Corruption all around.

In today's corruption news: 

"A confession letter written by Joel Greenberg in the final months of the Trump presidency claims that he and close associate Rep. Matt Gaetz paid for sex with multiple women—as well as a girl who was 17 at the time.

“On more than one occasion, this individual was involved in sexual activities with several of the other girls, the congressman from Florida’s 1st Congressional District and myself,” Greenberg wrote in reference to the 17-year-old.

“From time to time, gas money or gifts, rent or partial tuition payments were made to several of these girls, including the individual who was not yet 18. I did see the acts occur firsthand and Venmo transactions, Cash App or other payments were made to these girls on behalf of the Congressman.”

The letter, which The Daily Beast recently obtained, was written after Greenberg—who was under federal indictment—asked Roger Stone to help him secure a pardon from then-President Donald Trump.

A series of private messages starting in late 2020—also recently obtained by The Daily Beast—shows a number of exchanges between Greenberg and Stone conducted over the encryptedmessaging app Signal, with communications set to disappear. However, Greenberg appears to have taken screenshots of a number of their conversations.

“If I get you $250k in Bitcoin would that help or is this not a financial matter,” Greenberg wrote to Stone, one message shows.

“I understand all of this and have taken it into consideration,” Stone replied. “I will know more in the next 24 hours I cannot push too hard because of the nonsense surrounding pardons.”

I hope you are prepared to wire me $250,000 because I am feeling confident,” Stone wrote to Greenberg on Jan. 13.

In a text message to The Daily Beast, Stone said that Greenberg had tried to hire him to assist with a pardon, but he denied asking for or receiving payment or interceding on his behalf. He did, however, confirm he had Greenberg prepare “a document explaining his prosecution.”

In the private text messages to Stone, Greenberg described his activities with Gaetz, repeatedly referring to the Republican congressman by his initials, “MG,” or as “Matt.”

“My lawyers that I fired, know the whole story about MG’s involvement,” Greenberg wrote to Stone on Dec. 21. “They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”' 

And in other pals of the former guy corruption news:

"Eighteen months ago, media reports indicated that Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, was under scrutiny by federal prosecutors at the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York for actions related to his involvement in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump's first impeachment. 

Given the time that has passed, one could be forgiven for thinking that the investigation had petered out and that Giuliani was in the clear. All that changed early Wednesday morning, however, when FBI agents showed up at Giuliani's home and office to execute a search warrant approved by a federal judge, and later did the same with respect to fellow lawyer Victoria Toensing, a major sign that the investigation is not just still alive, but that it is ramping up in a big way. (In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, Ms. Toensing's law firm said she had been informed she wasn't a target of the investigation.)

The crimes under investigation, according to The New York Times, relate to whether Giuliani acted as an unregistered foreign agent -- namely, that if while he was working on Trump's behalf to get Ukrainian officials to announce a criminal investigation into the Bidens, Giuliani was also lobbying US officials about matters of interest to Ukrainians with whom Giuliani was working, like the removal of then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), trying to influence US policy at the direction of a foreign actor without registering as an "agent of a foreign principal" is illegal; for national security reasons, the US government wants to know the identities of the interests behind those lobbying US officials on matters of US and foreign policy.

One may ask: why did it take so long to get around to executing search warrants? We don't know for sure, and likely never will given the confidentiality around internal deliberations involving criminal investigations at DOJ, but The New York Times is reporting that there may have been politically motivated action taken to delay and then refuse to approve the warrant under the Trump administration. Search warrants involving lawyers like Giuliani carry particularly onerous approval requirements, because of concerns around breaching the attorney-client privilege by gaining access to communications between a lawyer and his client.

That means that these particular warrants would have been sent through the chain of command at the US Attorney's Office, up to Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss, and then down to the Justice Department in Washington for another set of approvals. In the past, approval was required from a special unit at DOJ called the Office of Enforcement Operations that handles particularly sensitive search warrants, including warrants for lawyers; now, due to a rule change, billed as a "clarification," by former Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen shortly before he left office at the end of the Trump administration, search warrant requests involving lawyers also must be approved all the way up to the Deputy Attorney General him- or herself.

Thus, in this case, before presenting the warrant to a judge, the Giuliani and Toensing search warrants also would have been approved by DOJ's second-in-command, now Lisa Monaco. Once approval is given, prosecutors take the application to a federal judge, who must be satisfied that there was probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that the evidence sought would be relevant to proving that crime.

Now that the search has occurred and evidence has been seized, I expect a few things to happen. As would be expected, Giuliani, who has long denied any wrongdoing, is ramping up his defense in the court of public opinion. We heard comments from Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello, who complained that execution of the warrant was "legal thuggery" because Giuliani served as associate attorney general and US attorney, as well as Trump's lawyer. Giuliani's son, Andrew Giuliani, also chimed in with comments suggesting political bias in the case.

I also expect significant litigation over the seized information to happen before the prosecution team is able to review it. Prosecutors certainly will be prepared to create a walled-off two-team review system to ensure protection of attorney-client privilege. But I expect -- as we saw when another Trump personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was served with a search warrant as part of his criminal investigation by SDNY -- that Giuliani will challenge them every step of the way. " [Source]

I know one thing, the right- wing republicans who fought against Merrick Garland getting on the supreme court will regret the day that they did that. He is not playing around over at the justice department. 

Just ask the former guy and his cronies. This won't end well for them.   

 

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