Rudy Giuliani’s role on the Donald Trump legal team appears to be that of Man Who Is Perpetually Outraged That Trump is Held To Any Standards At All. And the only thing that can be said of his performance is that he is definitely all-in when it comes to repealing every aspect of decency, history, and law.
The tour de force started during an interview with Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s other client, Sean Hannity, where Giuliani slipped in the phrase “they funneled it through a law firm” as if it were not just an ordinary occurrence, but obvious to the most casual observer. This came while admitting that Trump had not only been aware of the hush payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, but had actually routed funds through Michael Cohen in regular intervals. The interview not only confirmed that Trump had repeatedly lied about his knowledge of the agreement with Daniels and the payment by Cohen, but also featured Giuliani claiming that he had also handled such tawdry items for his own clients.
Giuliani moved on to attacking the same FBI agents he had claimed as his own during the campaign, treating them now as “a bunch of renegades” who need to be ousted because they insist on protecting the identity of a source. He called one group of agents “Storm Troopers” for executing a legal warrant against Cohen, then he matched that criticism with a statement that special counsel Robert Mueller was acting like “the Godfather” in refusing to hand Giuliani an explicit promise that Trump was free to do anything he wanted, without fear of legal action.
And finally, Giuliani was forced to tackle history to deny that Trump is subject to any legal strictures. At all.
“I never heard of a subpoena for the president’s person,” Giuliani argued. “Let’s distinguish between a subpoena for documents and a subpoena that takes the President out of the oval office and puts him in front of a grand jury or hearing. Can’t do it. Can’t do the second. You can’t do the first.”
Which puts Giuliani at odds with history in the form of Kenneth Starr and Robert Fiske, both of whom called Bill Clinton to testify, and both of whom subpoenaed documents from the White House. It also puts Rudy Giuliani hard against the past statements of Rudy Giuliani, who gave multiple interviews at the time stating that Clinton had to answer those subpoenas.
In an interview on CNN in 1998, Giulani had what seemed like a definitive position on whether or not Clinton could be called.
“If the president is asked to testify, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury and says no, not gonna do it? You gotta do it.”
But confronted by his own statements in the past week, Giulani strongly defended his new position through the most elegant legal argument.
As Cuomo played the clip, an angered Giuliani screamed, “That’s really unfair. What you’re doing right now is extremely unfair. It’s the reason people don’t come on this show."
It’s not the only occasion in the last few days where Giuliani seems determined to look away from his own past. Before the election, Giuliani was so keen on the opinion of FBI agents at the same office that he now condemns, that his frequent comments started an internal investigation into leaks. Exactly two days before James Comey sent the letter to Congress which re-opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, Giuliani was on Fox.
“I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises. I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton finally are beginning to have an impact. He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”
When the FBI was investigating Hillary—and spilling about it to Giuliani—they were great. This week he doubled down on his description of these of FBI agents as “storm troopers.”
Giuliani has also joined in the latest fiction that somehow Barack Obama “embedded” an operative within the Trump campaign, though there is no indication of this in the description of the FBI source under protection. That source is only described as someone who talked with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. But Giulani claims there were not just one, but two, FBI informants embedded into the Trump campaign.
In between his other statements, Giuliani made multiple improbable claims about his conversations with special counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani, who was brought onto Trump’s team with the declaration that he would wrap up the Mueller investigation “in a couple of weeks,” started these talks a month ago. But according to Giuliani, it’s all been worth it, because he has convinced Mueller to toss more than half of what he intended to ask Trump.
According to Giuliani, Mueller not only cut his list of items to discuss with Trump from five down to two, one of the items not on that list is anything to do with Michael Cohen. So, despite a situation where each day brings new revelations about the LLC Cohen supposedly set up to pay Daniels, but which has turned out to be an all-purpose nexus of graft; despite news that Cohen has unabashedly offered to sell access to Trump; despite word that both Cohen and Michael Flynn took bribes from the same Qatar government now preparing to give Jared Kushner a $1.2 billion payoff; and despite the astounding word that required Suspicious Activity Reports related to Cohen’s activities appear to have been pulled from government records … according to Giulani, Robert Mueller is not interested.
Instead, Giulani will sit down with Trump between rounds of golf, and prep him to deal with just two questions at some unspecified time over the summer. Giulani is claiming that the only questions Mueller intends to ask concern the Trump Tower meeting and the firing of James Comey.
But if Mueller is going to direct only two questions toward Trump, a better choice might be “Do you prefer orange or stripes?” And possibly, “What would you like for supper?”