How Giuliani Turned Into Trump's Clown
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
04 September 18
The former mayors theatrical, combative style of politics anticipatedand
perfectly aligns withthe Presidents.
Although it has been almost a generation since Rudolph Giuliani was the
mayor of New York, there is one place in the city where he still presides:
the Grand Havana Room, a tatty cigar club that occupies the top floor of 666
Fifth Avenue. Giuliani is on the Grand Havanas board of directors and is a
regular presence at the club. The room is filled with overstuffed armchairs,
oversized ash trays, and the persistent haze of smoke. Thick velvet drapes,
many the worse for wear, block out the view of the city, and ventilation
machines wheeze from the ceiling. One afternoon this summer, Giuliani sank
into a chair, pulled the knot of his tie down to his chest, and removed a
Padrón fiftieth-anniversary cigar (retail price: forty dollars) from a
carrying case. At seventy-four, Giuliani often seems weary. He limps. He has
surrendered his comb-over to full-on baldness, and, as his torso has
thickened, his neck has disappeared. He lit the Padrón with a high-tech
flame lighter. It works in the windgood for the golf course, he told me.
He drew his first puffs and placed an even larger stogiea gift from his
thirty-two-year-old son, Andrew, who works in the White House Office of
Public Liaisonon a cocktail table in front of him. Andrew got it when he
was playing golf with the President this weekend, Giuliani explained.
Cigars have played a recurring role in Giulianis career. When he joined the
Grand Havana, the club was struggling to find members. In 2002, his
successor as mayor, Michael Bloomberg, banned smoking in restaurants and
bars. Mike didnt realize it, but he saved us, Giuliani said. It became
the only place you could smoke. Giuliani met his third wife, Judith Nathan,
at another cigar venue, Club Macanudo. (The couple are now divorcing.) The
Grand Havana has also been a point of good-natured contention for Giuliani
in his latest incarnationas an intimate of, and a defense attorney for, the
President of the United States. In 2007, the family business of Jared
Kushner, Donald Trumps son-in-law, paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue,
which promptly fell dramatically in value, imperilling the Kushner
real-estate empire. One of Kushners plans to salvage the investment
involved tearing down the building and displacing the Grand Havana. I
always tell Jared Im rooting against him, Giuliani told me, chuckling.
Theres nowhere else in the city that wants hundreds of cigar smokers.
(Kushners family recently received a financial lifeline from a real-estate
investment firm, and current plans call for the club to remain.)
The actor Alec Baldwin, another Grand Havana board member, described the
club to me as Republican ManhattanWall Street guys, Yankees fans, Rudys
people. On the afternoon I met Giuliani there, members stopped by
periodically to pay respects. He reflected on the tumultuous six months he
has spent thus far representing Trump in the investigation led by Robert
Mueller, the special counsel. Giulianis work has involved countless
television appearancesoften featuring false or misleading claimsas well as
frequent phone calls with the President and months of negotiations with
Mueller about the possibility of Trump testifying. In all, he had a
favorable estimation of his own performance. I enjoy being a lawyer more
than I do being a politician, he told me. As a politician, a lot of people
are better than me. This is what I think I do best.
The addition of Giuliani to Trumps legal team has been part of a larger
change in the Presidents strategy. During the first year of the Mueller
investigation, which began in May of 2017, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, the
lawyers leading Trumps defense, took a coöperative approach, turning over
as many as 1.4 million documents and allowing White House staffers to be
interviewed. Their public comments were courteous, even respectful. But,
just as the cautious and deliberate style of Rex Tillerson, Trumps first
Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, Trumps former national-security
adviser, eventually frustrated the President, so, too, did that of Trumps
legal team. Trump wanted a more combative approach. Giuliani told me, of the
early defense, I thought legally it was getting defended very well. I
thought publicly it was not getting defended very well.
Since joining Trumps team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a
vindication, even when hes had to bend and warp the evidence in front of
him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a witch hunt and
the prosecutors as thugs. He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to
Trumps Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs,
exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is
not seeking converts but comforting the converted.
This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor,
Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As
mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked squeegee men off the
streets of New York. Now hes a talking head spouting nonsense on cable
news. But this version of Giuliani isnt new; Trump has merely tapped into
tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and
politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy
who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media
to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Muellers
investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, Wheres
my Roy Cohn? In Giuliani, the President has found him.
