In times of trial, most of us turn to those we can trust for aid and comfort. Perhaps that is the simple explanation for President Trump’s decision to add his long-time friend and confidant, Rudy Giuliani, to his embattled, revolving-door legal team.
But perhaps it is more than that. Maybe much more.
The country knows the brash New Yorker as “America’s Mayor,” who acquitted himself in legendary fashion after the terrorist attacks of 9/11; but the relevant part of his resume now is what came before his eight-year stint as a Republican mayor in one of the most Democratic cities in the nation.
Serious Questions
Indeed, it is both Giuliani’s experience as a federal prosecutor and his long and friendly relationship with Special Counsel Robert Mueller which make this an intriguing hire. Following the recent resignations of first Ty Cobb and then John Dowd from Trump’s White House legal team, Giuliani and his husband-and-wife colleagues, Jane and Marty Raskin, now come riding in at a potentially pivotal moment. The just-released CYA memos from disgraced former FBI Director James Comey – to himself – have raised serious questions about whether the investigation itself was even justified or was nothing more than an American version of the Josef Stalin-inspired imperative: target the man, find the crime.
And yet, as the special counsel investigation nears its second year, additional legal challenges have arisen for the President. A criminal referral by Mueller on Trump’s attorney/fixer Michael Cohen has been taken up by Geoffrey Berman, the powerful U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, leading to the recent FBI raid on Cohen’s office, home, and hotel room. On top of that, grandstanding lawyer Michael Avenatti, the east coast version of Gloria Allred, has filed a civil suit against Trump on behalf of aging pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
In addition to his close relationship with Trump and famous tenacity, Giuliani was himself the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980’s, and thus well-positioned to add the weight of direct federal prosecutorial experience to Trump’s team. But Rudy may be tasked with a much larger and more specific mission.
The Personal Touch?
It could be that Giuliani was brought in for some sort of direct negotiation with Mueller to bring an end to the special counsel probe. That investigation has come under increasing fire with both the release of the Comey memos and the mounting evidence that the Obama FBI and Justice Department used the FISA Court as justification for conducting surveillance inside the Trump campaign…while issuing a preemptive exoneration of Hillary Clinton in the email scandal of 2016.
Despite his advancing age, Giuliani appears to be well-connected to the federal law enforcement community. Just days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced the bombshell discovery of new Clinton emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner less than two weeks before the 2016 election, Giuliani hinted at the coming revelation on Fox News, saying “I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton finally are beginning to have an impact” and promising ”a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”
Conspiracies Abound
Of course, many in the leftist establishment media have pegged this hiring as a sign of Trump’s desperation. Not unexpectedly, CNN ran the screaming headline “Rudy Giuliani is the Guy You Hire as a Last Resort” asserting that “history shows Trump surrounds himself with loyalists when the end is near. Giuliani’s arrival signals that something darker — perhaps something worse than the Mueller probe — could be lurking around the corner.” Conspiracy theories on CNN? Shocking…not. Remember that in addition to their boiling cauldron of around-the-clock hatred for the President, this is a network that actually debated whether that missing Malaysian Airlines flight in 2014 was downed because of a black hole. Seriously.
One way or another, the addition of the combative Giuliani to the buttoned-down D.C. legal team of President Trump seems certain to shake things up, with the clear goal of bringing the seemingly endless – and thus far fruitless – special counsel investigation to a merciful end.
