Rudy Giuliani started Tuesday in the manner Americans have come to expect of the president’s lawyer: He attacked former FBI director James Comey by tweeting a cartoon image of Bashful from Disney’s “Snow White.”
Giuliani deleted the tweet, and anyway, it’s not clear why he chose Bashful.
.. He had told CNN on Sunday that “no one signed” a letter of intent for Donald Trump to build a Moscow project. On Tuesday, CNN obtained the letter — signed by Trump.
Giuliani, asked by the New York Daily News to explain himself, said, “I don’t think I said nobody signed it.” Completing the reversal, he said “of course” Trump signed it: “How could you send it but nobody signed it?”
.. The “fool” has been a dramatic fixture at least since Shakespeare scribbled, and Giuliani is the fool for our time. Occasionally he speaks accidental truths, but mostly he plays the clown.
.. “Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message,” an alarmed Giuliani tweeted a few weeks ago, calling Twitter “card-carrying anti-Trumpers.” In fact, Giuliani had accidentally sabotaged his own tweet with a punctuation error — “G-20.In” — that automatically created a hyperlink to an Indian Web address. A clever observer quickly bought the domain and created a page that said “Donald Trump is a traitor.” Giuliani’s errant accusation was all the funnier because he’s also Trump’s “cybersecurity adviser.”
.. The former New York mayor, 74, has long been a loose cannon, asserting that there had not been any “successful Islamic terrorist attacks” during the George W. Bush administration, saying Trump’s travel ban was a legal way to do a “Muslim ban,” and predicting a “pretty big surprise” right before Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Alternately ill-informed and indiscreet, he’s just the guy you’d want as your lawyer.
.. Giuliani began as Trump’s lawyer in the spring by comparing FBI agents to “stormtroopers” and later claiming a law-enforcement informant was a “spy.”
.. He said he would charge special counsel Robert Mueller’s office “with a lance” to defend Ivanka Trump, but Jared Kushner is “disposable.”
.. He said Trump couldn’t be indicted as president even if he “shot” Comey.
.. He undermined months of Trump’s “no collusion” claims by proclaiming instead that “collusion is not a crime.”
He defended Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by saying “truth isn’t truth.”
He admitted publicly that the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was held “for the purpose of getting information about Clinton,” upending the official line that it was about adoption.
He suggested guilt when he told the Daily Beast “this was not a big crime” because “nobody got killed, nobody got robbed.”
And, days ago, he raised the possibility that associate Roger Stone gave Trump advance notice that WikiLeaks would release emails about Clinton stolen by Russia, saying “if” Stone had, “it’s not a crime.”
Clearly, some Giuliani dopiness is an effort to divulge damaging information gently. But he often makes matters worse.
.. Giuliani announced that Trump reimbursed Cohen for hush money to a porn actress. But he seemed baffled when told Cohen had claimed it was his own money: “He did?” Retreating, Giuliani said Trump wasn’t told about the payments, “but even if he was told, he wouldn’t have remembered it.” Further backpedaling, Giuliani said, “I’m not an expert on the facts” and issued a written statement “to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days.”
A similar mop-up came after Giuliani volunteered on TV that there had been a second meeting between Trump associates and Russians. Hours later, he said the just-referenced meeting “never happened.”
On Sunday, Giuliani was back to truth-isn’t-truth, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “unless you’re God . . . you will never know what the truth is” from Cohen. And Giuliani told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that Mueller would interview Trump “over my dead body — but you know, I could be dead.”
Perish the thought! We need Giuliani’s entertainment. But when he dies, there should be a memorable scene when he goes before the One Who Knows Truth.
“I didn’t lie,” Giuliani will say, “but even if I did, it wasn’t a crime to be Dopey.”
Comments:
I always felt Rudy used 9/11 more than actually helping... Need for money and attention, and significant cognitive decline due to age have brought about this sorry spectacle.
In the Trump WH age-related cognitive decline has a pretty good chance of passing unnoticed... Trump is the anti-King Midas... I’m sorry, but this column is mistaken. Giuliani is playing out his assigned role precisely as intended. Self-contradictions, deliberate falsehoods, apparent “misstatements,” bizarre tweets — all external hallmarks of Rudy’s boss, and Rudy’s a talented understudy. The purpose behind all this playacting is to distract and confuse, and it works. Trump continues to operate on the principle that the longer he can keep people shocked, off-balance, outraged, distracted, and confused, the longer he can rake in ill-gotten gains from his real aim: fleecing the American public. Giuliani has been recruited to assist in the Dept. of Misdirection.
The only fool thing Giuliani has done is to place the slightest reliance on Trump’s promise of whatever payback The Gilded Don has dangled in exchange for Rudy’s excellent diversionary stunts. A substantial group of construction subcontractors have learned, to their lasting pain and sorrow, what Trump’s promises are worth.