***
Giuliani cant remember the first time he met Trump, but he recalls taking
special notice of him in 1986. Ed Koch was mayor, and Giuliani, who was the
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, was
planning his own mayoral run. For years, the city had been trying, without
success, to renovate the Wollman skating rink, in Central Park. Trump
volunteered to complete the project in just four months, at a lower price
than the city was proposing to pay. He embarrassed Koch, Giuliani told me.
After the project was finished, he said, Young Donald says, I want it
named after me. Koch goes nuts. Koch must have felt he was blindsided,
thought it was arrogant, and he said no. And then Trump got on the warpath
against him. Giuliani said that, as his campaign to become the Republican
mayoral candidate kicked into gear, Trump became a very big supporter of
mine. In the end, Koch didnt win the primaries in 1989, and Giuliani lost
that year to David Dinkins, whom he defeated four years later.
Naked aggression and a thirst for attention have been hallmarks of
Giulianis career. As U.S. Attorney, he won plaudits for prosecuting insider
trading on Wall Street and for his relentless pursuit of the Mafia. He
racked up more than four thousand convictions, including those of Ivan
Boesky and of four of the five heads of the New York Mafia families. But he
was also criticized for his practice of perp walkingmarching white-collar
criminals, in handcuffs, through the financial district, often in front of
reporters who had been alerted in advance. He sometimes arrested people in
their workplaces and then dropped the charges, seemingly as a way to
intimidate them and send a message to associates. He drew ridicule for
donning a leather jacket to make a supposedly undercover drug purchase in
Washington Heights.
As mayor, he oversaw a police crackdown that was associated with plunging
crime rates, and was reëlected in a landslide, in 1997. (The reasons for the
dip in crime have since been disputed.) But his introduction of broken
windows policingtargeting minor infractions like turnstile-hopping and
panhandlingand his use of stop-and-frisk searches were criticized as
racially biased. He defiantly stood up for New York cops accused of killing
unarmed black men. He dressed in drag at public roasts and on Saturday
Night Live. In a city that values free expression, he seemed to have little
appreciation for the First Amendment, and courts repeatedly slapped him
down. Outraged by a painting at the Brooklyn Museum by Chris Ofili, which
depicts a black Virgin Mary and incorporates lumps of dried elephant dung,
he began withholding the museums city subsidies and threatening to
terminate its lease, remove its board, and possibly seize the property.
After New York magazine took out advertisements on city buses featuring the
magazines logo and reading Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy
hasnt taken credit for, Giuliani ordered transit officials to strip the
ads. New York sued. Our twice-elected Mayor, whose name is in every local
newspaper on a daily basis, who is featured regularly on the cover of weekly
magazines, who chooses to appear in drag on a well-known national TV show,
and who many believe is considering a run for higher office, objects to his
name appearing on the side of city buses, the judge on the case wrote in an
opinion, siding with New York. Who would have dreamed that the Mayor would
object to more publicity?
Giuliani was unpopular, even discredited, before September 11, 2001, but his
resolute leadership in the aftermath of the attacks made him a worldwide
symbol of resistance to terrorism. He arrived at the World Trade Center just
after the second plane hit, and was nearly trapped at the site. Afterward,
while President George W. Bush was largely silent, he reassured the rattled
country. Tomorrow New York is going to be here, he said. And were going
to rebuild, and were going to be stronger than we were before. Time named
him Person of the Year, and Queen Elizabeth II bestowed an honorary
knighthood on him. He soon parlayed this fame into prosperity. In 2001, he
claimed that he had just seven thousand dollars in assets. In 2002, he set
up a security-consulting business and began giving speeches internationally.
By the time he embarked on his disastrous Presidential run, in 2007, he
estimated his wealth at more than thirty million dollars.
The parallels between Giuliani and Trump are temperamental as much as they
are political. Giulianis combative style of politics anticipated, and
perhaps served as a model for, Trumps. He described his approach as mayor
to me as provocative and not politically correct. Chris Christie, the
former New Jersey governor, has been a close friend of Giulianis for years.
When he decides to go all in, he does not filter, he does not hesitate,
Christie told me. He is the same guy who was perp-walking people on Wall
Street, the same guy who did all that aggressive stuff as mayor. The same
things that led him to success led him to being criticized. Now that he is
the leader of the Trump legal team, hes all in for the President.
Giulianis behavior has provoked disgust among some of his former
fellow-prosecutors. He has totally sold out to Trump, John S. Martin, a
predecessor to Giuliani as U.S. Attorney who later became a federal judge,
said. Hes making arguments that dont hold up. I always thought of Rudy as
a good lawyer, and hes not looking anything like a good lawyer today.
