Not so long ago, it seemed to Rudy Giuliani that he would be presiding over a hefty part of the world.Holding court a few nights after the 2016 election in a private cigar bar on Fifth Avenue, glass of Macallan at hand, Giuliani boasted to friends that President-elect Donald Trump would soon nominate
Not so long ago, it seemed to Rudy Giuliani that he would be presiding over a hefty part of the world.
Step by step, he has escorted Trump to the brink of impeachment. Giuliani himself is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in the very office where he enjoyed his first extended draughts of fame nearly four decades ago. The separate troubles he has gotten his client and himself into are products of the uniquely powerful position he has fashioned, a hybrid of unpaid personal counsel to the president and for-profit peddler of access and advice.
The forces that have returned Giuliani to the stage at age 75 are the same ones that made him a star federal prosecutor as a young man, a memorable mayor of New York in the 1990s and a scorched-earth advocate for Trump in 2016: his relentless drive to put himself at the center of public life and his very high regard for his own virtuousness.
A third marriage has fallen into divorce court ruins, revealing monthly expenses of $230,000 for six homes and 11 country club memberships. By taking Trump as a client, he lost a position at a law firm in 2018 that paid him $6 million annually, according to court filings. In October, he broke with a partner in a security consultancy, a former police officer who had been at his side for three decades.
And both men were Giuliani’s guests this year at an annual dinner he gives for a band of people, mostly city workers, knitted together after the Sept. 11 attacks.No, they had not.He deployed both men to find pressure points in Ukraine, and joined them in undermining an American ambassador. His intentions, he says, were pure. “As a person who finds public corruption a cancer,” Giuliani said, “I cannot ignore it.
With Trump as co-chairman of his first campaign fundraiser, Giuliani ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1989. He won the next time, in 1993, and served until the end of 2001. For the world, he embodied resilience following Sept. 11, a stature he would parlay into wealth but not a successful presidential candidacy. After a dismal showing in the 2008 Republican primaries, in which he spent more than $60 million and won no delegates, he and Mrs. Giuliani retreated to her family’s home in Florida.
Prominent Republicans who now style themselves devoted allies of Trump spoke of him then with acid revulsion or clenched-teeth neutrality. The campaign needed someone able to dial into a steady state of rage on a moment’s notice, even a high-mileage ex-politician scarcely known to a younger generation of voters.
Trump’s usual surrogates — Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Chris Christie — had been booked to appear on the Sunday shows before the tape came out. When it did, they all bailed.“Rudy was the only person willing to go on television to defend Donald Trump,” Bossie said. “We’ve got a couple of surprises left,” Giuliani said, chuckling but coyly refusing to be drawn out on specifics.
Giuliani would later deny that he had heard about the emails from FBI agents, though he had bragged about that in broadcast interviews. “I want to give a very special thanks to our former mayor, Rudy Giuliani,” Trump shouted, to chants of “Rudy, Rudy.” “That Rudy never changes. Where’s Rudy? Where is he?” A moment later, spotting him, Trump called again, “Oh, Rudy, get up here.”The Inner Circle
So he returned in January 2017 to his partnership at Greenberg Traurig. He was also running a consulting company, Giuliani Security & Safety, with mostly foreign clients.Out of the blue, he would call John Dowd, an old colleague from their days as young lawyers. Dowd had known Giuliani as a 30-year-old prosecutor whose withering cross-examination drove a sitting congressman to halt his own trial and plead guilty.
He hired himself out to a Turkish money launderer, Reza Zarrab, and argued his case directly to the president and the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in the Oval Office. Zarrab had been accused of moving $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran, evading U.S. sanctions. He eventually pleaded guilty and became a prosecution witness.
He seemed taken aback when reporters questioned him about his private business clients. “I’m not going to answer any more of your goddamn questions because this is getting to be harassment,” he said in an interview last month.When he announced that he would be representing Trump, he said he would be taking a leave of absence from Greenberg Traurig. But his partners, and some of their clients, had had their fill of being associated with Trump. The firm said Giuliani was resigning.
Other lawyers on the Trump team were dismayed by his rhetoric but Giuliani said it was tactical, regardless of how unhinged it seemed. Once he learned that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had decided that Justice Department policy forbade the criminal indictment of a sitting president, he said, he viewed impeachment as Trump’s only risk. That would be a public relations war, not a legal one, he explained, with the battles fought on television — an arena that Mueller did not contest.
Fruman also had a business distributing luxury products in Ukraine, including yachts, jewelry, cars and electronics. Manafort maintained that he and Trump were victims of Ukrainian meddling that took two forms: the release of a mysterious slush fund ledger that detailed payments by the Russia-aligned party, including $12.7 million earmarked for Manafort; and the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers that was blamed on Russia.
Equally difficult would be showing that Manafort was a victim of a forged paper ledger: Electronic bank records were so overwhelming that he pleaded guilty. Still, Giuliani’s project expanded from Manafort to include the vilification of Biden and yet one more person: the American ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch.
Parnas and Fruman also dangled American favors in front of Petro O. Poroshenko, president of Ukraine at the time, and two exiled Ukrainian oligarchs facing legal problems in the U.S. In exchange, the oligarchs and the president were asked for their help in implicating the Bidens in bribery, or Ukraine in 2016 meddling.
At the same time, The New York Times reported that contrary to Giuliani’s claim that he had no business interests in Ukraine, he had negotiated with officials there for up to $500,000 in contracts that would involve the recovery of looted assets. They probably did not know that this would turn out to be their last get-together, at least for a while.
But it was Giuliani who served as the wrangler of business hustlers, compromised ex-prosecutors, Ukrainian oligarchs and a host of bewildered American diplomats and Ukrainian elected officials who could not entirely fathom how he had come to wield such outsize influence, or to what ends he was wielding it.
The Rudy Giuliani business has been hurt, he said, because potential clients are afraid of being exposed to the endless scrutiny of his affairs. Anthony Carbonetti, a City Hall aide to Mr. Giuliani and a longtime friend, said he worried that what he saw as Giuliani’s groundbreaking years as New York mayor would be forgotten behind the sky-filling spectacle of Trump.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
Similar News:Vous pouvez également lire des articles d'actualité similaires à celui-ci que nous avons collectés auprès d'autres sources d'information.
U.S. Democrat says Trump violated oath; Republicans attack impeachment probeThe head of a U.S. congressional panel leading the impeachment inquiry against President Trump accused him of putting himself before his country and violating his oath of office ImpeachingHearing
Lire la suite »
‘Trump changed everything’: Big cities break hard left in Dem primaryMayors are under increasing pressure to embrace the leading progressive candidates.
Lire la suite »
Rep. Welch on impeachment stakes: ‘Is President Trump above the law?’Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) joins Alex Witt to discuss the impeachment inquiry and how close House Democrats are to drafting articles of impeachment. Plus, how the congressman feels about the lack of support from across the political aisle.
Lire la suite »