The Morning Dispatch: Feds Escalate Giuliani Investigation

Happy Monday! Important lesson that one of your Morning Dispatchers learned the hard way over the weekend: Vaccines may be over 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infection, but they are 0 percent effective at preventing debilitating sunburn.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Biden administration on Friday moved to restrict travel from India due to the country’s skyrocketing number of new COVID-19 cases and the presence of new variants. The policy goes into effect tomorrow and prohibits most people from entering the United States if they’ve been to India within the past 14 days. U.S. citizens and their families, legal permanent residents of the United States, and a few other groups are exempted.

• Two Republicans will advance to a runoff after outpacing 21 other candidates on Saturday in the special election to replace Rep. Ron Wright in Texas’ 6th congressional district. Susan Wright—the late congressman’s widow—emerged as the top contender with 19 percent of the vote, followed by state Rep. Jake Ellzey at 14 percent.

• At least three people died and dozens others were injured when a boat authorities say was attempting to illegally smuggle migrants into the United States crashed into a reef near San Diego and broke apart.

• The Department of Defense announced Friday it is “canceling all border barrier construction projects paid for with funds originally intended for other military missions and functions,” a widely expected move partially undoing former President Donald Trump’s decision to divert to border wall construction billions of dollars originally appropriated for the military.

• The Taliban on Saturday warned the U.S. and NATO of “counteraction” against “occupying forces” in Afghanistan as the May 1 deadline to withdraw forces originally negotiated with the Trump administration came and went. The Biden administration has begun to draw down the last few thousand troops deployed in the region but is not expected to complete that process until late summer.

• Axios reported Sunday that President Biden, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and CIA Director Bill Burns met with Israeli spy chief Yossi Cohen at the White House on Friday, with Biden telling Cohen that the U.S. is not yet close to returning to the Iran Deal.

• Newsmax—conspiracy-friendly, far-right media company—apologized Friday afternoon to an employee of Dominion Voting Systems for amplifying baseless claims that he was involved in rigging the 2020 election. In a statement, the company backtracked on claims about Dr. Eric Coomer, writing: “Newsmax would like to clarify its coverage of Dr. Coomer and note that while Newsmax initially covered claims by President Trump’s lawyers, supporters and others that Dr. Coomer played a role in manipulating Dominion voting machines, Dominion voting software, and the final vote counts in the 2020 presidential election, Newsmax subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true. Many of the states whose results were contested by the Trump campaign after the November 2020 election have conducted extensive recounts and audits, and each of these states certified the results as legal and final.”

• Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who served as House Democrats’ campaign chair during the 2020 cycle, announced Friday she will retire from Congress after her current term.

• Medina Spirit beat out its competitors by a half-length in the 147th Kentucky Derby on Saturday, giving jockey John Velazquez his fourth win at Churchill Downs and trainer Bob Baffert his seventh, a new record.

• The United States confirmed 31,050 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 2.8 percent of the 2,127,998 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 316 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 577,035. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 36,304 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 2,127,998 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 147,047,012 Americans having now received at least one dose.

Giuliani’s Home, Office Raided by FBI

When we got this little newsletter off the ground in October 2019, one of the earliest stories we tackled was the bizarre and seedy affair of Rudy Giuliani and his associates’ misadventures in Ukraine. Some of these had been part of then-President Trump’s impeachment-inducing efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, while others appeared to be simple schemes to turn a quick buck in the corruption-beleaguered nation.

That month, the New York Times reported New York federal prosecutors had launched an investigation into Giuliani, focusing on potential violations of campaign finance laws. But it had been a while since anyone had heard much about that investigation—until last Wednesday morning, when FBI agents suddenly executed search warrants at the former mayor’s New York home and office, seizing cell phones and computers.

Allies of Trump’s erstwhile personal lawyer immediately denounced the raid as political retribution from President Biden and the Democrats in his administration. The investigation was launched during the Trump years, but Wednesday’s raid would have required Justice Department sign-off, given that many of a lawyer’s communications are protected by attorney-client privilege.

“In banana republics, in Castro’s Cuba, in many parts of the world, when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends,” attorney Alan Dershowitz said Sunday. “That’s happening in America now. They’re going after Rudy Giuliani.”

“It’s very, very unfair,” Trump himself told Fox Business on Thursday. “It is so terrible when you see things that are going on in our country with the corruption and the problems and then they go after Rudy Giuliani.”

In a statement after the raid, Giuliani complained that the FBI raiding him, rather than prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton and President Biden, constituted “legal thuggery” and a “corrupt double standard.”

Giuliani and his associates are right about one thing: Any move a government takes against the current regime’s past or present political enemies deserves the highest level of scrutiny. But their arguments compel the question: Why did the FBI specifically decide to go after Rudy Giuliani? One pretty compelling answer would be: Because Giuliani’s conduct in Ukraine, much of which is already a matter of public record, has stunk to high heaven for years.

One of the clearest takeaways from former President Trump’s first impeachment hearing was that the White House had circumvented the State Department’s ordinary diplomatic channels in Ukraine to run a shadow foreign policy through Giuliani and his allies, one primarily aimed at pressuring Ukraine to announce an investigation into supposed criminal acts by the Biden family. Numerous officials testified to this fact. A transcript of a phone call in which Giuliani pressured a top aide to the president of Ukraine to open such an investigation in July 2019 was recently released by Buzzfeed.

