani for business and legal advice.
Mr. Giuliani said in an interview that he hadn’t been contacted by prosecutors and has denied wrongdoing.
Subpoenas described to The Wall Street Journal listed more than a half dozen potential charges under consideration: obstruction of justice, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government, serving as an agent of a foreign government without registering with the Justice Department, donating funds from foreign nationals, making contributions in the name of another person or allowing someone else to use one’s name to make a contribution, along with mail fraud and wire fraud.
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Rudy and the company he keeps, which are a couple of Russian Oligarchs who help fund the deals, and they all share lawyers. See everyone trying to deny that those relationships were a big nothing.
Busses are being driven and people are being thrown under them…
VIENNA — They were two Ukrainian oligarchs with American legal problems. One had been indicted on federal bribery charges. The other was embroiled in a vast banking scandal and was reported to be under investigation by the F.B.I.
And they had one more thing in common: Both had been singled out by Rudolph W. Giuliani and pressed to assist in his wide-ranging hunt for information damaging to one of President Trump’s leading political rivals, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
That effort culminated in the July 25 phone call between the American and Ukrainian presidents that has taken Mr. Trump to the brink of impeachment and inexorably brought Mr. Giuliani’s Ukrainian shadow campaign into the light.
In public hearings over the last two weeks, American diplomats and national-security officials have laid out in detail how Mr. Trump, at the instigation and with the help of Mr. Giuliani, conditioned nearly $400 million in direly needed military aid on Ukraine’s announcing investigations into Mr. Biden and his son, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
But interviews with the two Ukrainian oligarchs — Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky — as well as with several other people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s dealings, point to a new dimension in his exertions on behalf of his client, Mr. Trump. Taken together, they depict a strategy clearly aimed at leveraging information from politically powerful but legally vulnerable foreign citizens.
In the case of Mr. Firtash, an energy tycoon with deep ties to the Kremlin who is facing extradition to the United States on bribery and racketeering charges, one of Mr. Giuliani’s associates has described offering the oligarch help with his Justice Department problems — if Mr. Firtash hired two lawyers who were close to President Trump and were already working with Mr. Giuliani on his dirt-digging mission. Mr. Firtash said the offer was made in late June when he met with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen involved in Mr. Giuliani’s Ukraine pursuit.
Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”
…
In the interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.” But to help his legal case, he said, he had paid his new lawyers $1.2 million to date, with a portion set aside as something of a referral fee for Mr. Parnas.
And in late August, Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova did as promised: They went to the Justice Department and pleaded Mr. Firtash’s case with the attorney general, William P. Barr.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani acknowledged that he had sought information helpful to Mr. Trump from a member of Mr. Firtash’s original legal team. But, Mr. Giuliani said, “the only thing he could give me was what I already had, hearsay.” Asked if he had then directed his associates to meet with Mr. Firtash, Mr. Giuliani initially said, “I don’t think I can comment,” but later said, “I did not tell Parnas to do anything with Firtash.”
He added, though, that there would be nothing improper about seeking information about the Bidens from the oligarchs. “Where do you think you get information about crime?” he said.
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