.. I agree. Fortunately, Giuliani has no power or authority so people just ignore his inane pronouncements. In the words of Jimmy Breslin, “Rudy Guiliani is a small man in search of a balcony.”.. I think you’re giving them both more credit than they deserve. IMHO Trump is just a bully and Giuliani really is just a fool. But hey, there’s every chance you’re right, I’m just not sure they are smart enough to be so devious... Trump, Giuliani, and Gingrich: The Three Wives Men.. Oh god another moron who thinks he is a stable genius. Surely Rudy’s third divorce is having an affect on him. And getting kicked out of his law firm for disgracing them with his idiocy, and having another exwife asking for more money, just has Rudy rattled. Please somebody remove this blight on the Constitution from our eyes and ears... I find it amazing that anyone would even have this man appear in front of any camera. If one lived in NYC when he was Mayor (as I did) you would know the truth about him.He was a Mayor whose interest was to clean up the parks by moving all the homeless out of them with nowhere to go. Put them in the streets with no plan.Did nothing for NYC education, nothing for housing, nothing for women’s or Gay rights and on and on.The final straw was this America’s Mayor standing in front of Grace Mansion and telling the world he was divorcing his then wife (Donna Hanover) to marry his mistress. Never telling her in person.What kind of man is this? He is exactly the clown you see today licking the boots of a President who like Rudy is a man without scruples and who lies on TV then is brought back to reality with proof that he spouts these lies and thinks he will get away with them. Todays world has everything recorded. Mr Giuliani please go back to your senior home and take your meds... Could it be that Rudy is really a secret double agent who actually works for Mueller? Every time he opens his mouth, Rudy digs the hole deeper for Trump... Very nicely done. The most puzzling thing about Giuliani is that he doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize that he looks foolish and he apparently doesn’t have anyone close to him who he trusts to tell him that he looks foolish either. He has chosen a very difficult role: mouthpiece for an habitually lying, narcissistic degenerate. Very few people could take that role and emerge with any dignity. In fact, most people with dignity would not take that role. Guliani will not be remembered as the Mayor of New York City during 9/11 nor as the U.S. Attorney who once tried to clean up Wall Street. He will be remembered as Trump’s tool, and as this piece says, as a fool... Mr. Rudolph Guiliani is second only to the TRumpster himself in making the TRumpster look guilty as sin.
Steve Hilton: Hey, Trump haters (on both sides) could you just admit that this is a successful presidency?
In the evil populist “Trump’s America,” here’s what happened to energy-related carbon emissions: In 2017, they fell by 0.5 percent. But in the saintly globalist European Union, they went up by 1.5 percent in the same period. In fact, per-capita carbon emissions in Trump’s America are nearly at a 70-year low.
It turns out energy deregulation does more to fight climate change than going to conferences. I guess you might call that an “inconvenient truth.” This one’s pretty inconvenient if you’re the kind of person that goes around saying Trump is a fake populist, that he’s not doing anything to help the forgotten men and women in this country.
.. Look, America’s poverty rate was lower in President Trump’s first year than at any point in the Obama administration.
Okay. Whatever, you Trump haters are probably saying. But of course the middle class was screwed by the Trump tax cuts that only helped the rich, right?
Oh wait. The Trump tax cuts doubled the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for families. That’s a huge change that takes millions of Americans out of federal income tax altogether and has effectively increased incomes for middle class families across the country.
.. What else helps the middle class? Jobs. But of course that “idiot” Trump couldn’t create them.
“When somebody says – like the person you just mentioned that I’m not going to advertise for – that he’s going to bring all these jobs back. Well, how exactly are you going to do that?” Obama once said. “He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what – how – exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have?”
Yeah, Trump, what magic wand do you have? I don’t know, maybe just better economic policy. The kind that results in the lowest unemployment rate since 1969. And the lowest African-American unemployment ever.
.. Also, wasn’t Trump going to crash the economy? Hillary Clinton thought so, telling an audience, “Economists – left, right, and center – all agree: Donald Trump will drive America back into recession.”
Left, right and center, inconvenient truth, Hillary. Even the New York times just gave Trump credit for the fact that the U.S. economy is on track for its “best annual performance since 2005.”
Alright, whatever. Jobs and growth … but Trump still isn’t delivering his promises to working people. I mean, after decades of stagnation, incomes are still flat, aren’t they?
“A key thing we’ve been looking at for quite a while that doesn’t seem to be moving much are wages,” CBS correspondent Anthony Mason said on-air.
Oh dear. That turns out not be true any more. Wages have risen all the way through the last two years and were up 3.1 percent in the last quarter – the highest level in a decade.
Fine. But it’s all going to be ruined, isn’t it, by Trump’s crazy trade war with China? In fact, the elitists seem to hate Trump so much, they even took China’s side. Remember how they thrilled to the brutal autocrat Xi Jinping at Davos last year? They just lapped up his speech on the virtues of globalization. The president of the EU-owned European Investment Bank said, “In these times of a lack of leadership, particularly in Europe, it was quite impressive.”
Oooh President Xi! You’re quite impressive!
What’s actually happening is that President Trump’s pressure is working. China is on the back foot, making trade concessions, and now pledging to drop its “Made in China 2025” program, which was Xi Jinping’s grand plan to achieve world domination in the industries of the future.
