The real reason Rudy Giuliani is in negotiations to testify to the January 6th Committee
As we explained at the start of the process, it’s easy for Trump people to make the decision to cooperate with the January 6th Committee if they have no underlying criminal liability to begin with. All they have to do is testify about what happened and then they can move on with their lives. As opposed to not testifying, which will land them in prison for contempt of Congress.
It’s a different situation for those Trump people who do have underlying criminality. We saw Mark Meadows try to walk a tightrope of giving the committee enough cooperation to avoid contempt charges without further incriminating himself on election tampering charges in the process, and he managed to screw it up in a way that’ll likely cause him to go down on both charges. And yet Meadows at least seems to understand that he’s fumbling his way through a no-win situation.
If you’re facing massive underlying criminal liability to begin with, you’d have to be a complete idiot to just walk up to the January 6th Committee and tell them everything about a Trump criminal plot to overthrow the government that you helped orchestrate, and expect all your existing legal troubles to just go away, right? And yet here comes Rudy Giuliani raising his hand.
That’s right, the New York Times is now reporting that Giuliani is in talks to cooperate with the January 6th Committee. The reason being given is that Giuliani is trying to avoid a costly legal battle over his subpoena, and trying to avoid being indicted for contempt. In and of itself, that’s an entirely reasonable move. And based on his nature and some of the hints he’s dropped along the way, we’ve always expected that if Rudy ever felt that he had to give up Trump and others in order to keep himself out of prison, he’d selfishly do it in a heartbeat. But here’s the thing.
The long running DOJ criminal case against Rudy Giuliani has not gone away. In fact the courts just recently finished the long and slow process of sorting the communications that the Feds seized when they raided his home last year. The process was complicated by Giuliani’s assertion that his communications with Trump were covered under attorney-client privilege. But after a lengthy review process, the courts decided that the majority of the communications weren’t privileged, and turned them over to the DOJ.
In other words, Giuliani is now going to end up being criminally indicted for the dirty foreign money he’s taken over the years. On top of that, last month the Oath Keepers confirmed that the DOJ has been grilling them about Giuliani’s connections to the January 6th Capitol attack – suggesting that Giuliani is the target of a truly massive DOJ criminal probe that should end up putting him in prison for the rest of his life.
Given all this, Rudy can’t possibly be dumb enough to think that he can make the DOJ criminal case against him go away just by giving the January 6th Committee some dirt on Trump, can he? Those are two different branches of government. And given that Giuliani is apparently under DOJ investigation for January 6th, he’d have a heck of a time testifying about Trump’s January 6th crimes without giving up his own January 6th crimes in the process.
It’s enough to make you wonder if Giuliani may have already cut a deal with the DOJ, or may have already decided he’s going to end up cutting a deal with the DOJ. This would in fact be his smartest move, because if he’s willing to hand everyone in Trump world to the DOJ on a silver platter, the DOJ would likely be willing to give him leniency or perhaps even immunity in return. In a perfect world Giuliani would not go free for his crimes. But if Giuliani can take down Donald Trump and everyone else in Trump’s orbit, it would realistically be worth it. And in such case, Giuliani wouldn’t have to worry about further incriminating himself by testifying to the January 6th Committee, because he’d just be giving the committee the dirt that he’s going to give (or already has given) the DOJ.
The only catch is that this would be a really smart move – and when’s the last time we’ve seen Rudy Giuliani do anything that was even in the same solar system as smart? Perhaps his preservation instinct has simply kicked in, and if nothing else he’s remembering that before he started going senile, he told himself to cut a deal if he ever got cornered. Or maybe Rudy really is stupid enough to think that testifying to the January 6th Committee, about crimes he helped orchestrate, is somehow magically going to make the massive existing DOJ criminal case against him go away. Looks like we’ll find out soon enough.
