A quick rundown on a couple of important court actions within the last hour:

Before any more time goes by, I wanted to flag your attention to the November 8th Inside Briefing we did with foreign policy expert Heather Hurlburt on US relations with Turkey. US-Turkey relations may seem pretty far afield right now as we wrestle with the impeachment story. But it’s not. The whole briefing is illuminating. But I am suggesting you watch specifically for the part of the discussion where we get into how Trump’s actions and inactions toward Turkey have been shaped Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have been lathered up with vast sums of money by cronies of President Erdogan for the purpose of gaining access to and influence over the President. Giuliani appears to have played a critical role portraying the Kurds to Trump as duplicitous and anti-Trump.

This tells us a lot about Trump’s actions toward Turkey. More important is that this looks like the template for current US relations with numerous countries around the world, especially those with authoritarian and oligarchic states where the strongman figure has access, either directly or indirectly, to large sums of private money.

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Along with Josh Kovensky’s big scoop about Trump world lawyer Bud Cummins and the SDNY, there’s been a flurry of news over the last 48 hours about the tangle of corruption connecting Trump and Ukraine, largely but not exclusively through Rudy Giuliani. Most of these stories – and the criminal or semi-criminal networks they’re about – get hard to follow: Ten names you haven’t heard of involved in a corrupt enterprise in a country where corruption is endemic and commonplace. This tends to obscure the real pattern which is most important from a US perspective.

Let me try to explain what that is.

Happy Monday, November 25. It feels like every day, more subplots connected to the Ukraine pressure campaign come into focus. Today is no exception. Here’s what we’re watching.

Great exclusive here from Josh Kovensky who’s been working this story for several weeks and has more coming on this front. Another Trump-aligned attorney — actually a former U.S. Attorney, Bud Cummins — was pushing the Southern District of New York on investigations of Joe Biden based on clients he was working for in Ukraine. He was trying to serve as an intermediary for Yuriy Lutsenko, the crooked prosecutor who later hooked up or was already working with Rudy Giuliani. Yesterday, Giuliani published a letter to Senator Lindsey Graham, offering new purported evidence for Graham’s investigation into the Biden family. This is what he was talking about.

The big picture here is that when you have a crooked President who puts out word that he’s looking for foreigners to take out his political rivals, a lot of shady people come out of the woodwork — unsurprisingly.

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It seems our former AUSA Reader was on to something when they pointed to the logic of trying to deal with subpoenaing recalcitrant witnesses at a Senate trial rather than getting slow rolled for months in the courts and possibly, ultimately getting nothing. You’ll remember that Chief Justice Roberts acts as judge in a senate trial and under Senate rules he makes all decisions on questions of evidence, relevance, subpoenas witnesses – though he can be overruled on those judgments by a majority of the Senate.

Chairman Adam Schiff appeared this morning on both the State of the Union and Meet the Press and he seemed to confirm that this is his thinking too. Read More

TPM’s investigative reporters, Tierney Sneed and Josh Kovensky, reflected on what we learned during an intensive week of impeachment hearings and took your questions on what’s next. Watch here.

On this week’s podcast, we covered all the twists and turns in the marathon impeachment hearings, from Gordon Sondland’s wisecracks to Fiona Hill’s subtly devastating testimony. Take a listen here, or on your podcast platform of choice.

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The last two plus months has been the kind of breakneck torrent of news that is what this organization and the machine of its news reporting was built for. We’ve heard from many of you thanking our team for the coverage they’ve provided over this period. So let us thank you because your membership makes it all possible.

The Ukrainian at the center of the “Ukraine collusion” conspiracy just posted a picture of himself hanging out with John Voight at the Trump DC hotel. Because of course he did.