Preet Bharara, who served as U.S. Attorney from 2009 until 2017, when he was
fired by Trump, told me, His blatant misrepresentations on television make
me sad. Its sad because I looked up to him at one point, and this bespeaks
a sort of cravenness to a particularly hyperbolic client and an unnecessary
suspension of honor and truth thats beneath him. I would not send Rudy at
this point in his career into court. Giulianis desire for attention and
publicity has always been at odds with the buttoned-up traditions of the
Southern District of New York. In 2014, some seven hundred current and
former prosecutors for the Southern District met for a gala dinner to
celebrate the two-hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary of the office. Almost
every former U.S. Attorney still living gave a speechexcept Giuliani, who
sent a video, with the excuse that he was attending to his duties as an
ambassador to the U.S. Ryder Cup golf team. The announcement was greeted
with derisive laughter.
***
Trump raised money for Giulianis three mayoral races and for his
Presidential run, and the two mens personal ties deepened through Trumps
relationship with Giulianis son. Andrew, who once aspired to be a
professional golfer, bonded with Trump at his golf clubs. (He notes that
Donald Trump, Jr., does not play much golf and that Eric Trump took up the
game only in recent years.) Andrew estimates that he has played about two
hundred rounds with the President. Giuliani went through a rancorous divorce
from Andrews mother, Donna Hanover, in the final years of his mayoralty,
and Trump became a surrogate parent. There was a point in my life when my
father and I were working through some lower points in our relationship, and
the President was always encouraging me to keep the lines of communication
open, Andrew told me. Ive looked to him as a father figure, as an uncle,
and Ive had the opportunity to see the compassionate side of him that other
people dont see or choose not to see.
Unlike many in the Presidents inner circle, Giuliani has always been a
peer, never an underling. This was evident in 2015, when Trump was thinking
about declaring his candidacy for President. One day, I was on probably one
of the Fox shows, and they asked me who did I think was a serious candidate
for the Republican nomination, Giuliani told me. And I said the obvious:
Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Perry, three or four others. About two hours
later, he said, Trump called him, asking, What about your friend? Giuliani
reminded Trump that in 2012 hed used the prospect of a Presidential run
solely as a money-maker and promotional tool for The Apprentice. Giuliani
said that Trump replied, This time Im serious. And I want to be mentioned
in that group. Giuliani began including Trump on his list. But Giuliani was
also friends with Jeb Bush and Rick Perry, and he withheld his endorsement,
a slight that Trump has not forgotten. He reminds me it wasnt on Day One,
Giuliani said. Still, in August of 2016, he left his law firm to work on
Trumps campaign, and became a regular speaker at his rallies. I knew he
was going to win the first time I campaigned with him, which was in Ohio,
Giuliani told me, describing the hostility he witnessed toward Hillary
Clinton. These people were jumping off the rafters, they were both in love
with him and extremely angry at her, and Im not sure which is the bigger
emotion. At the Republican National Convention that July, Giuliani gave a
bombastic speech attacking Clinton, saying, There is no next electionthis
is it. According to Christie, who was also deeply involved in the campaign,
What his role eventually evolved into was First Friend. Theyve known each
other forever, there is enormous respect between them. Rudy was becoming the
guy that Donald would sit with on the plane and get reviews and critiques.
He was generationally the guy Donald was closest to as well. Rudy became a
peer whom Donald could lean on and talk to and also have fun with.
Giulianis pivotal moment in the campaign came in October, when the Access
Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy,
surfaced. Other campaign insiders, including Reince Priebus, told Trump that
he had suffered a fatal political blow, but Giuliani immediately began
trying to salvage the situation. Steve Bannon, Trumps former campaign
strategist, told me that no one on the campaign would go on television that
weekend. But Rudy went out there and did a full Ginsburg, a reference to
William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinskys lawyer, who pioneered the feat of
appearing on five Sunday talk shows in a single day. On the darkest
weekend, Rudy knew that Trump needed the most establishment guy on the
campaign to stand by him, and thats what Rudy did, Bannon said. That
really instills camaraderie. On Election Night, when Trump declared
victory, Giuliani was on the stage. He told me that Trump brought the
family out, and then from the other side he called me up, and he said, He
had a lot to do with my winning. Well, I really liked that.
