White House Was Warned Last Year That Russian Intelligence Was Seeking to Manipulate Rudy Giuliani With Election Misinformation on Bidens

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Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer and campaign oppo fixer for Donald Trump, has been targeted by Russian intelligence to launder election misinformation about Joe Biden

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. intelligence community made that assessment last year, and went so far as to warn the president that Giuliani could be an unwitting conduit of false or manipulated claims, with the goal of sowing dissension and chaos in the 2020 election. This alert was based on a number of different evidence sources, including intercepted communications.

The warnings to the White House, which have not previously been reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.

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But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

News of this U.S. intelligence warning comes amid new reports in the New York Post based on alleged emails from Hunter Biden to Chinese and Ukrainian officials, one of whom purportedly thanks Biden for possibly setting up an introduction to his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden. The Post‘s report is based on information supposedly pulled off a laptop hard drive that may have once belonged to the younger Biden — who, the story goes, turned it in for repair but then never retrieved it — and that Giuliani obtained and then ferried to the newspaper.

The highly suspicious circumstances of the laptop’s provenance, as well as Giuliani’s explanation of it, which he has already changed in retelling it, has led even some at Fox News to remark: “This whole thing is sketchy.”

Last month, the Post had also reported that one of Giuliani’s associates in digging up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, Andrii Derkach, had been identified in a secret CIA assessment as a covert Russian agent. When confronted over the report, Giuliani defended Derkach and effectively brushed aside the intelligence warning.

“Giuliani was interested in acquiring information from his foreign contacts about Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden held a board seat, as well as Biden’s activities in Ukraine, China and Romania,” two former U.S. officials told the Post.” Giuliani’s eagerness was so pronounced ‘that everybody [in the intelligence community who knew about it] was talking about how hard it was going to be to try to get him to stop, to take seriously the idea that he was being used as a conduit for misinformation.'”

The White House disputed the Post‘s account of the president’s response to the warning, saying that O’Brien “can say that the President always treats such briefings with the utmost seriousness. The characterization of the meeting as described in this article is not accurate.”