DOJ throws Rudy Giuliani under the bus
Last week Palmer Report pointed out that Rudy Giuliani may have taken Attorney General Bill Barr down with him, when Giuliani met with high ranking DOJ officials to try to convince them to let one of his legal clients off the hook. We posited that there was no way this meeting would have happened unless Barr signed off on it, which put Barr front and center in the criminal case against Rudy.
Now, unsurprisingly, the Department of Justice is trying to distance itself from the mess by throwing Rudy Giuliani under the bus. The DOJ released a statement saying that it wouldn’t have taken the meeting with Rudy Giuliani if it had known that the SDNY, an outpost of the DOJ, was criminally investigating Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The thing is, although not everyone at the DOJ may have known about the investigation, the New York Times says that Bill Barr had known about it since February.
So now we have a situation where a high ranking DOJ official took a meeting with Rudy Giuliani at a time when Bill Barr knew that the SDNY was investigating Parnas and Fruman for their work with Giuliani, and the official is now claiming that he didn’t know about the investigation.
It’s clear that the DOJ is throwing Rudy Giuliani under the bus by distancing itself from its own meeting with him. It also sounds like the DOJ’s Brian Benczkowski is throwing Bill Barr under the bus by implying that Barr didn’t bother to tell him about the investigation before he took the meeting with Rudy.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report