I'd like to think Rudy is just getting his paybacks, but he's not that smart. He's not intentionally taking Trump down.Holding court a few nights after the 2016 election in a private cigar bar on Fifth Avenue, glass of Macallan at hand, Mr. Giuliani boasted to friends that President-elect Donald J. Trump would soon nominate him to the most prestigious of cabinet posts.
“How about,” Mr. Giuliani asked, “secretary of state?”
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It would be a sublime reward for having thrown in with Mr. Trump when the respectable Republican establishment was keeping its distance, a fresh burst of stardom in a public life that had been fading fast. Mr. Giuliani made himself indispensable to the Trump campaign by doing dirty work that no one else wanted and trudging ahead even after the candidate lashed him with humiliations.
Three years on, Mr. Giuliani never got the job he believed he had coming — “a bitter disappointment,” his now-estranged wife says — but in his five decades as a public figure, he has never been more prominent in national affairs.
Step by step, he has escorted President Trump to the brink of impeachment.
NYT
Yet another trait he has in common with Trump.Mr. Giuliani himself is now under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in the very office where he enjoyed his first extended draughts of fame nearly four decades ago. The separate troubles he has gotten his client and himself into are products of the uniquely powerful position he has fashioned, a hybrid of unpaid personal counsel to the president and for-profit peddler of access and advice.
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Mr. Giuliani has been the voice in Mr. Trump’s ear when others could not be heard, and served as the voice of Mr. Trump in places where presidents dare not go.
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His personal life has descended into the sort of well-appointed shambles that material wealth can disguise, though not necessarily make any less fraught.
A third marriage has fallen into divorce court ruins, revealing monthly expenses of $230,000 for six homes and 11 country club memberships.By taking President Trump as a client, he lost a position at a law firm in 2018 that paid him $6 million annually, according to court filings.
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“He doesn’t just like the spotlight,” his estranged wife, Judith Giuliani, said in an interview. “He craves it, for validation.”
Then he must not look in the mirror at all.During the last three months of the [2016 Trump] campaign, he spun like a tornado from one television studio to the next or jetted around the country, at every stop hurling charges of corruption like boiling brimstone at anyone standing in Mr. Trump’s way.
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[When] an off-camera tape from the television show “Access Hollywood” [was] released of Mr. Trump speaking in crude terms about how his celebrity status gave him license to sexually assault women [...] Mr. Trump’s usual surrogates — Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Chris Christie — had been booked to appear on the Sunday shows [...] they all bailed.
Then Mr. Giuliani stepped forward.
“Rudy was the only person willing to go on television to defend Donald Trump,” Mr. Bossie said.
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Mr. Giuliani spent that morning rushing between studios — he appeared on all five major networks — pausing long enough to strike a penitential chord and write off Mr. Trump’s words as unfortunate locker-room talk.
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Unknown to the public, the F.B.I. had recently obtained a laptop used by one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides that had not been examined during the investigation of her private email server. That inquiry had concluded in July without charges, but the newly discovered laptop contained about 50,000 emails that might have been relevant. F.B.I. agents planned to go through them in due course, but several ranking officials did not see that any mad rush was called for, the Justice Department inspector general would later report. They believed — correctly, as it turned out — that the emails would be similar to the hundreds of thousands already examined.
Then Mr. Giuliani began dropping those broad hints of a “surprise,” adding that he knew F.B.I. agents were very upset.
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Mr. Giuliani would later deny that he had heard about the emails from F.B.I. agents, though he had bragged about that in broadcast interviews.
Years before, he had shown that working with virtually nothing, he could cultivate the mere existence of investigations to his political benefit. Early in his first term as mayor, facing criticism over patronage hires, Mr. Giuliani and aides announced spectacular claims that a widely respected commissioner in the previous administration, Richard Murphy, had overspent his budget by millions of dollars for political reasons. Moreover, computer records seemed to have been destroyed in a suspicious burglary. The heat shifted from the reality of Mr. Giuliani’s patronage hires to the wispy vapors of the Murphy investigation. A year later, it emerged that Mr. Murphy had neither overspent nor done anything wrong, and that no records had been destroyed or stolen. Mayor Giuliani shrugged.
“This happens all the time,” he said. “And you write about those things all the time. Sometimes they turn out to be true. And sometimes they turn out to be wrong.”
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In year one of the investigation, President Trump went through multiple lawyers [...] By spring 2018, Mr. Trump was having a hard time getting top legal talent to work on the case.
Up stepped Mr. Giuliani, who said he would serve without pay.
