Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Akron, Ohio, in 2016
When Donald Trump became president, his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, saw the opportunity to cash in, selling himself to corporations as someone who could wield influence with the new administration. Though some gullible companies paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, it turned out he could do no such thing; Trump had lost interest in Cohen, despite the alleged lawyer Cohen providing services that would eventually help land him in prison.
Trump has a new “personal attorney,” one who has all the clout and effect on policy Michael Cohen wished for but didn’t achieve. In fact, Rudy Giuliani may right now occupy a place without precedent in American history.
Other presidents have had outside advisers they turned to for counsel; some of those advisers have even shaped the president’s thinking. But it’s nearly impossible to think of any presidential friend who became what Giuliani has become: Someone with no government position who not only has the president’s ear but can get his own wishes translated into policy, no matter how corrupt they might be.
Rudy Giuliani is making American foreign policy, got a respected U.S. ambassador fired, and has even convinced the president to attempt (albeit without success) to kill a prosecution of one of his clients. He travels the world as the representative of the president, yet is bound by no rules of ethics or disclosures that might tell us, among other things, who’s paying him. “He is seemingly free to hold himself out as someone acting on behalf of the U.S. government,” Trevor Potter and Delaney Marsco point out, “but without the legal obligations that would prevent him from using that authority to line his pockets, perform political favors and advance the interests of himself or his unknown clients.”
To make things even worse, this extraordinary influence is being exercised by someone who is—how should I put this—bonkers.
Giuliani confesses to wrongdoing by himself or his client so often that the idea that he’ll admit to new crimes with each interview he does has become a running joke. He holds up a printout from an obscure right-wing web site and claims it’s an “affidavit.” He denies squeezing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, then when asked seconds later if he squeezed Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, says “Of course I did!” He tells reporters things like “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation.” His public statements are so full of falsehoods that they can only be compared to those of one other person.
With his love of ludicrous conspiracy theories and associations with criminal elements, it’s obvious why Giuliani and President Trump get along so well. But he may well be the agent of Trump’s destruction.
The deeper we get into the Ukraine scandal, the more appalling it is and the more it appears to have been driven by Rudy Giuliani. Late last week, two of Giuliani’s Soviet-born associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested on their way out of the country (with one-way tickets). The two are accused of some rather colorful campaign finance violations involving shell companies and hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign money donated to Republicans; as The Washington Post reported, “By spring 2018, the two men had dined with Trump, breakfasted with his son and attended exclusive events at Mar-a-Lago and the White House, all while jetting around the world and spending lavishly, particularly at Trump hotels in New York and Washington.”
One of Parnas and Fruman’s top priorities was arranging the removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the widely respected longtime Foreign Service officer who until earlier this year was our ambassador to Ukraine. In one of the depressing ironies of this whole situation, while Ukraine was struggling mightily to rid itself of corruption so it could remake itself into a place more like the United States, the American president’s cronies were trying to subvert that work and make Ukraine more corrupt. Yovanovitch was apparently an impediment to that project, so Giuliani, Parnas, and Fruman set about to destroy her. “The ambassador to Ukraine was replaced,” Giuliani told reporters. “I did play a role in that.”
That role apparently involved telling his good friend Donald Trump—who before this whole thing went down surely couldn’t have told you who the ambassador to Ukraine was if his life depended on it—to remove her from her job, which he did. On that now-infamous phone call, Trump told the Ukrainian president that Yovanovitch was “bad news” (though he referred to her only as “the woman”), then said, “Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it.”
That’s not all Giuliani has been up to. Bloomberg News reports that in 2017, President Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to push the Justice Department to drop an investigation of an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was suspected of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. Tillerson refused because doing so would be illegal; “other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.”
Why was Trump interested in getting this case dropped? You can have one guess on who the gold trader’s lawyer was. “Suppose I did talk to Trump about it—so what?” said Giuliani.
And there may be other areas where Giuliani is exercising his influence. Here’s a rather remarkable piece of video of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refusing to answer the question of whether he met with Giuliani when they were simultaneously in Warsaw recently. What might they have talked about?
Giuliani himself is now under investigation in regard to his dealings with Parnas and Fruman; one interesting question to be answered is how much Rudy was cut in to the deal they hoped to get to export natural gas to Ukraine. It seems likely that Giuliani was simultaneously pressuring Ukraine to help Trump’s reelection campaign and looking to loot the country with the help of his now-jailed friends; the three men were also pursuing energy deals in other former Soviet republics.
All of which is almost certainly just fine with President Trump. If anyone believes that government policy should be a tool to enable the well-connected to grab as much cash as they can, it’s him. Amid all the arrests and investigations and widening scandal, Trump sat down for a well-publicized lunch with Giuliani this weekend at one of his golf courses, just to show everyone that they’re still thick as thieves. So to speak.