During the Presidential transition, Giuliani triedand failedto persuade
Trump to nominate him for Secretary of State. Ive always thought that I
knew a lot more about foreign policy than anybody ever knew, Giuliani told
me. He had me slotted in as Attorney General. He offered me the job, I
turned it down. (He also turned down Secretary of Homeland Security.)
Theories abound about Trumps refusal to give Giuliani the State Department
job. One of them is that Trump was penalizing him for his closeness to
Christie, who had been placed in charge of the transition and then was
quickly fired. Rudy was aligned with Chris Christie, and that wasnt a good
thing to be in that period, a Trump friend told me. Another is that
Priebus, Trumps first chief of staff, sabotaged Giulianis bid. Reince was
leaking like crazy, trying to kill Rudys chances, Anthony Scaramucci, who
was on the transition team before his brief stint as the White House
communications director, told me. (Priebus denies this.) Yet another theory
is that Kushner and Bannon wanted a weak Secretary of State so that they
could run foreign policy out of the White House. In the end, Rex Tillerson,
the Exxon chief executive, who had no government experience and no prior
relationship with Trump, was given the position.
Giuliani returned to his law firm and, as the Mueller investigation got
under way, he kept in touch with the President and his legal team. In March
of 2018, Jay Sekulow told Giuliani that the relationship between the
President and John Dowd, his lead defense attorney, had deteriorated. He
asked whether Giuliani would consider replacing him, and Giuliani was
receptive. Trump made him a formal offer over dinner at Mar-a-Lago and
Giuliani left his law firm again to work for the President pro bono.
***
The investigations surrounding Donald Trump have become sprawling
enterprises, with multiple strands that are increasingly intertwined.
Disclosures about the investigations have come in piecemeal fashion, and
its easy to become confused about the nature of the accusations and the
cast of characters. Giuliani is in charge of the over-all defense effort,
and Sekulow, the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a
conservative public-interest group founded by Pat Robertson, is his
second-in-command. At the moment, the greatest legal peril for Trump may
come from the constellation of issues relating to hush money paid during the
2016 campaign to two women who have alleged that they had affairs with
Trump: the adult-film star Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels,
and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. Earlier this year, Mueller
referred this investigation to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York, which obtained search warrants for the home
and office of Michael Cohen, Trumps former personal attorney. The Southern
District also recently provided immunity to two former Trump confidants in
exchange for their coöperation: Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief
financial officer of the Trump Organization, and David Pecker, the chief
executive of the parent company of the National Enquirer, which made the
payment to McDougal. Last month, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating
campaign-finance laws by engineering these payments, which he said he had
done at the direction of Trump. The prosecutors may decide to continue the
investigation, or, if they find that the President was implicated in illegal
activity, to return the probe to Mueller.
In California, Trump is facing lawsuits and an arbitration proceeding
related to his nondisclosure agreement with Clifford. His lawyer there is
Charles Harder, who is best known for representing the professional wrestler
Hulk Hogan in the lawsuit that led to the dissolution of the Web site
Gawker. Harder is also representing the Trump campaign in arbitration
proceedings against Omarosa Manigault Newman, Trumps former political aide,
for alleged violations of her nondisclosure agreement in connection with her
recent memoir.
Giuliani and Sekulow are also leading Trumps defense in the Mueller probe,
which is focussed on Russias role in influencing the 2016 election and on
possible obstruction of justice by Trump. To date, Mueller has obtained the
indictments of thirty-two individuals and three corporations, as well as
five guilty pleas. Last month, he secured the conviction of Paul Manafort,
Trumps former campaign chairman, on eight felony counts of fraud related to
his representation of a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Giuliani has
deputized the husband-and-wife team of Martin and Jane Raskin, former
federal prosecutors based in Florida, to deal with routine contacts with the
Mueller team. Emmet Flood, who, as a lawyer at the firm of Williams &
Connolly, assisted in the impeachment defense of Bill Clinton, is the
government lawyer charged with protecting the institutional interests of the
executive branch (as opposed to those of Trump as an individual).
Despite this pileup of lawyers, Trumps defense has shown little coherence
or strategic thinking. Neither Sekulow nor Giuliani is working full time;
Sekulow is also representing other clients, including Andrew Brunson, the
Christian pastor whose detention in Turkey has set off a crisis in
U.S.-Turkish relations, and Giuliani is still running his security
consulting business. He was on vacation, attending a wedding and playing
golf in Scotland, the week that Cohen pleaded guilty and Manafort was
convicted. (In an interview with Sky News conducted from a golf cart, he
called Cohen a massive liar.) The President also takes an active role in
his own defense, especially when it comes to media strategy. During one of
my conversations with Giuliani at the Grand Havana, he excused himself to
take a call from Trump. We went over what I was going to talk about on
Hannity tonight, Giuliani said when he returned, referring to Sean
Hannitys Fox News show.
