He's Still Relevant

And bigly, from what Wayne Barrett reports—

Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: "I think he's [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you're going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I'm talking about some pretty big surprises."

Pressed for specifics, he said: "We've got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around."

The man who now leads "lock-her-up" chants at Trump rallies spent decades of his life as a federal prosecutor and then mayor working closely with the FBI, and especially its New York office. One of Giuliani's security firms employed a former head of the New York FBI office, and other alumni of it. It was agents of that office, probing Anthony Weiner's alleged sexting of a minor, who pressed Comey to authorize the review of possible Hillary Clinton-related emails on a Weiner device that led to the explosive letter the director wrote Congress.

Barrett runs down numerous other Giuliani-FBI pal connections, including this one—

[Jim] Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the '90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani's longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he's called the Clintons as a "crime family." He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey's exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.

Besides apolitically exposing the Clinton crime family on Fox, Kallstrom chairs (though without pay, notes Barrett)

...the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation ... the single biggest beneficiary of Trump's promise to raise millions for veterans when he boycotted the Iowa primary debate. A foundation official said that Trump's million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he'd given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received. The Trump Foundation had contributed another $230,000 in prior years and Trump won the organization's top honor at its annual Waldorf Astoria gala in 2015.

Much more, in Barrett's piece.

Steve M. takes up Barrett's conclusion, that "Fox is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau"—

... A cabal of current and former law enforcement operatives has made this a live issue again. We think the likes of Giuliani and Kallstrom have been banished to cigar lounges and cable news greenrooms, where they can strut their supposed expertise while recalling the good old days when they had power. But they have power. They're the undead, and they're working with some of the living to undermine American democracy and either install a psychopath as president or hobble the psychopath's opponent if she manages to win.

And they're spreading disinformation via Fox News -- which a lot of smart people told us was on its last legs. Roger Ailes is gone, Bill O'Reilly might retire, Sean Hannity might soon leave for Trump TV, Megyn Kelly might jump ship, and Rupert Murdoch might finally cede full control to his less ideological sons. And yet when this cabal wanted to spread its story, Fox was still the obvious venue...