Rudy Giuliani goes bonkers amid news that the DOJ is targeting Donald Trump
Last year the Feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and seized his electronic communications among other evidence. If you’ve been wondering what happened to that probe, the courts held things up for about eight months while they determined which of Giuliani’s seized communications were covered under attorney-client privilege. The DOJ recently ended up winning that battle and obtained the majority of the seized communications. Since then we’ve been waiting for inevitable movement in the case.
Now CNN is reporting that the DOJ is nearing a charging decision on Rudy Giuliani. This same CNN article states that Giuliani has voluntarily unlocked his own seized phone for the DOJ, because Giuliani wants to prove to the DOJ that there’s nothing incriminating on it.
Given the point of view from which this is being reported, it’s nearly certain that Giuliani is the source for this CNN story, which makes it suspect. But the real story here is that something is afoot. Rudy spent all this time trying to keep the DOJ from obtaining any of his seized communications, and now suddenly he’s giving the DOJ more of his communications?
We don’t believe for one minute that Rudy is one unlocked phone away from the DOJ clearing him. The only way Rudy would have gotten off the hook was if the courts had declined to give any of the seized evidence against him to the DOJ – and that ship has already sailed. It’s a question of whether Rudy gets indicted sooner or whether Rudy gets indicted later.
The real story here is that something has prompted Giuliani to suddenly spring into action. That “something” is most likely the recent news that the DOJ is targeting Donald Trump on multiple fronts. If Rudy lulled himself into believing that Trump world was just magically going to get off the hook, the news of the DOJ’s Trump probe could certainly have spooked him into action.
It’s possible Giuliani is doing this as a signal to Trump that he’s about to flip on Trump, in the hope that it’ll scare Trump into paying some more of Giuliani’s legal bills. This is sadly legal, and we’ve seen Giuliani do it before. But if Giuliani unlocked his phone and gave incriminating evidence against himself and Trump to the DOJ in the process, just so he could turn around and leak to Trump that he’d done so, then Giuliani is playing with an even more empty deck than we imagined.
While it’s difficult to parse Rudy Giuliani’s actions because he’s a mostly senile man whose actions are largely incoherent, it’s notable that he’s suddenly making these weird moves at all. Even as the media continues to largely downplay the news that the DOJ is targeting Trump, this news is surely sending shockwaves through Trump world.
Rudy’s sudden panic moves are an indication that he knows he’s heading to prison unless he does something. Apparently he thinks giving the DOJ his phone password is the secret to getting himself off the hook. When he learns that’s not the case, the question is whether he’ll come up with some other mentally incompetent scheme to try to get himself off the hook, or whether he’ll finally figure out that he’s out of options and it’s time to flip on Trump. Rudy was always going to flip on Trump if he ever concluded that he needed to flip on Trump. It’s always been just a question of when or whether Rudy might finally come to that conclusion.
