The real reason Rudy Giuliani became Donald Trump’s legal liaison to the media
In the five weeks since Rudy Giuliani became the public face of Donald Trump’s legal defense team, we’ve watched Rudy go on television and harm his client with one mistake after another. With the exception of Fox News, we’ve seen Rudy’s interviewers routinely call him out for his bad lawyering. But there’s something else they don’t call Rudy out on. After I finished documenting all the various Trump-Russia scandal divorces earlier today, it finally occurred to me that this is the real reason he became Trump’s media liaison.
Last year a federal judge kicked Rudy Giuliani off the legal defense team for Reza Zarrab, due to improper conduct. Zarrab then cut a plea deal, which by definition required him to testify against everyone he knew to have committed a crime. To give you an idea of how much Zarrab knew about the Trump-Russia scandal, Michael Flynn gave up and cut a plea deal just four days after Zarrab did. It’s nearly a given that Zarrab also testified against his “lawyer” Giuliani. In turn, this is almost certainly why Rudy disappeared from the public eye for several months.
Last month Judith Giuliani filed for divorce from Rudy Giuliani, abruptly ending a fifteen year marriage, and raising questions about whether she left him because she thought he was going to end up in prison. Rudy then quickly announced himself as the new face of Trump’s legal defense team, making fairly clear that Rudy was inserting himself in the hope of preventing the Trump-Russia investigation from taking him down. Yet now that Rudy is firmly back in the spotlight, no one in the mainstream media is asking him about the Zarrab plea deal or his suspiciously timed divorce. There’s a reason for that.
Rudy Giuliani is now the person the mainstream media has to deal with in order to get interviews with Donald Trump’s legal team. These interviews are highly valuable from a ratings and relevance standpoint. Major news outlets know that they can’t afford to cross the kind of line that would prompt Giuliani to stop granting them access. They can get away with insulting him for the bad job he’s doing. But if they ask him about Zarrab, or about his own status as an alleged Trump-Russia scandal co-conspirator, he’s likely to grant his next interview to the competition.
As such, Giuliani has managed to grant himself protected status when it comes to how the mainstream media treats him. It’s similar to how the mainstream media – particularly the news outlets that have people in the White House briefing room – have given protected status to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She decides who gets called on during briefings, so none of them want to be the one who calls her a liar.
Rudy Giuliani has clearly lost several steps since his political heyday. But he’s just clever enough to understand that he could start screwing with a federal investigation that’s almost certainly targeting him, and face no scrutiny over the fact that he’s a target or suspect, simply by positioning himself as someone the mainstream media needs. Rudy is harming Trump by being so reckless. But this is about Rudy trying to sabotage the investigation before it can circle back to targeting him.
