Did Robert Mueller get to Rudy Giuliani?
For the first nineteen days of January, Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney Rudy Giuliani kept coming out swinging, both in defense of Trump, and on the attack against Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But Rudy ended up ineptly flubbing things even worse than usual, and over the past twelve days he’s disappeared entirely. If this were all there was to it, I’d think he just went silent in order to lick his wounds. But some clues suggest something else may be going on.
Just before Rudy Giuliani disappeared, multiple major news outlets published insider reports saying that Donald Trump blamed Rudy for everything that’s gone wrong in the Trump-Russia investigation. This is usually the part that comes just before Trump solely blames that person for the crimes involved, and then claims to have barely even known the person. Rudy may be addled, but he’s not completely clueless; he surely knew how to interpret what he was reading in the press.
In fact the last big thing Rudy Giuliani said before vanishing was that he was worried his epitaph would simply say that he lied for Donald Trump. Talk about a whole heaping of regret. Rudy sounded like a guy who had just figured out that he’d made the wrong choice by joining Team Trump in the hope of getting himself off the hook for his own criminal involvement in the plot to throw the 2016 election. And of course there’s only one other way for Rudy to get himself off the hook: cutting a deal with Robert Mueller.
I’m not saying it’s happened. I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that it has. Rudy Giuliani originally thought he could get Robert Mueller fired before Mueller could finish exposing the 2016 election conspiracy. Instead Rudy has gotten himself into even bigger legal trouble in the form of felony witness tampering against Michael Cohen, in plain sight. That’s on top of Rudy’s role in the FBI leaks in the final days of the 2016 election, and Rudy’s apparent status as an unregistered foreign agent of Turkey.
Rudy Giuliani knows he’s completely screwed. Even if he thought he could beat the more complex criminal charges, he’s definitely going to prison for the witness tampering. Rudy has also surely figured out by now that Donald Trump isn’t even going to try to pardon anyone in this mess, at least not outside his own family. In the past two weeks we’ve seen a series of events where Trump publicly turned on Rudy, Rudy publicly expressed regret at having signed on with Trump, and then Rudy vanished.
Keep in mind that there’s no attorney-client privilege between Trump and Rudy when it comes to crimes they conspired to commit together, whether it be obstruction of justice, or the aforementioned witness tampering, or the original 2016 election conspiracy. If Rudy Giuliani hasn’t run off to cut a deal with Robert Mueller, then where is he?
