Saturday, October 12, 2019

An Unusal Approach to International Relations

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.     The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. Impeachment is becoming likely.

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:
On Wednesday Bloomberg reported that Trump had pressed Rex Tillerson, who at the time was nominally secretary of state, to push the justice department into killing an investigation into Reza Zarrab, a Giuliani client, for allegedly violating sanctions designed to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Specifically, in a February 2017 Oval Office meeting, Trump had invited Giuliani, and Michael Mukasey, Bush 43’s attorney general and a former federal judge, to lobby Tillerson on that score.
...
Like Trump, Giuliani can engender a sense of disappointment and disgust among those who know him best. Ken Frydman, a New York-based public relations whiz and a veteran of Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral race, recently wrote: “The man I worked for in 1993 is not the man who now lies for Donald Trump.”

Frydman isn’t alone. As another Giuliani alumnus told the Guardian, “There is tremendous disappointment that a man we once greatly admired and who was worthy of that admiration has become a lapdog to a conspiracy theorist president.” The aide explained: “It’s heartbreaking in so many ways because – at his core – for better or worse, Rudy was always his own man. Sadly, he no longer is.”




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