The real reason Rudy Giuliani gave last minute testimony to the January 6th Committee
Rudy Giuliani has spent the past few months leaking a number of things to mainstream media outlets, all of which the media was willing to print in spite of his track record of being full of it, none of which were ever substantiated. Rudy leaked that he voluntarily unlocked his phone for the FBI. He leaked that the DOJ was about to make a charging decision on his case. And he leaked, more than once, that he was in negotiations to testify to the January 6th Committee. Nothing came of any of these Rudy leaks – until now.
This past Friday, Giuliani apparently did testify to the January 6th Committee, for a full nine hours, according to multiple major news outlets. So why did he finally go through with it, after having spent months pretending he was going to do so? As I’m fond of pointing out, he is an idiot. But he’d have to be a complete idiot to testify to Congress about a criminal conspiracy he participated in, while he’s under active criminal investigation by the DOJ.
So was testifying merely yet another incomprehensibly dumb Rudy move? After all, he did join a parade this weekend, only to end up cursing out random people along the way – so the bar is pretty low here. But given the timing, I keep coming back to last week’s faux-controversy about the DOJ and the January 6th Committee supposedly not cooperating with each other.
As a reminder, leaks like this don’t get picked up off a government insider’s desk by the wind, and randomly land on a reporter’s desk. Someone nearly always makes a choice to leak something like this, for a specific reason, typically to try to trigger a certain reaction. The bottom line: either the DOJ or the January 6th Committee leaked this story, in order to try to make something happen.
To be clear, there’s no real controversy here. The committee will fully cooperate with the DOJ at the appropriate time. There are only two reasons for the committee to not agree to immediately turn over the transcripts. One would be timing, specifically with regard to the bombshells it plans to drop during upcoming public hearings. The other would be negotiations, which is to say that the committee wanted something in return from the DOJ. Either way, this is something that will be resolved swiftly enough, and isn’t something to lose sleep over. But why would either side bother to leak such a thing to the media? And why did Rudy Giuliani, after so many false starts, suddenly decide to go ahead and testify almost immediately after this media leak happened?
It could be coincidence. Often times, two things happen in a similar timeframe that seem related but turn out to have nothing to do with each other. And with Rudy being the kind of guy who curses people out while marching in parades, there doesn’t need to be a coherent reasoning to explain anything he does. But what if there is?
Even if Rudy wanted to go in and tell his side of the story to the January 6th Committee, for fear that all these other Trump world witnesses might have thrown him under the bus, Rudy’s big problem was that the DOJ was going to end up seeing his testimony – and using it to help nail down the ongoing criminal case against him. How convenient, then, that somebody just happened to leak to the media that the committee wasn’t giving its transcripts to the DOJ? Was that leak a trap aimed at convincing Rudy that he could run his mouth to the committee without the DOJ seeing it? If so, the joke’s on him, because the DOJ will absolutely end up seeing his testimony transcript one way or the other.
But what if this leak was a negotiation tactic? What if the January 6th Committee is declining to give its testimony transcripts to the DOJ because it’s been trying to get something in return? What would the committee be prioritizing at this point? By its own account, it already ha an overwhelming treasure trove of witnesses and evidence. But one thing it never did get was Rudy’s testimony. What if the reason Rudy wasn’t testifying was that he already has cut a cooperating plea deal with the DOJ, and the DOJ didn’t want him blabbing about his cooperation to the committee, but the committee got the DOJ to relent by offering to turn over the transcripts from all the other witnesses?
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Again, Rudy is so far gone, he’s probably leaving his apartment building without pants on most of the time, only to be sent back upstairs by his doorman. Would the DOJ even give a cooperation deal to a guy who’s that incoherent? Then again, Rudy did famously claim that he had “insurance” against Donald Trump, in case Trump ever became disloyal to him. If that’s in the form of physical evidence, Rudy wouldn’t need to be a coherent in order to be a useful cooperator.
We’ll find out soon enough. The January 6th Committee’s televised hearings are now days away, and we presume that the useful bits of Rudy’s closed door testimony will be aired during those public hearings. And the DOJ will end up either indicting Rudy, or indicting others in Trump world in such a way that it gives away that Rudy is cooperating. Take your pick. These Trump world people have no future. But it sure is interesting that, in between senile public meltdowns, Rudy Giuliani decided to spend nine hours apparently testifying against himself to Congress. Even walking bags of jello can have occasional lucid moments. We’ll see.