This spring, Giuliani met with Mueller and his staff, and Giuliani pressed
the special counsel about whether he believed that a sitting President could
be criminally indicted. According to a 1973 opinion from the Office of Legal
Counsel, a President should not be subject to indictment while in office
because it would interfere with the Presidents unique official duties,
most of which cannot be performed by anyone else. (A 2000 legal opinion
from the Justice Department reached a similar conclusion.) Giuliani recalled
Mueller saying, Well, were going to reserve our thinking on that.
Giuliani told me that after two days, with a lot of going back and forth,
Muellers team affirmed that it wouldnt indict, regardless of the result of
the investigation. (Muellers spokesman declined to comment.)
This apparent concession has shaped Giulianis defense of Trump ever since.
He now knew that there would never be a courtroom test of the Presidents
actions; the only risk to Trump was that Muellers report could lead
Congress to impeach the President, a process that is political as much as it
is legal. With impeachment, Giuliani explained to me, the thing that will
decide that the most is public opinion, and the perception of Mueller is as
important as that of Trump. If Mueller remains the white knight, it becomes
more likely that Congress might at some point turn on Trump, he told me. As
a result, Giuliani has set out to destroy Muellers reputation. His efforts
have been helped by Muellers tight-lipped media strategyneither the
special counsel nor anyone on his staff talks to the press, so Giulianis
attacks always go unanswered.
***
What makes Giulianis role distinctive in the history of Presidential
scandalsindeed, in the history of criminal defenseis that he is his
clients day-to-day attorney and spokesman as well as an international
figure in his own right. For much of the world, Giuliani is still defined by
his leadership after 9/11, and the juxtaposition of his seedy theatrics on
behalf of Trump with his performance on that grand stage is jarring.
Occasionally, the two Giulianisthe leader and the lawyerare both on
display. Earlier this summer, Giuliani found himself in a picturesque
setting overlooking the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to
make a brief speech supporting Eddie Edwards, a candidate for the Republican
nomination for one of the states two seats in Congress.
For some members of the audience, the sheen cast by Giulianis final months
in office hadnt faded. We still think of him as Americas Mayor, a
woman named Amy Chiaramitaro told me as Giuliani worked the crowd. Mike
Coutu, another attendee, said that Giuliani is like Trump. He explained,
Hes not like a blade of grass that blows with the wind.
At the podium, however, Giulianis current set of concerns was evident. He
was endorsing Edwards, an African-American Navy veteran and former police
chief, for one main reason: Edwards backs Trump. In his speech, Giuliani
said, The most important thing is the President is doing a very, very good
job. Hes about as successful a two-year President weve had in a very long
time on the economy, on engaging North Korea, on engaging Iran, on dealing
with the problems in the world, on getting money back into NATO. I mean,
what the heck are you against him for? What else do you want the guy to do?
Were just winning so much were going to get tired of it!
Earlier that day, the President had tweeted, Attorney General Jeff Sessions
should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain
our country any further. Sessions had recused himself from supervising
Muellers investigation more than a year earlier, and the statement, like
many of the Presidents previous tweets berating Sessions, looked like a
directive to derail the special counsels work, giving greater credence to
the idea that Trump intended to obstruct justice. In New Hampshire, at a
brief news conference, Giuliani explained that, contrary to appearances, the
tweet was not incriminating. Its an opinion, and he used a medium that he
uses for opinionsTwitter, Giuliani said. One of the good things about
using that is hes established a clear sort of practice now that he
expresses his opinions on Twitter. He used the word should, he didnt use
the word must.
The White House had already taken the opposite position, affirming that
Trumps tweets do, in fact, represent official statements. But the
explanation was typical of Giulianis media strategy. He set the tone in one
of his first television appearances as Trumps lawyer, on Hannitys show, a
favorite destination. In a rambling interview, Giuliani said that Hillary
Clinton was a criminal, the former F.B.I. director James Comey a very
perverted man, and Kushner disposable. He asserted that if Mueller tried
to interview Ivanka Trumpa fine womanthe country would turn against him,
and claimed that Presidents cant be subpoenaed, a provably false statement.
