President Trump was personally warned by his own national security adviser last year that his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was being used to feed him disinformation from Russian intelligence operatives, but he just “shrugged his shoulders,” The Washington Post reports, citing multiple former officials. The Daily Beast previously reported about the numerous alarm bells that went off within the U.S. intelligence community about Giuliani’s ties to Andriy Derkach, the Ukrainian lawmaker spouting pro-Kremlin propaganda who would later be blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury as a “Russian agent.”
According to the Post, the warnings about Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine during a trip last December, which were based on intercepted communications, among other things, made it directly to the president before apparently being dismissed. “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” one source was quoted telling the Post about the message conveyed to Trump. The idea, one official said, was to “protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,” as Trump was already embroiled in impeachment scandal. But the commander in chief dismissed the warning from National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien by saying, “That’s Rudy,” according to the report.
Read it at Washington Post
