‘Rudy Inc.’ has flourished in age of Trump

WASHINGTON — As Ukraine investigation moved toward a House floor vote on articles of impeachment, the most intriguing personality may be the man who arguably set this bizarre chain of events in motion — Rudolph Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and global fixer.

Giuliani occupies a unique perch: He’s the president’s advocate, but he is snared in probes of his own activities, including reported federal grand jury subpoenas requesting information about Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. He’s the man who seeks to protect Trump but sometimes seems to be digging the president deeper in a hole with his own public actions and comments.

Consequential moments such as a presidential impeachment sometimes begin with small, almost random events. That seems true of Giuliani’s entanglement with Ukraine. He had legal clients and contacts there he thought could help him and the president; month by month, Trump followed Giuliani toward the vortex of what will likely be the third impeachment of a commander in chief in American history.

“Rudy Inc.” has flourished in the age of Trump. In the three years since Trump was elected president, Giuliani has had unique access to the White House as the president’s friend and unpaid lawyer. This insider status has provided new cachet, and with that, new business opportunities. As Giuliani has traveled the world, he has promoted his relationship to the president and his ability to make deals. Several of his clients have been wealthy foreigners facing legal problems in the United States.

Giuliani himself bristles at the notion that there is anything improper about his activities, and whether he had blurred the lines between his work for the president and his private law practice and business endeavors. “Not even close,” he wrote in a text. “It’s left wing attack … based on no evidence, just assuming I’m unethical like they are. I’ve been a lawyer for 50 years without even a phony complaint. I value ethics and I am outraged at this attack on my reputation based on smoke and mirrors and Trump hatred.”

In evaluating Giuliani’s actions, Ukraine is ground zero, for this is where his efforts were most intense and, according to his critics, most toxic. Ukraine was political terrain for Giuliani, as a potential source of dirt about Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

But it was also about legal business.

In Ukraine, as in many other countries, the most lucrative and corrupt area of the economy has been the energy sector. In this swamp of energy politics, Giuliani became entangled with Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born Americans who were indicted in October on charges of making false statements and conspiring to funnel illegal contributions to Republicans, including a Trump-supporting super PAC.

Through their lawyers, Parnas and Fruman have both denied any wrongdoing.

This business nexus is an important strand of Ukraine story. It helps us understand one of the riddles of the impeachment narrative: Why did Giuliani lobby so hard for Trump to fire Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine? What triggered the smear campaign against her, which came long before Trump’s haggling over a political “favor” in exchange for military aid to Kyiv?

A chillingly simple answer emerges in interviews with Ukrainian business and political leaders and a review of thousands of pages of testimony and dozens of news reports: Giuliani was feuding with Yovanovitch partly because she was blocking efforts by his clients, Parnas and Fruman, to pursue deals with Naftogaz, the Ukrainian natural gas company, that could have made millions for Giuliani’s friends.

Many presidents have had someone like Giuliani — a personal friend, often a lawyer, who built a private business or legal practice around White House access. What’s striking about Giuliani is the breadth of his influence and the degree to which his public policy and private business roles overlapped.

As the president’s friend, lawyer and back-channel policy advocate, Giuliani crossed lines that most White House insiders avoid. He pressed for an ambassador to be fired. He seemingly encouraged delay of a congressionally mandated military-aid program to an embattled ally. He blurred the usual conflict-of-interest norms in dealing with clients whose matters overlapped with foreign-policy issues where he was advising Trump.

For those who remember Giuliani amid the rubble of the fallen twin towers, summoning his city and nation to work together for a great cause, it’s a sad story of how big people can shrink before our eyes — and of the persistence of the public-private swamp that many voters thought they were rejecting in 2016.