Rudy Giuliani Plucked from Irrelevance to Fix Trump’s Legal Woes
Rudy Giuliani, last seen heading a presidential working group on something he referred to as "security for cyber," has accepted a new position in the White House orbit, if not the administration itself: America's Mayor has joined the president's personal legal team, where he will be working to "negotiate an end" to Robert Mueller's investigation. Having exhausted his Rolodex of sycophants in less than two years, apparently, Donald Trump has begun the process of going through it a second time to see who will debase themselves again.
Prior to becoming a politician and, more recently, the Republican Party's best-known man who screams nonsensical things about police officers in public, Giuliani was an honest-to-God lawyer who served for years in President Reagan's Justice Department and as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He entered private practice after his mayoralty ended in 2001, but given how much of his time and energy he has spent since that time failing to be elected president, it remains unclear whether he is prepared for this type of substantive, high-stakes legal work. His track record of late—Giuliani was supposedly an architect of the administration's various Muslim-ban executive orders, which federal judges took turns contemptuously stuffing in the trash throughout most of 2017—is not promising.
The president's newest attorney downplayed his role a bit after the news broke, emphasizing that his primary value-add is the relationship he developed with Mueller during their time together at DOJ. (Giuliani will also be working strictly on a pro bono basis.) "I don't think it's going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution. They're almost there," he said to the New York Post about an investigation that has yielded 19 indictments or guilty pleas to date. "I'm going to ask Mueller, 'What do you need to wrap it up?'" Given that the president also added a pair of white-collar criminal-defense lawyers from Florida to his legal team on Thursday, this statement might be more of a wishful-thinking effort to placate his client than it is an accurate description of where Mueller's probe is headed next.
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Trump Is Finished
Giuliani probably sees this gig as both a nod to his legal acumen and also as a long-overdue reward for his loyalty to Trump on the campaign trail. Perhaps, he thinks, it is his chance to get back into Trump's good graces. Perhaps he holds out hope that a standout performance could yield one of the cabinet positions for which the president halfheartedly pretended to consider him before quietly doling out those jobs to less embarrassing nominees.
Given the history that the two men share, maybe he just longs to play their greatest hits one last time. Here, watch then-mayor Giuliani dress up in drag for a truly horrific "comedy" sketch that features Trump, in a classic case of tasteless art imitating disgusting life, groping him without permission. "Can't say I didn't try!" says the man who would become president about the man who is now his attorney.
The likeliest explanation, though, is that when given the choice between finding good lawyers and bringing in familiar faces who he knows will do his bidding, Donald Trump always casts his lot with the latter group. Besides, at this point, the president has been politely turned away by just about every A-list litigator and top-tier law firm in Washington and New York whose services he has attempted to solicit, so leaning in to the "Call whoever is on Fox News and see if they have a J.D. and can be available tomorrow" element of his defense strategy is the most promising move he has left. Rudy Giuliani, now and always, is too thirsty to notice.
