The Crazy Last Days of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon

 

 "Giuliani appears frustrated by his inability to concoct a Biden scandal that works. On Tuesday, he exploded during a Fox Business appearance, when the host pressed him on the shady origins of the derogatory information he claims to have on Hunter Biden. The next night, Giuliani posted a 32-minute-long YouTube video in which he presented a series of unproven or discredited accusations against Biden: The former veep pocketed millions by forcing the firing of that Ukrainian prosecutor; he was involved in Russian money-laundering; he had a dirty deal in Kazakhstan. But Giuliani zeroed in on the China stuff, claiming that Joe Biden was the kingpin behind Hunter’s (unsuccessful) deal there. Giuliani excoriated the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media for not reporting this. He called Joe Biden a “crook” and noted darkly that “a lot of the people the Bidens did business with” have “disappeared.” In this time-is-running-out frenzy, Giuliani had reached the point of putting out a DIY video intimating the Bidens knock off business associates. (Also on Wednesday night, Fox host Tucker Carlson joined the Frustrated October Surprise Club, when he declared on air that “confidential” Hunter Biden documents that one of his producers had shipped through an express-mail service had mysteriously disappeared.)

The New York Post reported that Bannon, who now hosts a radio show and a podcast, was the fellow who first tipped off the tabloid in September that Giuliani had material supposedly from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But Bannon has been up to much more than connecting the Post with Giuliani. After Trump booted him from the White House in 2017, he found a new patron: Guo Wengui, a mysterious Chinese dissident reputed to be a billionaire. Guo has lived in the United States since 2014, when he fled China, where he faces charges for various financial crimes related to his former real estate business. Guo claims these charges are false and politically motivated. (He has also been accused of rape in a civil lawsuit; Guo denies this allegation, contending it was engineered by the Chinese regime he has opposed.) Guo has fashioned himself a vocal critic of corruption in the Chinese Communist Party and has hooked up with Bannon to bash the Chinese regime. In June, the duo announced the “Federal State of New China,” a vaguely defined initiative to “overthrow the Chinese government.” Their attacks on Beijing include funding a researcher, Li-Meng Yan, who has issued papers making the widely rejected claim that the coronavirus was potentially manufactured in a Chinese lab. Guo is also a member of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club. "


The Crazy Last Days of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon – Mother Jones