The striped pants and skirts at the State Department are howling mad about Rudy Giuliani conducting an independent foreign diplomacy operation in Ukraine.  Since quid pro quo hit the rocks with President Trump's release of the transcript of his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky, the Democrats — along with their puppet masters in the press — have seized on Giuliani's efforts as alternate grounds for impeachment.

Media reports of Giuliani's efforts in Ukraine somehow gloss over the simple fact that he was — and is — operating under the direct authority of President Trump, the commander-in-chief of the Executive Branch.  There is nothing illegitimate in Giuliani's efforts.  He has a mandate from the very top of the United States government.  The efforts of the foreign policy elites to frustrate Giuliani and Trump are the illegitimacy.  Their authority also derives from President Trump, not some divine right of bureaucracy.  They have no legitimate claim to superior authority over foreign policy in general, nor Giuliani's efforts in particular.

The sad souls who believe the foreign policy elites' derogatory interpretation of Giuliani's efforts are ill educated in history.  Presidents have frequently used unofficial emissaries as conduits to foreign leaders.  President Trump is not the first president to circumvent the official foreign policy apparatchiks in the State Department.

A relevant historical example is President Kennedy establishing a back channel to the Soviets — before he even took office — through his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.  RFK became attorney general in JFK's administration but never held a remit in foreign policy — circumstances not dissimilar to Giulani's.

Robert Kennedy met at least 31 times with Major Georgij Nikitovich Bol'shakov of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence, the very same organization accused of mucking about in our 2016 election).  Major Bol'shakov (1922–1989) was posted to the United States under the diplomatic cover of a cultural attaché and the American editor of Soviet Life magazine.  RFK was probably more committed to anticommunism than his brother at this time, but he dutifully conducted wide-ranging conversations with Georgij Nikitovich from 1960 to 1962.  They developed a rapport that escaped America's foreign policy elites of the era.

Their conversations defused the tensest moments of the Cold War, notably the Bay of Pigs aftermath and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis.  The U.S. foreign policy establishment — and the American military — were proposing options whose outcomes were certain to be ugly.  President Kennedy was able to skirt a global nuclear war because Soviet leaders developed some degree of trust in Kennedy.  They believed their agent, Georgij Nikitovich.  President Kennedy was able to get the Politburo to accept his challenging proposals as genuine, something the feckless State Department could not do.  Neither the State Department nor the military accepted JFK's proposals to the USSR with any conviction.  Yet those proposals prevented nuclear war on more than one occasion.

Should Kennedy have been impeached for establishing a back channel to the USSR leadership?  The only real difference between Kennedy's back channel to the USSR and Trump's back channel to Ukraine is that Trump's back channel has been exposed by jealous foreign policy mandarins through their agents in the media.  This is a particularly ironic difference, since the American media knew of RFK's contacts with Georgij Nikitovich.  RFK and Georgij Nikitovich were introduced by Frank Holeman, who was a reporter and correspondent of the New York Daily News, assigned to their Washington bureau.  JFK also told Scotty Reston, the legendary New York Times columnist.  They never betrayed JFK.  No one in the press or the Democratic Party ever considered impeaching Kennedy.

This was a different era, before the American news media became the puppet masters of the Democratic Party.  Both placed the welfare of America above partisan warfare.  No longer.  No political ploy, however deceitful, is off limits in their quest for total power.  If today's American media and Democratic Party did not have double standards, they would have no standards whatsoever.