In a story on Donald Trump "lawyer" Rudy Giuliani's voluminous phone calls with the White House and other bits of government during key periods in the pressuring of the Ukrainian government to provide political favors to Trump, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Mick Mulvaney-led Office of Management and Budget is flatly denying that Giuliani spoke with anyone of consequence … about anything. This, despite subpoenaed phone records identifying repeated calls between Giuliani and the OMB during the period in question.
An OMB official said "the department had checked with senior career and political staffers and didn't identify anybody who had spoken with Mr. Giuliani," according to the Journal. Oooh … kay?
From this we are to presume that Rudy Giuliani was making numerous calls to the OMB, some of which lasted 12 or 13 minutes, but that none of them made it to anyone worth "checking with." It must be that, because it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone working in the scrupulously scandal-free Donald Trump administration would brazenly lie about such an easily checkable—and, in fact, checked—material fact.
As for whether the mystery conversations were with still-OMB chief Mick Mulvaney, nobody appears to dispute that Giuliani and Mulvaney were themselves in communication but, the Journal cites a White House official as saying records of Mulvaney's personal cellphone use don't "match" with those in the House Intelligence Committee report.
This is another reminder that the Intelligence Committee may have released an initial report, but its work is far from done. The administration, including the Office of Management and Budget, has so far successfully hidden the vast majority of documentation of just what Giuliani was doing on Trump's behalf, who he communicated with, and who directly assisted him (or was assisted by him) in sabotaging Ukrainian support after Trump demanded it be done. A casual Trump administration claim that they "checked" and everyone they checked with says they didn't talk to Rudy during mysterious phone calls discovered by House impeachment investigators isn't going to cut it.
Unless that administration claim is made under oath, in fact, it's worth less than nothing.
Published with permission from Daily Kos.
