Say it ain’t so…
It’s been obvious that Rudy Giuliani drinks to excess for a long time. He’s shown up on Fox News inebriated more than once, as was obvious to anyone watching. In the infamous interview “Over Bloody Mary’s with NY Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi” he was described like this:
His ex-wife had implied, in an interview with New York, that he was an alcoholic. Others anonymously question his mental state. “Oh yeah, yeah — I do a lot of drugs,” Giuliani said sarcastically. “There was one I was addicted to. I’ve forgotten what it is. I don’t know where the drug things come from — I really don’t. The alcohol comes from the fact that I did occasionally drink. I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars — I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.”
Here’s some evidence. Although some of them are probably just Rudy being nuts, there’s little doubt that he was imbibing heavily during this period:
This speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 was truly epic:
According to the NY Times this week, the prosecutors really are looking at Giuliani’s drinking on election night (and probably after that) on regards to Trump’s potential claim that he was just listening to his lawyers:
For more than a decade, friends conceded grimly, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking had been a problem. And as he surged back to prominence during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it was getting more difficult to hide it.
On some nights when Mr. Giuliani was overserved, an associate discreetly signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion, out of the former mayor’s line of sight, in case others preferred to keep their distance. Some allies, watching Mr. Giuliani down Scotch before leaving for Fox News interviews, would slip away to find a television, clenching through his rickety defenses of Mr. Trump.
Even at less rollicking venues — a book party, a Sept. 11 anniversary dinner, an intimate gathering at Mr. Giuliani’s own apartment — his consistent, conspicuous intoxication often startled his company.
“It’s no secret, nor do I do him any favors if I don’t mention that problem, because he has it,” said Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president who has known Mr. Giuliani for decades. “It’s actually one of the saddest things I can think about in politics.”
No one close to Mr. Giuliani, 79, has suggested that drinking could excuse or explain away his present legal and personal disrepair. He arrived for a mug shot in Georgia in August not over rowdy nightlife behavior or reckless cable interviews but for allegedly abusing the laws he defended aggressively as a federal prosecutor, subverting the democracy of a nation that once lionized him.
Yet to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking has been the pulsing drumbeat punctuating his descent — not the cause of his reputational collapse but the ubiquitous evidence, well before Election Day in 2020, that something was not right with the former president’s most incautious lieutenant.
Now, prosecutors in the federal election case against Mr. Trump have shown an interest in the drinking habits of Mr. Giuliani — and whether the former president ignored what his aides described as the plain inebriation of the former mayor referred to in court documents as “Co-Conspirator 1.”
In a normal world this would be a problem for Donald Trump but I doubt that his cult will hear about it and even if they did they wouldn’t believe it.