(Thomas Jefferson was subpoenaed in the trial of his former Vice-President,
Aaron Burr; Richard Nixon was subpoenaed for the White House tapes; and Bill
Clinton was subpoenaed for testimony in the Whitewater investigation,
although he ultimately testified voluntarily.) At the time, Trump was
denying any knowledge of the payment to Stephanie Clifford, and Michael
Cohen was claiming that he had not been reimbursed for making it. In the
interview, Giuliani contradicted both men. The money, he said, was
funnelled through a law firm, and the President repaid it. In Cohens
guilty plea, last month, he testified that Trump reimbursed the payment,
suggesting that Trump may be guilty of an unlawful campaign contribution.
Giulianis performance on Hannity was so bizarre that it prompted some
observers to ask whether he had been drinking. Im not drinking for lunch,
Giuliani said in an interview with Politico. I may have a drink for dinner.
I like to drink with cigars. The President took a more indulgent stance.
Hes learning the subject matter, Trump said of Giuliani. He started
yesterday. Hell get his facts straight. (Giuliani had started about a
month earlier.)
Far from an early aberration, the Hannity interview became the template for
Giulianis appearances, which have regularly entailed casual inaccuracies
garlanded with generous invective. In April, after the F.B.I. searched
Michael Cohens home and office, Giuliani ratcheted up his rhetoric. That
was when the shit hit the fan, Giuliani told me. That changed the whole
atmosphere. I think it was a very unwise thing to do. Giuliani called the
agents Storm Troopers, comparing federal law-enforcement officials to
Nazisa remarkable statement coming from a former U.S. Attorney. (Cohen said
that the agents were extremely professional, courteous, and respectful.)
Giuliani was repeatedly challenged about the analogy, but refused to back
down, saying that we get bad people, and its my job to flush them out.
With no evidence, he accused Mueller of leaking to the press. More recently,
he has tweeted that Sessions should appoint a special counsel to investigate
Mueller. Investigate the investigation and investigators, he tweeted.
Unlike the illegal Mueller appointment you will be able to cite, as law
requires, alleged crimes. Giulianis tweet is baseless. In federal courts
in both Virginia and the District of Columbia, Manafort tried to claim that
Muellers appointment was somehow invalid, and the judges in both courts
rejected his argument.
Giuliani has sown abundant confusion about the facts underlying Muellers
investigation. One of the key questions in the obstruction-of-justice
inquiry is whether Trump encouraged Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn, then
the national-security adviser, who was under investigation for lying to the
F.B.I. At first, Giuliani seemed to acknowledge that Trump had asked Comey
to give Flynn a break. In more recent statements, Giuliani has denied that
Trump even discussed Flynn with Comey. His comments about the notorious
Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016, between campaign officials and the
Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, have similarly devolved into
falsehoods. In an August appearance on Meet the Press, Giuliani asserted
that the campaign officials, including Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr.,
didnt know she was a representative of the Russian government, and,
indeed, shes not a representative of the Russian government, so this is
much ado about nothing. The e-mail that led to the meeting, sent to Trump,
Jr., explicitly said that the gathering was part of Russia and its
governments support for Mr. Trump.
At times, Giulianis arguments have verged on thuggish irrationality. In
mid-August, he told reporters at Bloomberg that Mueller should complete the
investigation by September so as not to interfere with the midterm
elections. He added, If he doesnt get it done in the next two or three
weeks we will just unload on him like a ton of bricks.
Giuliani is generally loath to contradict his client, but he distanced
himself from the Presidents statement, following Cohens guilty plea, that
flippingpleading guilty in return for testimony against othersalmost
ought to be illegal. Like most federal prosecutors, Giuliani built many of
his major cases on the testimony of coöperators. The President, he told me,
is not a lawyer, so he doesnt know the prosecution business. So there are
good flippers and bad flippers. But the ones that are telling the truth,
fine, and the ones that are lying, youve got to get rid of. Trump, he
added, goes overboard a little. And hes not shy.
