Who’s the next to fall?
The thing about criminal investigations is that as an outside observer, you don’t generally know what’s currently happening with the case until 1) someone on the inside tells you what’s happening, or 2) it actually happens.
Take, for instance, the federal criminal probe into Rudy Giuliani. None of us even knew that the DOJ’s years-dormant probe into him had been reactivated, until we woke up to headlines that the FBI had raided his home and seized his devices. None of us even knew that Tom Barrack was under federal criminal investigation at all, until we got the news that he’d been arrested.
On the other hand, the New York criminal case into Donald Trump has spent two years being in and out of the headlines, complete with a court battle over Trump’s tax returns, and an announcement in advance that Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization were about to be indicted. Of course that announcement came from Trump’s lawyers, so they could try to downplay it before it happened.
Then there’s the federal criminal probe into Matt Gaetz, which has been partially playing out in public for months, but not so much of late. The lack of recent news about the Gaetz case doesn’t mean that it’s gone cold; instead it means that prosecutors are at a stage where they don’t currently feel it’s advantageous to put anything out there about the case to the media.
The only consistent pattern here is that a lack of recent media headlines does not mean a lack of ongoing progress behind the scenes in any given criminal case. On the other hand, when the players involved in a case start making noise, it’s often a sign that something is indeed about to give way.
Over the past several days Rudy Giuliani has publicly acknowledged that he expects to end up in prison, and he’s begun lashing out at Donald Trump more and more directly for hanging him out to dry. This stands out, given that the Giuliani raid took place quite awhile ago, and nothing new about the case has publicly surfaced of late that would have Giuliani suddenly behaving like this.
So has Rudy’s internal fuse just finally blown? Or have federal prosecutors informed his lawyers that they’re about to move on him? Much as we all expect Matt Gaetz to be arrested soon, we’re now wondering if perhaps Rudy Giuliani might beat him to the punch.
