Is Rudy Giuliani a Russian Pawn?

Rudy Giuliani demonstrating something or other to the press after a television interview.Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

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The bombshell story of Hunter Biden’s computer goes something like this: Rudy Giuliani was strolling around in Wilmington one day when he noticed a hard drive lying on the sidewalk. When he hooked it up, it turned out to be full of incriminating evidence about Hunter Biden’s lobbying for a Ukrainian energy company, along with some risque photos. What luck! So he gave it to the FBI and turned over a copy to his pals at the New York Post, who put it all on their front page.

OK, that’s not exactly how it happened. But it might as well be, since the actual story is hardly any more believable. Tonight, the New York Times provides some hints about what probably really happened:

The intelligence agencies warned the White House late last year that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run, according to four current and former American officials.

….Mr. Giuliani has made multiple trips to Ukraine to gather material that is damaging to the Biden campaign, and his December visit came as he tried to shift the political conversation from impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump to unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Biden’s wrongdoing.

Conservatives are apoplectic that mainstream news organizations are mostly ignoring the hard drive story (so far) and that both Twitter and Facebook initially acted to limit the spread of the Post story. And I hardly blame them for being disappointed. After all, this kind of thing has always worked so well in the past, so why not this time too?

That’s hard to say. The optimistic take is that everyone has learned a lesson from 2016. The less optimistic take is simply that (a) Giuliani is a nutcase these days, and (b) he’s been publicly searching for precisely this kind of thing for over a year. It’s hardly believable when he comes up with precisely what he wanted just three weeks before the election.

Republicans are mostly hanging back on this story, since they know it could blow up any moment. However, the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to open an investigation of Twitter, apparently as a safe way of keeping this story in the spotlight without actually taking a stand on it. Stay tuned.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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