Giuliani Trashed His Own Reputation In Defense Of Trump

(Cartoon image is by Tim Campbell in the Independent Tribune.

Rudy Giuliani was once a respected and feared U.S. Attorney. Those days are long gone. And by becoming Donald Trump's attack-clown, he is insuring that his last shred of respect is now gone.

The following is just a tiny part of an article on Giuliani by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

The addition of Giuliani to Trump’s legal team has been part of a larger change in the President’s strategy. During the first year of the Mueller investigation, which began in May of 2017, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, the lawyers leading Trump’s defense, took a coöperative approach, turning over as many as 1.4 million documents and allowing White House staffers to be interviewed. Their public comments were courteous, even respectful. But, just as the cautious and deliberate style of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national-security adviser, eventually frustrated the President, so, too, did that of Trump’s legal team. Trump wanted a more combative approach. Giuliani told me, of the early defense, “I thought legally it was getting defended very well. I thought publicly it was not getting defended very well.”

Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt” and the prosecutors as “thugs.” He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.

This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the President has found him. . . .

At one point, I asked Giuliani whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his legacy.

“I don’t care about my legacy,” he told me. “I’ll be dead.”