Rudy Giuliani Is a One-Man Wrecking Crew

On Monday night, Rudy Giuliani appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, where he has taken up semipermanent residence. Earlier in the day, three congressional committees had issued Giuliani with subpoenas for documents and records relating to his role in the Ukraine scandal. Hannity asked if he would agree to testify to Congress. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m weighing the alternatives,” Giuliani said, stroking his chin. “I’ll get all my evidence together. I’ll get my charts. I don’t know. If they let me use videotapes and tape recordings that I have—if they let me.” Then he changed the subject.

Think for a moment about what Giuliani said. By his own account, he not only took part in an effort to persuade a foreign government to investigate a political rival of the President—Joe Biden—but also recorded at least some of this activity on videotape and audiotape. He’s even got charts. It’s almost as if he wanted posterity, or congressional investigators, to have a full record of his Ukraine caper, which is now the subject of a Presidential impeachment inquiry. Armed with their subpoenas, the committees on Capitol Hill will likely get access to any Ukraine-related materials that Giuliani possesses, including tapes, e-mails, travel records, and other documents.

Rather than handing over the evidence, Giuliani could conceivably try to assert client-attorney privilege. “I gathered all this evidence before the Mueller probe ended, so it was clearly under my responsibility, as the lawyer for the President of the United States,” he told Hannity. But, just last week, in an interview with Elaina Plott, a White House correspondent for The Atlantic, he said the opposite: “I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government. Anything I did should be praised.” It was almost as if Giuliani was deliberately sabotaging his ability to defy a subpoena.

This type of behavior raises a question that has long mystified many people in Washington, including some senior members of the Trump Administration: What is Rudy up to? In meeting, at the start of this year, with Yuriy Lutsenko, a former prosecutor general of Ukraine, and pressing him about Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter Biden, he embarked down a path that has led to a Presidential-impeachment probe, and also dragged into the mire a host of other senior Administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal  reported that Barr and Giuliani are now “struggling to get on the same page.” You don’t say.

Historians of the Trump Administration may well recall the seventy-five-year-old New Yorker as a one-man wrecking crew. But what is his motivation? One theory is that he’s lost it mentally. “A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a ‘moron,’ ” Plott noted. Since his heyday in City Hall, as the mayor of New York, he certainly appears to have experienced a decline. On some occasions, such as during an interview that he did with CNN’s Chris Cuomo a couple of weeks ago, when he first denied asking the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens and then boasted about it, Giuliani can seem a bit deranged.

However, he also displayed great doggedness and determination in pursuing his Ukraine probe, even as some of Trump’s own staff dismissed it as baseless. This past weekend, the Times quoted a former White House aide who said that Giuliani would “feed Trump all kinds of garbage,” which created “a real problem for all of us.” Evidently, he was together enough to carry out his own inquiries, navigate around a hostile White House staff, and get his message over to the President.

If this was a dystopian thriller, one could imagine Giuliani as an undercover saboteur, who was ordered to embed himself as deeply as possible within Team Trump and then bide his time. In 2016, he proved his bona fides with Trump by publicly defending him after the appearance of the “Access Hollywood” tape, and then he accompanied Trump on his final campaign swing. In 2018, after Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, Giuliani reappeared as the public face of the President’s legal-defense team. With other lawyers conducting most of the actual legal work, he had plenty of time for pursuing other projects, including a certain oppo-research effort in Kiev. And what a job he made of it.

Giuliani isn’t an undercover operative, of course. He’s a retired politician who couldn’t bear to be out of the spotlight and who saw, in Trump’s rise, a way to get back on the stage. He’s also a rich security consultant, whose clients include Eastern European moguls with ties to the Ukrainian government. In promoting to Trump the unfounded theory that Biden blackmailed Ukraine’s government to protect his son, these two streams in Giuliani’s life came together. And you have to give him some credit, at least, for knowing his client. Outside the confines of 4chan, there is probably nobody in America more partial to conspiracy theories than Trump.

Whatever Giuliani thought he was doing, the great irony is that, by luring Trump into the Ukraine folly, he has ended up bloodying him more seriously than Mueller or James Comey ever did. Many Trump allies fervently wish that Giuliani would shut up and go away, but there is no chance of that happening. On Tuesday night, he appeared on another Fox News show, hosted by Laura Ingraham, where he said that he was considering launching civil suits against individual congressional Democrats, for taking part in “a conspiracy to violate civil rights”—i.e., his and Trump’s. “This is worse than McCarthy,” he added.