We’ll see if they mean it. But even the fact that they’re saying it is a major victory for that “idiot” Trump, who obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing. Just like with North Korea, remember?
It was outgoing President Obama who told President-elect Donald Trump that North Korea would be his number one problem. Trump actually listened to him, did something about it, and turned our relationship around in a way that has made the world incomparably safer.
And then, just this past week, we saw incredibly important substantive progress from this administration. Major criminal justice reform, led by Jared Kushner, is now looking good for passage in the Senate. A major new effort to revitalize urban America and rebuild low-income neighborhoods is being led by Ben Carson. And there’s a highly significant new strategy from John Bolton to fight China’s attempted colonization of Africa.
.. Look, the point here is this: We’ll never persuade the Trump haters on the left and the right to change their feelings about the president. They just can’t stand him. And more than anything, it’s aesthetic. They find him vulgar … not to their taste.
Fine. But could you just focus on the facts? Could you just acknowledge – even for a day or so over Christmas – that on the facts, on policy, on the substance, that this is, so far, a pretty successful presidency?
The Strengthening Case Against Trump
Two days earlier Trump had to sit alongside three past presidents through the funeral of President George H.W. Bush. With Bush lauded as almost his exact opposite in style and manner, Trump looked throughout as if he wished he were anywhere else. Meanwhile, the stock market’s entire gains for the year were wiped out as Trump’s supposed trade truce with China fell apart.
It also became clear just how badly Trump has lost control of Congress. The Democrats’ gain in the House of Representatives continued to rise (the latest number is a stunning 40 seats), as closely fought, undecided races in last month’s midterm election continued to fall the party’s way. And some Republican senators are finally breaking ranks with Trump over the role of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (a pet of both Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) in the grisly murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Unlike Trump, the senators refused to subordinate the moral and real-world implications of permitting a foreign government to murder a US-based journalist to the president’s exaggerated claims about the Kingdom’s future arms purchases and its supposed strategic role in curbing Iran’s regional ambitions.
.. At long last, we learned what embarrassing information Russian President Vladimir Putin had on Trump, after Cohen told prosecutorsthat Trump had long sought to build a grand, highly lucrative hotel in Moscow, permission for which had to come from the Kremlin. (Russia also stood to gain significant revenue from the project.)
.. Cohen’s testimony also highlighted the likelihood that various aspects of US foreign policy, including favorable statements about or treatment of certain autocratic leaders, have been influenced by Trump’s private business interests – existing or desired – in those countries, which include Turkey, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Russia. Meanwhile, Trump’s hotels, especially his expensive new one near the White House, received business from various countries. This is especially significant because, unlike his predecessors, Trump refused to detach himself from his private business when he took office
.. The corruption extends to Trump’s immediate circle. His daughter Ivanka was awarded trademarks from China for her clothing line (now defunct, though she has retained the trademarks and sought new ones). Her husband, Kushner, is believed to have used his position to try to find funds to pay off excessive debt incurred by his family’s real-estate business. And Cohen literally sold his supposed access to Trump to businesses for a reported $4 million (though how much, if anything, he delivered is open to question).
.. Trump’s ever-stranger behavior of late – including more frequent and more hysterical tweets – has been widely attributed to his growing realization of what the Democrats’ takeover of the House of Representatives means for his presidency.
As Trump prepares for his holiday respite in Florida, he is more isolated than ever
Christie has maintained a cordial and clear-eyed relationship with the president. Though he carries some political baggage from his time as governor, he had credentials that few of the others considered for the chief of staff position could offer — skills that Trump likely will need in the year ahead. Among them were
- executive experience,
- political experience,
- communications skills,
- independent political relationships and, above all,
- legal experience as a former U.S. attorney.
.. Christie apparently concluded this was no time to go inside the Trump administration and to work for a president who rarely takes the advice of his advisers and whose volatility and unpredictability could prove to be even more detrimental in the months ahead.
.. The decisions by Ayers, Christie and others underscore the precariousness of Trump’s position. At a time when he will need all the strength, wisdom, firepower and support directly around him, Trump presides over a White House that is thinning out rather than beefing up.
.. The White House Counsel’s Office is understaffed heading into a year that could bring multiple requests for documents from congressional committees and the possibility of impeachment proceedings, if what special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ultimately reports rises to that level. So far that is an open question. Others already have moved out of the White House to jobs on the Trump 2020 campaign or the private sector. More could follow in the months ahead.
.. Some loyalists remain. Among them are
- Kellyanne Conway,
- Sarah Sanders, and the president’s daughter
- Ivanka Trump and son-in-law
- Jared Kushner.
But on the issue of fresh recruits, the question is: Who would want to come to work for a president at this moment, knowing that could result in sizable legal fees as a side benefit?
.. For Trump, a group of people he once counted as among his most trusted advisers has been turned into a weapon in the hands of prosecutors
.. Another person who once protected the president and is now on the other side is David Pecker, of American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer
.. Equally worrisome for Trump could be the role of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer and the person who must know as much as anyone about the inner financial workings of Trump’s empire. He has been granted immunity from prosecution in return for his cooperation.