Rudolph the runny lawyer
“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago,” President Donald J. Trump said in May 2018, after his personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani admitted on Sean Hannity’s show that
Trump had been aware of hush payments to Stormy Daniels. “But he really has his heart into it. He’s working hard. He’s learning the subject matter. ...
He’ll get his facts straight.”
Like the president’s more recent statements that he would be competitive in New York in the 2020 general election, this has turned out not to be the case. Giuliani and facts remain barely acquainted.
In the same way that we all long for the sylvan glades of a happy childhood, Trump has made plain his nostalgia for the legal cocoon provided to him by the notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, another son of the outer boroughs. (Trump is from Queens, Cohn from the Bronx, Giuliani from Brooklyn.)
But in virtually all mud fights Giuliani has taken up for Trump — from l’affaire Daniels to the Ukraine investigation and Hunter Biden’s laptop — the former U.S. attorney once dubbed “America’s mayor” for his performance during and after 9/11, has proven to be the opposite of the sort of cool legal assassin the president dreams of.
Instead, what we have gotten is a clown show — and I speak as someone who many decades ago performed as a clown during my summertime employment as a singing telegram messenger. Those days came back to me on Thursday as I watched the parallel rivulets of ... something
( gray-concealing mascara was one theory) oozing from Giuliani’s sideburns during one of the most memorable news conferences of the 2020 election cycle.
In the trade, we always knew to use makeup that wouldn’t run when you were performing outside on a hot day — because there is nothing more terrifying to small children than a clown who looks like he’s melting as he whips up a balloon animal.
Scaring the impressionable was, however, the entire point of Giuliani’s news conference, in which he and a cadre of other Trump lawyers offered up a dog’s breakfast of conspiracy theories, evidence-free allegations and ad hominem attacks. Asked to offer proof to back up, say, their allegations that voting software was deployed to switch votes from Trump to Biden, they scolded reporters for failing to understand how the legal system works.
Judges understand how the legal system works, and so far have rejected almost every one of the Trump team’s legal arguments, which are actually more like angry yawps poured into the form of court filings. These documents and the transcript of Thursday’s news conference represented what the philosophically-minded journalist Sean
Illing, writing in Vox earlier this year, described as “manufactured nihilism” — the willful demolition of the entire notion that facts exist and can be helpful in apprehending reality.
That’s the game Giuliani has been playing for Trump for several years now, to increasingly shambolic effect. If you’re able to set aside the damage done to our democratic institutions, it’s almost touching: Of all the aides Trump has fired — the noble and the venal alike — one of the only people he continues to depend on is the lawyer with the runny sideburns who keeps getting the president in trouble.
And another thing
Speaking of outer-boroughborn lawyers with decades-old relationships with Trump: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo earlier this month gave a podcast interview to Democratic consultant and CNN pundit David Axelrod that was revealing in all sorts of ways — especially for the manner in which the governor attempted to reframe the conviction of his former top aide Joe Percoco.
“Close aide, close friend of mine got convicted — not of taking state money, but of having outside income that was unreported, basically, to put it in layman’s terms,” Cuomo said in response to Axelrod’s question about whether the scandal represented a low point of his decade in office.
Actually, Percoco was convicted of selling his office. He was found guilty of honest services fraud, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and solicitation of bribes and gratuities — money that Cuomo, a former assistant district attorney and state attorney general, appears to equate to “income that was unreported.” That’s like saying that ( basically, to put it in layman’s terms), John Wilkes
Booth was guilty of discharging a firearm inside a theater in violation of municipal noise ordinances.
Cuomo continued with an oblique reference to Axelrod’s CNN colleague Preet Bharara, who like Giuliani is a former Manhattan U.S. Attorney: “On the other hand, during that situation it was a very aggressive prosecutor who went through everything on every level, and that was the one person that he found anything on.”
This similarly glossed over the convictions of Alain Kaloyeros, the man Cuomo entrusted with leading his primary upstate economic development initiative; bagman Todd Howe, a longtime Cuomo friend and fundraiser; and several businessmen who were generous donors to the governor’s campaigns when they weren’t busy bribing Percoco.
As I saw on one of the governor’s recent Powerpoint presentations: Facts matter.