Another useful GOP idiot with Fox News brain rot
by digby
TPM had a big scoop today that sheds light on Giuliani's ravings of the past few days:
As far back as October 2018, a former U.S. attorney acting on behalf of Ukrainian interests tried to get federal law enforcement to bite on bogus political dirt about the Bidens and on whether Paul Manafort’s notorious Black Ledger was a forgery.
Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney in Arkansas, emailed the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York relaying a request for a meeting on the same topics into which President Trump would later demand Ukraine conduct investigations.
TPM has been investigating Cummins’ role in attempting to serve as an intermediary between certain Ukrainian interests and federal law enforcement. Cummins’ involvement has not been previously reported. However, Rudy Giuliani sent a letter on Saturday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) claiming that a former U.S. attorney was ready to provide emails and memoranda about an attempt to get the FBI to investigate Biden and the list of Manafort bribes, called the Black Ledger.
Cummins confirmed to TPM Sunday morning that Giuliani’s letter was referring to him.
Click over to read the whole thing. It's yet another story of half-baked wingnut conspiracy theory nonsense proving these people will believe anything.
I knew the name Bud Cummins was familiar and it turns out he was one of the US Attorneys forced out by Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his purge. He was replaced by the GOP political operative Tim Griffin.
Gonzales shouldn't have bothered. This guy is a true blue wingnut. But maybe he was actually fired because he was even thicker than usual:
Speaking over the phone Sunday morning, Cummins expressed to TPM a mixture of dismay that Berman broke off contact and mild embarrassment at having dealt with Ukrainians whose motivations he admitted he did not understand. Cummins added that when he sent the email to Berman he “wasn’t advocating for the legitimacy of any of this.”
“At the time, I didn’t know a whole lot about Ukraine. I didn’t make any real attempt to vet this.” He added “I didn’t care, that wasn’t my job” in a discussion of what may have been motivating Lutsenko.
Lutsenko and a spokesperson for Lutsenko didn’t immediately return requests for comment. Berman’s office declined to comment.
Cummins told TPM that he had tried to signal to Berman that he was not vouching for the credibility of the allegations themselves. He said that he suggested to Berman that Lutsenko could “delegate some investigators to meet with some line [prosecutors] in his office,” referring to Berman.
Cummins called the lack of response from the Manhattan federal prosecutor a “breathtaking double standard,” given how the Mueller investigation “targeted” President Trump.
It gets dumber:
In 2016, Cummins served as chair of Donald Trump’s campaign in Arkansas, then as a Trump whip at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He went on to serve on the Trump administration transition team.
Cummins said that he believed that “mistrust of the FBI” was what led the Ukrainians to seek a backchannel to the Justice Department. He said that his Ukrainian interlocutors — who he declined to name — apparently went to him because they believed the “FBI in Ukraine had either wittingly or unwittingly become the pawns of the ambassador and secretary of state and vice president, and they cannot be trusted.”
Fox News brain rot is epidemic. It's worse than ebola. Indeed, I think the greatest damage that's been inflicted in this whole mess is that the whole world knows that the American conservative elites are a bunch of gullible fools whom you can easily figure out how to dupe just by watching Fox and Friends.
Click over to get the whole story. It's interesting.
This also reminds me: whatever happened to Rudy's backchannel with the NY FBI investigation? I guess we'll never know who he was conspiring with to sabotage Clinton in the fall of 2016 will we?
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