I don’t think so
Early in the scrum of the 2016 presidential campaign, the political strategist Rick Wilson bumped into an old boss and strongly advised him not to cast his lot with Donald J. Trump. No good would come of it.
“Even if he wins, he’s going to destroy you,” Mr. Wilson remembered telling Rudolph W. Giuliani. “This guy’s going to humiliate you.”
Mr. Wilson recalled being dismissed as a provincial Floridian unable to understand the bond between two New Yorkers — outer-borough strivers who walked the Manhattan streets with proprietary airs and were now within grasp of once-unimaginable power.
“He’s going to take care of me,” Mr. Wilson said Mr. Giuliani would tell those around him. A cabinet post, probably. Maybe secretary of state.
Never happened. Instead, Mr. Giuliani became Mr. Trump’s secretary of aggression and blind allegiance: his attack dog, legal adviser, unindicted co-conspirator — and now, co-defendant in a criminal conspiracy case.
The two friends from New York, along with 17 others, were indicted Monday in Georgia in a broad racketeering case centered on the sobering charge that they illegally plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of its loser, Mr. Trump. Adding to the ignominy for Mr. Giuliani, 79, is that he was once an innovative prosecutor who specialized in federal racketeering cases.
“I think it’s going to be scary for him,” said Mr. Wilson, a former Republican who worked as an adviser to Mr. Giuliani a quarter-century ago and is a leading conservative critic of Mr. Trump. “The justice system is ringing his bell and calling him to account.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani responded to his indictment by calling it “just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling regime.” The Georgia case, he added in his prepared statement, “ is an affront to American democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system.”
On Monday night, as the grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., prepared to hand up the 41-count indictment, Mr. Giuliani could be seen on his nightly livestream show, “America’s Mayor Live,” watching a broadcast of the goings-on at the Atlanta courthouse, making sardonic comments and trying to appear unfazed.
“He’s the consummate happy warrior,” Ted Goodman, Mr. Giuliani’s political adviser, maintained.
Still, the criminal indictment of Mr. Giuliani, his first, marks the lowest point so far in his yearslong reputational tumble. Once heralded as a fearless lawman, game-changing New York City mayor and Sept. 11 hero, he is now defined by a subservience to the 45th president that sometimes veered into buffoonery.
Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mr. Giuliani when he was the United States attorney in Manhattan, is among a legion of former colleagues who struggle to reconcile the Rudys of then and now.
“I found him to be an inspiring leader,” recalled Mr. Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School. “He was very focused on the law, committed to what the right thing was — and doing it.”
He said that while Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, from 1994 through 2001, had its highs and lows, “he rose to the occasion on Sept. 11th,” reassuring New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.
Now?
“In his sad commitment to be relevant, he has thrown himself in with a crew where facts and the law are either irrelevant or there to be twisted,” Mr. Richman said. “It’s the thirst for relevance. The thirst to be in the mix.”
It’s pathetic and incredibly destructive.
In my m ind he was always an asshole and hasn’t really changed all that much except to the extent he’s older and drunker than he used to be. The article describes him becoming “a defender so ferocious that some wondered about his mental well-being.” Yeah, no kidding.
Mr. Giuliani’s pattern of curious legal interpretations, provocative statements and odd behavior kept him in an often unflattering spotlight.
One example: He was duped into appearing in the Sacha Baron Cohen satire “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which the president’s personal lawyer is seen putting his hands down his pants while reclining on the bed of a young actress posing as a reporter. He later said he was tucking in his shirt after removing a microphone.
All mere prologue.
On Election Night 2020, with Mr. Trump’s chances fading by the hour, the president nevertheless declared victory, while also alleging electoral fraud, egged on by a conspiracy-focused Mr. Giuliani. Later, in testifying before the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump aides described Mr. Giuliani as having been highly intoxicated that night, a description he has rejected.
Several days later, on Nov. 12, Mr. Trump’s election lawyers advised the president that they could find no evidence of election fraud, notwithstanding what he had been asserting publicly. But Mr. Giuliani prevailed again, this time by sharing the specious theory that Dominion voting machines had converted thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes, and by encouraging the president to file a lawsuit in Georgia.
Mr. Giuliani’s actions from this point on are detailed in Monday night’s indictment, which echoes the federal indictment filed earlier this month, in which Mr. Trump was charged with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and Mr. Giuliani appears as unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1.”
The most recent indictment describes, step by frantic step, how Mr. Giuliani possessed a bullheaded determination to prove against all evidence that the election had been stolen, leading a supposedly “elite” team of lawyers that filed dozens of legal challenges across the country and hitting the road with outlandish theories.
Each step, the indictment said, constituted “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy” — legal terminology no doubt acutely familiar to the former federal prosecutor.
He had plenty of experience with conspiracies. Maybe it makes sense that he would automatically help organize one.
He is a clown now. And he’s also apparently almost broke and looking for help to pay his bills. But he is relevant if that’s what he wants. He’s very, very relevant.
Here he is last night on Newsmax:
Actually, the man who wrote the indictment is a nationally recognized expert on the RICO statute. Rudy hasn’t prosecuted a case since the 1980s.