The Trump administration turned out to be very good for the business of being Rudy Giuliani, though it was no simple matter to say precisely what that was.
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When he announced that he would be representing Mr. Trump, he said he would be taking a leave of absence from Greenberg Traurig. But his partners, and some of their clients, had had their fill of being associated with Mr. Trump. The firm said Mr. Giuliani was resigning. He said it was a mutual decision.
The loss of the $6 million income came with one consolation. No longer would Mr. Giuliani be subject to a moratorium on his TV appearances, imposed by the firm’s buttoned-down reticence. “The last year and a half, I haven’t been on television,” Mr. Giuliani said in May 2018. “Frankly, I’ve missed it.”
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Other lawyers on the Trump team were dismayed by his rhetoric, but Mr. Giuliani said it was tactical, regardless of how unhinged it seemed. Once he learned that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had decided that Justice Department policy forbade the criminal indictment of a sitting president, he said, he viewed impeachment as Mr. Trump’s only risk. That would be a public relations war, not a legal one, he explained, with the battles fought on television — an arena that Mr. Mueller did not contest. During his barrage, public opinion shifted slightly against an impeachment based on the Mueller findings, and Congress showed little appetite for pursuing it. Mr. Giuliani took victory laps.
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Without Mr. Giuliani’s push for money and frank yearning for relevance, the Trump Ukrainian initiative might never have amounted to much more than presidential tweetstorms. Mr. Giuliani compressed the digital gases of the president’s suspicions and wishful theories into what is now the molten core of impeachment.
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Mr. Giuliani may have been stopped from becoming secretary of state in 2017 by his business entanglements, but as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in 2019, he created and oversaw the dominant American foreign-policy channel with Ukraine, running the president’s affairs, his clients’ and his own through it.
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Late last year, Mr. Giuliani began to pursue information in Ukraine that he believed might show that the Mueller inquiry was built on a false premise, that it was really Ukrainians who meddled in the election and then framed the Russians for it.
This had long been the claim of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, now serving seven and a half years in federal prison for laundering millions of dollars from the Russia-aligned political party in Ukraine.
Mr. Manafort maintained that he and Mr. Trump were victims of Ukrainian meddling that took two forms: the release of a mysterious slush fund ledger that detailed payments by the Russia-aligned party, including $12.7 million earmarked for Mr. Manafort; and the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers that was blamed on Russia.
“The original investigation came to me from an investigator who had a client who said that the Ukrainians were the ones who did the hacking,” Mr. Giuliani said in April.
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Pinning the 2016 cyberattacks on Ukraine was a steep hill to climb, as the Senate Intelligence Committee had unequivocally found that they were a Russian operation. Even so, Mr. Giuliani demanded that the country’s new president announce an investigation of it, according to Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union.
Equally difficult would be showing that Mr. Manafort was a victim of a forged paper ledger: Electronic bank records were so overwhelming that he pleaded guilty.
Nevertheless, if blame were seen to have shifted to Ukraine in these episodes, Mr. Giuliani would provide balm for Mr. Trump’s lingering furies that the findings of Russian involvement had tainted his presidency. Debunking the slush-fund ledger could also help build the case for a pardon of Mr. Manafort, Mr. Giuliani said.
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His project to deliver a crushing blow against a Trump opponent, and to establish that Mr. Trump — not the Democrats — had been the victim of foreign interference in the 2016 election, would fade into a toxic fog of impeachment charges.
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After signs of distance between the president and Mr. Giuliani — when the president hesitated about confirming that he was still his personal lawyer, Mr. Giuliani made a “joke” to The Guardian about having “very, very good insurance” — Mr. Trump gushed praise for him on Twitter and on “Fox and Friends.”
Mr. Giuliani said he appreciated the show of support, but added: “I’m not some little schmuck that needs Daddy to protect him.”
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“I really try very hard to be super-ethical and always legal,” Mr. Giuliani said. “If it seems I’m not — it’s wrong, and I can explain it.”
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Mr. Giuliani predicted that he would emerge from all the investigations wreathed in glory, an indispensable man who served the country against the odds.
“These morons,” Mr. Giuliani said. “When this is over, I will be the hero.”
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The face Mr. Giuliani sees in the mirror, he has always said, is of a man compelled by his idealism to purify government. “I get completely disgusted when I see public corruption,” he said.
Like the Washington Post article cited in the previous post, this is a lengthy article about Rudy's rise to his current precarious position, and it covers many of the same events. And like that article, this one is behind a pay wall.