Giulianis advocates say that critics may be measuring his performance by
the wrong standards. In May of 2017, when Mueller was appointed,
public-opinion polls showed strong bipartisan support for the special
counsel. Now, after months of verbal assaults from Giuliani and Trump,
Republicans overwhelmingly disapprove of Mueller. The investigation has
become one more issue dividing red and blue America. (Muellers numbers have
ticked up since his victories in the Cohen and Manafort cases.) As
Scaramucci told me, What the Presidents previous lawyers did was take a
nineteen-nineties approachstay away from the press, dont fight the case in
the court of public opinion. They were operating off of a
pre-social-mediapre-fragmentation-of-all-mediastrategy. If you know
anything about the President, thats antithetical to his lifetime approach,
which is to fight all the time. In Giuliani, he said, Trump had found a
like-minded advocate. The mainstream media doesnt like his appearance of
improvised, spontaneous conversation. But I think its way more staged, more
well planned out, than people think.
Marc Mukasey, a former prosecutor with the Southern District and a longtime
law partner and protégé of Giuliani, told me, This is not the kind of
advocacyquiet, stealthy, seriousthat you would engage in for a typical
white-collar criminal defendant. This is a totally different animal. This is
the defense of the President of the United States in a very public arena,
where there are former prosecutors on TV every night prosecuting an
imaginary case against the guy. Rudy has always been a passionate advocate,
and he was not a shrinking violet when he was the mayor. He is a lifelong
opera fan, and hes an operatic guy. Everybody who asks whats wrong with
Rudythe answer is, nothing.
***
Giuliani faces one central conundrum: when, or whether, to allow Mueller to
interview the President. As with many issues, Giuliani has addressed the
question with a farrago of bumbling confusion and sly misstatement. Trump
has repeatedly said that he wants to talk with Mueller because he has
nothing to hide. Before Giuliani joined the defense, Dowd and Mueller came
close to an agreement for the President to voluntarily testify. They even
scheduled a date and a location: January 27, 2018, at Camp David. Trump has
always hedged by saying that his attorneys have to sign off on any deal.
Talks between the Trump and the Mueller teams later broke down.
Giuliani, like Trump, has created the illusion of coöperation without the
risks of actual coöperation. At times, it seems that hes just going through
the motions of negotiating with Mueller. We were pretty close a few times
to an agreement, but we couldnt quite get it across the goal line, he told
me. There were disputes about time, disputes about questions in advance,
disputes about whether they can only ask questions about collusion. At one
point, Giuliani told me, he proposed that Trump answer questions, but only
about the period before he became President.
In public, Giulianis reasons for refusing an interview have moved away from
constitutional principle and toward political pique. He now says that
Mueller is too biased, too fanatical, to interview the President. Giuliani
said on Fox, Youre a lawyerwould you walk your client into a kangaroo
court with guys who donated thirty-six thousand dollars to his opponent,
cried at her loss party, represented the scoundrel who broke the hard
drive? James Quarles, a member of Muellers staff, donated about
thirty-three thousand dollars to Democrats; there is no evidence that
Mueller staffers cried at Clintons defeat; the reference to the hard drive,
in this context, is a mystery.
Giulianis animus toward Mueller precipitated what may be his most notorious
recent gaffe. He has objected to the interview by saying that the
Presidents words may conflict with those of other witnesses, leading
Mueller to conclude that Trump is lyingwhat Giuliani calls a perjury
trap. This is a contrived objection, since any reasonable prosecutor would
look at a range of evidence, especially corroborating witnesses and
documents. In an August 19th interview on Meet the Press, the host, Chuck
Todd, asked Giuliani whether a perjury trap could even exist, since a
witness who told the truth couldnt be trapped. Giuliani responded, When
you tell me that he should testify because hes going to tell the truth and
he shouldnt worry, well, thats so silly, because its somebodys version
of the truth. Not the truth.
Todd responded, Truth is truth.
No, it isnt truth, Giuliani said. Truth isnt truth.
Giuliani later claimed that he was trying to say that truth can be
subjective, especially when there are conflicting versions of events, but at
this point his performance suggests that he may not believe the concept of
truth is even real.
If the negotiations over a voluntary interview fail, as now seems likely,
Mueller may decide to subpoena the President. Giuliani has weighed in on the
legality of Presidential subpoenas in the past. In 1997, a unanimous Supreme
Court ruled that President Clinton was legally obligated to submit to a
deposition in Paula Joness sexual-harassment case against him. As the
special prosecutor Kenneth Starrs investigation of Clinton intensified, the
following year, Charlie Rose put the question to Giuliani in an interview:
Would the President have to obey a grand-jury subpoena for his testimony?
Hes gotta do it. He doesnt have a choice, Giuliani responded. Under the
criminal law, everyone should be treated the same. He added, As far as the
criminal law is concerned, the President is a citizen.
