Something doesn’t add up with this SDNY arrest of Rudy Giuliani’s associates

| 5:20 pm EDT October 10, 2019
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When the news broke this morning that the Feds at the SDNY had arrested Rudy Giuliani’s co-conspirators in the Ukraine scandal, plenty of people took it as a sign that the SDNY was taking a bold stand against Donald Trump and his criminal administration. Unfortunately, the preponderance of the evidence points elsewhere.

This is the same SDNY that’s been in court arguing that New York State shouldn’t be allowed to have Donald Trump’s tax returns. This is the same SDNY that announced this summer that it was dropping the Trump hush money case. It’s clear that Attorney General Bill Barr has managed to compromise the SDNY on a pretty fundamental level. Now that same SDNY is suddenly arresting the people who were doing Trump’s bidding in Ukraine? Something doesn’t add up here.

New details coming out this afternoon are providing additional context for what might really be going on. ABC News says that Bill Barr has known about the SDNY case against Rudy’s associates for several months, and that Bill was told last night that they were going to be arrested. The AP says that Barr has spent the past few days meeting with the SDNY. The WSJ says that Rudy had lunch with the two associates just yesterday. CNN says the SDNY had to make an expedited move on them last night because they were trying to flee the country.

So where does this get us? If all of the above reporting is accurate, then Bill Barr knew all along that an arrest was coming eventually, and he went to New York because he wanted to assert his authority over what the SDNY was about to do. Rudy, who used to run the SDYN and surely still has connections there, had lunch with his two associates at the perfect time. Did he tip them off that they were about to be arrested? Is that why they tried to flee? How did the SDNY find out that they were about to flee?

What stands out the most here is that if the SDNY didn’t think it could stand up to the Trump-Barr regime when it came to Trump’s tax returns, why would it be defying Trump and Barr by arresting two of Rudy’s henchmen? After all, these arrests ensure that Rudy goes down too. The most logical explanation continues to be that Trump and Barr gave the SDNY the green light to make the arrests, because they’re trying to scapegoat Rudy for the whole thing.

By the way, for the sake of clarity, the SDNY is part of the federal government overseen by the DOJ. The SDNY has nothing whatsoever to do with the state-level criminal case that New York is bringing against Donald Trump. In fact the Manhattan District Attorney is pulling Michael Cohen out of prison next week to have him testify before the grand jury that’s targeting Trump for indictment on state charges.