But Giuliani’s involvement looks even fishier in light of the criminal charges against two of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were arrested in late 2019 on campaign finance charges. Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman had a common purpose in Ukraine: Getting Trump to fire the U.S. ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. Following their indictment, U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman said that Parnas and Fruman were working “to advance the political interests of at least one foreign official—a Ukrainian government official who sought the dismissal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.” And Giuliani has explicitly said he worked with Parnas on his Ukraine work: “I used him to find people in Ukraine because I couldn’t trust anyone else.”  

NBC News reported over the weekend that investigators are examining to what extent Giuliani was involved with the attempt to oust Yovanovitch—an effort that ultimately proved successful.

Worth Your Time

• Ten years ago this past weekend, SEAL Team Six executed an intricate plan to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Garrett Graff has put together an incredibly comprehensive oral history of the raid—and the decision leading up to it—for Politico, featuring quotes from Adm. William McRaven, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, and many others. “We had looked at the possibility that somebody would come out from the third floor, possibly with an RPG, and try to hit the helicopters,” McRaven remembers. “I had had a number of discussions with the great warrant officer who was flying the helicopter—at one point, in one of the rehearsals, he said, ‘Look, sir, unless I am dead, I’ll be able to get this helicopter on the ground safely.’”

• You may or may not be familiar with the name John Swartzwelder, but you’re definitely familiar with his work. Though he left the show nearly two decades ago, he’s written more episodes of The Simpsons than anybody else. Notoriously reclusive, just a handful of pictures of the 72-year-old can be found online, and he’s never done an interview about his work—until this week, when he agreed to speak with Mike Sacks of The New Yorker. “I’ve always thought Season 3 was our best individual season,” he said. “By Season 3 we had learned how to grind out first-class ‘Simpsons’ episodes with surprising regularity, we had developed a big cast of characters to work with, we hadn’t even come close to running out of story lines, and the staff hadn’t been worn down by overwork yet.”

• Reason’s Matt Welch is out with a lengthy essay for the magazine diving into the immortal debate over what the goal of public policy should be: equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome. Most Democratic politicians, he argues, are situated firmly in the latter camp—but many of the pandemic-era policies being pushed by their party will only exacerbate existing disparities between classes, races, and genders. “On February 12,” Welch writes, “Vice President Harris took to the pages of The Washington Post to sound the alarm about a clear and present crisis. ‘About 2.5 million women have lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic,’ she lamented. … But the vice president gave only passing reference to the single biggest factor keeping mothers of minor children out of the labor force: the ongoing closure of, and uncertainty surrounding, public schools. And like economic restrictions, school closures are jarringly partisan.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• David’s Sunday French Press focuses on the role of prophesy in Pentecostal Christianity. “Many, many prophets predicted Trump would win. He lost. And while virtually no prophets predicted the coronavirus catastrophe, many of them predicted a quick end to the pandemic. They were wrong,” David writes. “Too many Christian leaders reject accountability. Too many Christian believers seek the voices that tell them what they want to hear and despise those who dissent.”

• On the latest episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah discuss Justice Stephen Breyer’s controversial pronunciation of the word “amicus,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Second Amendment jurisprudence, and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Niz-Chavez v. Garland. Plus, they chat about Supreme Court oral arguments for a First Amendment lawsuit involving a high school cheerleader.

• In his Friday G-File, Jonah riffs on the idea floated in some quarters that Biden is the anti-Reagan, and that the era of big government is here to stay. And in the newsletter’s second section, he isn’t done with the Matt Gaetz/Joel Greenberg/Roger Stone saga quite yet.  

• This weekend’s Ruminant is less ruminant-y than usual, as the Greek chorus that has silently watched Jonah during these recordings for the last few episodes finally speaks up. That group includes Ryan, the newest addition to The Dispatch; Guy, noted Mark Steyn impersonator; and Nick, Jonah’s long-suffering research assistant. In this imitation of a kinda-crude FM radio show, the four talk about the latest Gaetzian nonsense, Biden’s address to Congress, and Chez Goldberg’s interesting history with Newt Gingrich.

• In his Monday column, Chris Stirewalt laments the nadir of conservatism as both parties abandon it. “Its success was so towering 25 years ago that Democratic President Bill Clinton embraced smaller government, free trade, welfare reform and fiscal discipline,” he writes. “Conservatism’s failure now is so abject that not only has a new Democratic president repudiated those concepts in his first address to Congress, but the Republican Party that for decades made itself synonymous with the conservative movement also increasingly rejects its core tenets.”

• Friday’s edition of Vital Interests, looking at the 10th anniversary of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, is available on the website this morning. “For America, bin Laden’s death brought about a collective sigh of relief. The master terrorist responsible for the most devastating attack on U.S. soil in decades was dead,” Joscelyn writes. “A decade later, however, we can say this with certainty: Al-Qaeda is alive.” 

Let Us Know

A Manchester United v. Liverpool game was postponed over the weekend after a horde of angry United fans stormed the pitch to protest the team’s owners and their (since reversed) decision to form a “Super League.”

What decision by a sports executive could get you riled up enough to (peacefully—three Manchester police officers were allegedly injured here) storm the field in protest? (Correct answer: Rob Manfred’s stupid new rule automatically putting runners on second base in extra innings.)

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).