– the president dismissed it and responded by requiring personal approval of each expense.
Nine weeks and another impeachment later, Trump started the day on Thursday by asking aides to erase any signs of division. Deprived of his Twitter account, Mr. Trump conveyed his compliments through a consultant, Jason Miller, who tweeted: “I just spoke to President Trump, and he told me that @RudyGiuliani is a great guy and a patriot who dedicated his services to the country! We all love the mayor of America! “
White House officials are universally angry with Giuliani and blame him for Trump’s impeachments. But the president is another story.
Even as he complains about Giuliani’s last efforts as fruitless, the president remains exceptionally respectful of him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Trump told aides.
But only to a point. Although Trump and his advisers declined the request for $ 20,000 weeks ago, it is not clear whether the president will approve Giuliani to receive anything beyond expenses.
The intermittent tensions are characteristic of a decades-long mutually beneficial relationship between the former New York Mayor of Brooklyn and the former Queens real estate developer. Although the two were never particularly close in New York, Trump liked having the former mayor as his personal legal pit bull during the special attorney’s investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia.
In return, Giuliani, who failed to run for president in 2008, went to live with the president in the Oval Office and used his new connections to seek lucrative contracts.
Trump put Giuliani on politically disastrous missions that led to his impeachment – twice. Now, isolated and stripped of his usual political megaphones, the president faces the devastation of his business and political affairs for his part in encouraging a pro-Trump crowd that attacked the Capitol on January 6.
Giuliani – who, in turn, encouraged a group of supporters of the president that day to conduct “trial by combat” – is one of the few people who are still willing and eager to join Trump in the trench. While most lawyers are reluctant to represent the president in a second Senate impeachment trial, Trump’s advisers said Giuliani remains the most likely to be involved. Despite President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s certification as a winner, Giuliani continued to promote unproven theories about election results and falsely attributed the violence to left-wing anarchists.
A podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, a former chief strategist for Trump, was taken down on Thursday because of an interview in which Giuliani repeated false allegations about the election. During the interview, Bannon begged Giuliani to move on to a new topic.
“I don’t mind being closed down by my madness,” said Bannon to Giuliani, according to Alexander Panetta, a CBC News reporter who heard the podcast before it was removed. “I will not be closed because of yours.”
Mr. Trump has always had an abundance of yes, men and women around him, but Mr. Giuliani occupies a unique space in his orbit. Few people have had such durability with the president and few have been so willing to say and do things for him that others are not.
“Your typical role as a legal advisor is to tell your client the harsh truth and keep him from risk,” said Matthew Sanderson, a Washington-based Republican political lawyer, in an interview. “Rudy, instead, seems to tell his client exactly what he wants to hear and steer him towards risk as if they are both moths in a flame.”
This journey left him looking worse from wear and tear. Days after the election, Giuliani hit the road, challenging the results at a much-maligned press conference in front of a Pennsylvania landscaping company. In another appearance that month, Giuliani was on camera with black liquid, apparently hair dye, running down his face as he protested the election result.
Few were so willing to defend the president and, paradoxically, few were so detrimental to his legacy.
The Trump Impeachment ›
Answers to your questions about the impeachment process:
The current impeachment process is testing the limits of the process, raising questions never before addressed. Here’s what we know.
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- How does the impeachment process work? House members consider impeaching the president – the equivalent of an indictment in a criminal case – and members of the Senate consider dismissing him, holding a trial in which senators serve as a jury. The test, as established by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery or other serious crimes and misdemeanors”. The House vote required only a simple majority of lawmakers to agree that the President did, in fact, commit high crimes and misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority.
- Does impeaching Trump disqualifies you from taking office again? The conviction in an impeachment trial does not automatically disqualify Mr. Trump from future public office. But if the Senate condemns him, the constitution allows for a subsequent vote to prevent an official from exercising “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States”. Such a vote would require only a simple majority of senators. There is no precedent, however, for disqualifying a president from the future office, and the issue may end up in the Supreme Court.
- Can the Senate hold a trial after Biden becomes president? The Senate can hold a trial for Trump even after he leaves office, although there is no precedent for that. Democrats who control the House can choose when to send their impeachment article to the Senate, at which point the House would have to move immediately to start the trial. But even if the House immediately transmitted the accusation to the other side of the Capitol, an agreement between the Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate would be necessary to take it before January 19, the day before Biden’s inauguration. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on Wednesday that he would not agree to such an agreement. Given that schedule, the trial is unlikely to begin until Biden is president.
Giuliani entered the president’s legal affairs in April 2018. His eagerness to attack Robert S. Mueller III, the special attorney, impressed Trump, who constantly made changes to his legal team. Most Trump advisers have come to view Giuliani’s efforts with Mueller as a success.
“There has never been a time when Rudy was not willing to go down any further, and that is what Trump demands,” said Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “He proved that delivering to Donald was not as important as continuing to try.”
In addition to his work with Trump, Giuliani sought side projects with the added prestige of being the president’s personal lawyer. Freed from the ethics laws that restrict government officials, Mr. Giuliani sought profitable business even during the investigation of the special attorney.
And then came the impeachments. When the story of the Trump presidency is written, Giuliani will be a central figure, first for pursuing a pressure campaign against the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden’s family members and then travel across the country in efforts to overthrow Biden’s. victory.
Giuliani’s own legal problems grew in parallel with those of the president. While Giuliani was looking for separate business opportunities in Ukraine, intelligence agencies warned that it could have been used by Russian intelligence officials who sought to spread misinformation about the election – reports that Trump shrugged. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine remains of interest in an ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. And his comments to Trump supporters before the Capitol rebellion are now the subject of an effort by the New York State Bar Association to expel him.
Giuliani does not seem discouraged.
In a 37-minute video published on Wednesday night, Giuliani tried to rewrite the history of the Capitol rebellion. Although Trump urged his supporters to march up to the building and “show strength”, Giuliani suggested in the video that antifa activists were involved, a theory repeatedly debunked that has proliferated in pro-Trump circles online.
“The rally ended up being used to some extent as a fulcrum to create something totally different that the president had nothing to do with,” said Giuliani.
Now, his calls to the president are sometimes blocked on orders from White House officials. Advisers say Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner holds Giuliani partially responsible for the confusion currently surrounding the White House.
But Giuliani persists in the shrinking circle around Trump.
“He’s not alone,” said Alan Marcus, a former adviser to the Trump Organization, about the president. “He’s abandoned. Rudy is just the last in a group of people. “