Rudy Giuliani actually admits he's using the State Department in his plot against Biden — but he won't say whether Trump is involved

When last we left the saga of Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to smear Joe Biden with a third-hand scandal in Ukraine, the former state prosecutor behind the whole affair admitted that he had been creating a line of pure BS simply to curry favor with Trump. However, since Giuliani knew the whole thing was a fabrication from the beginning, and is simply looking to pay someone to provide “evidence” that can be used against Biden … that wasn’t a problem.

Now, months after he was forced to step back from this make-believe story in the face of one too many cameras, Giuliani is counting on the many, many, many scandals generated by Trump in the interval to allow him to go back to feeding at this trough. And on the theory that by this point no one can remember anything beyond there was something about Biden and something that happened in Ukraine, Giuliani shot back across the Atlantic last week to resume ghostwriting this fairy tale.

As The New York Times reports, Giuliani has returned to the same tactics he deployed before the limelight got a little too bright the first time—leaning on officials to let them know that anyone who is willing to think of something, anything, that can be flung in Biden’s direction gets a cookie. While a failure to find some reason that Donald Trump can’t claim that the former vice president is “under investigation” might have serious effects on Trump’s willingness to extend help to Ukraine in the form of either dollars or military hardware.

In these efforts, Giuliani claims he is “acting on his own as a private citizen.” Though his idea of being just any old tourist means he’s also working “with the knowledge and assistance of the State Department.” In the latest interview, Giuliani refused to say whether or not he was working on Trump’s dime … but since Giuliani previously called Trump from the office of an official he was trying to convince to say something against Biden, and since Giuliani put that official on the phone with Trump so that Trump could make it clear how important this was to him, the idea that Trump has nothing to do with this seems to reach a “buying Greenland” level of ridiculousness.

Just as in his last series of visits, there is no Biden scandal in Ukraine. But there certainly is a Giuliani scandal. He has told everyone up to and including the new president of the country that they should “pursue inquiries into matters of interest to Trump.” The way that Giuliani has gone about trying to obtain spurious evidence against Biden in Ukraine, should be more than enough reason to call into doubt any case that Giuliani ever prosecuted.

Unfortunately for Giuliani, while Ukraine was a rich stomping ground for Trump campaign manager turned federal prisoner Paul Manafort, and a perfect testing ground for the kind of tactics Manafort and his Russian handlers would deploy in the 2016 election, things there have changed. Comedian turned politician Volodymyr Zelensky was elected overwhelmingly in the spring on a mission to explicitly root out the kind of anything-for-a-buck corruption that Giuliani has been depending on, and also to make tight connections between Ukraine and western Europe.