Then as now, Giulianis answer reflected the conventional wisdom. The courts
had determined that a President could be required to testify in civil cases
such as the Jones case and would likely come to the same conclusion about
criminal investigations, which are generally viewed as having greater
societal import. But after Giuliani became Trumps lawyer he began arguing
that the pressing duties of the Presidency rendered him immune from a
subpoena. When journalists confronted Giuliani with his statement from 1998,
he didnt say that he had changed his mind or that his earlier position was
incorrect. Instead, he claimed that his statements were about documents
rather than Presidential testimony, despite clear video evidence to the
contrary.
Even if the question of Presidential testimony is resolved, Giulianis
attacks on the investigation are likely to continue. Mueller will file a
concluding report with Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, at the
end of the investigation, and, in theory, Rosenstein has the option of
releasing the report to Congress and to the public. But Giuliani pointed out
a little-known aspect of the agreement that Trumps original legal team
struck with Mueller: the White House reserved the right to object to the
public disclosure of information that might be covered by executive
privilege. I asked Giuliani if he thought the White House would raise
objections. Im sure we will, he said, adding that the President would
make the final call. In other words, the conclusion of the special counsels
investigation could be the beginning of a contentious fight over whether
Rosenstein is allowed to release a complete version of Muellers report.
Giulianis team is also preëmptively preparing a report to be released at
the same time as Muellers, to refute its expected findings. Giuliani said
that this counter-report is already forty-five pages and will likely grow,
adding, It needs a five-page summaryfor me.
***
As the legal peril to Trump has mounted, Giulianis behavior has become
increasingly unhinged. Hes started tweeting with the casual
recklessnessand the buzzwordsof his client, inflaming Trumps supporters
and taunting his enemies. After Trump revoked the security clearance of John
Brennan, a former C.I.A. director who has been critical of his Presidency,
Brennan said that he was considering suing. Giuliani tweeted to Brennan,
Today President Trump granted our request (Jay Sekulow and me) to handle
your case. After threatening if you dont it would be just like Obamas red
lines. Come on John youre not a blowhard? This assertion makes no sense;
if Brennan sues, the government will be represented by Justice Department
lawyers, not by Giuliani and Sekulow.
At the same time, the more fraught the situation becomes the more Giuliani
seems to be enjoying himself. In his appearances during the 2016 campaign,
Giuliani often seemed angry, grim-faced, and ferocious. Now, making the
rounds on cable news, hes usually beaming, even as he lays into Trumps
adversaries. His transformation may be tied to the latest changes in his
marital life, which has been nearly as complicated as Trumps. In 1968, he
married his second cousin Regina Peruggi, whom he divorced fourteen years
later. In 1984, he married Hanover, a television journalist. On May 10,
2000, toward the end of his mayoralty, Giuliani announced at a press
conference that he was seeking a separation from Hanoverwhich, it turned
out, was news to her. The disintegration of their marriage was tabloid
fodder, and Giuliani became a kind of citywide joke; he was seen around town
with Judith Nathan, whom he married in 2003. Early signs suggest that
Giulianis third divorce may turn out to be as rancorous as his second.
Bernard Clair, Judith Giulianis lawyer, told me that she wants to remain
silent at this point in time regarding the whys and wherefores of her
divorce filing and the causes behind her husbands changes in behavior
observed by people around the countryfriend and foe alike. When we began
speaking this summer, Giuliani seemed to have moved on. He was dating
Jennifer LeBlanc, a Republican fund-raiser from Louisiana whom he met during
his 2008 Presidential race. Jennifer was chairman of my finance committee
in Louisiana, and then in the South raised a lot of money for me, Giuliani
told me. Fine woman. (They are no longer dating.)
Giulianis defense of Trump reflects much about his personality. He is an
intensely loyal person, and he loves a fight, Chris Christie told me,
arguing that Giulianis fervor for the President was a result of his keen
sense of allegiance. What Rudy saw here was an incredible fight, and he
really likes Donald Trump and he felt like he was the right guy to have as
your lead fighter.
The problem for Giuliani is that his loyalty may not be reciprocated. Since
Trump became President, his closest advisers have been humiliated
(Tillerson, Priebus), disgraced (Sean Spicer, Bannon), prosecuted (Flynn,
Rick Gates), or all of the above (Manafort). At one point, I asked Giuliani
whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his
legacy.
I dont care about my legacy, he told me. Ill be dead.
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