RUDY GIULIANI: FROM HERO TO ZERO?
There’s no stopping Rudy Giuliani, said Asawin Suebsaeng on The Daily Beast. As the Democrats prepared to file impeachment charges against Donald Trump, the president’s personal lawyer was engaged on a whistle-stop tour of eastern Europe, including a visit to Ukraine. The purpose of the trip was ostensibly to participate in a pro-Trump documentary series. But according to insiders, Giuliani was also still “shopping for dirt” about the former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and speaking to officials who can help support his theory – held “against all evidence” – that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Having been accused of facilitating an earlier plot to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens – the scandal that gave rise to the current impeachment proceedings – it seems Giuliani is now defiantly doubling down on this risky strategy.
Trump, meanwhile, is distancing himself from his attorney, said Paul Waldman in The Washington Post. Asked last month whether he’d directed Giuliani to do anything in Ukraine, Trump said: “No, I didn’t direct him, but Rudy’s a warrior.”
Asked what Giuliani was doing there, he replied: “You have to ask Rudy.” Trump’s profession of ignorance bears no scrutiny at all. The transcript of the 25 July phone call in which Trump asked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for a “favour” – by which he clearly meant investigating Biden – shows him saying: “Rudy very much knows what’s happening... If you could speak to him, that would be great.” By claiming to have no idea what he was up to, Trump appears to be setting Giuliani up as his fall guy.
That’s a dangerous strategy, said The Dispatch. Giuliani is now under federal investigation for his lobbying activities in Ukraine. During recent interviews, he has pointedly joked he has “insurance” should Trump ever try to throw him under the bus. That’s a clear warning from a man who doesn’t want to spend a day in prison. What a fall from grace, said Gregory J. Wallance on The Hill. Giuliani was once admired as a crime-busting prosecutor and as New York’s inspirational mayor after 9/11. Now he has been exposed as a “scheming conniver” willing to lie shamelessly and smear those who get in his way. Is this how he’ll go down in history: as the human “hand grenade” who “blew everyone up”?