Why Rudy Giuliani is now suddenly rushing in to testify
Rudy Giuliani is now expected to testify to the 1/6 committee, per CNN. No surprise. With so many other high level folks having testified, Rudy has to worry that they’ve thrown him under the bus, and he feels compelled to go in and defend himself. But by testifying at all, he’ll likely only end up making it easier for the DOJ to get a conviction when it inevitably indicts him.
Even the slickest of people in Rudy’s position would have a very tricky time trying to thread the needle of defending themselves in congressional testimony without further incriminating themselves in the process. Rudy is the least slick of people.
“But Rudy will just lie!” Hopefully. Then he can be indicted for lying to Congress. “But he’ll just plead the fifth!” So what if he does? Pleading the fifth to specific questions only makes him look guilty in the court of public opinion, and tells the DOJ precisely where to dig. “But he’ll never actually go through with testifying!” Then he can be indicted for contempt. There are, as always, no magic wands for just “getting away with it all.”
“But why isn’t Rudy’s testimony going to be public?” Because this is an investigative probe, not a reality show. If you’re the committee, you want to let Rudy babble behind closed doors, and hope he gives something away that you can exploit, or gets caught in a lie that you can then use to pressure him into coming clean against others.
It is worth pointing out that Rudy would have to be a complete idiot to testify to Congress about the things the DOJ is criminally targeting him for, without having a deal in place with the DOJ. So it does raise the possibility that Rudy has indeed cut a deal with the DOJ. That said, Rudy is a complete idiot, so he could just be screwing himself here. When idiots on the other side do idiotic things, it helps our side.
If Rudy ends up behaving well in his private testimony, or you get perjury leverage over him, then you consider bringing him back for public testimony. But if his private testimony is mostly conspiracy theories and false election claims, you don’t want to put that on tv anyway.
The public hearings will be a “greatest hits” show. The most compelling cooperative witnesses will be brought back to answer the most important questions in front of a primetime audience, for maximum impact. The unstable witnesses you don’t want in front of a camera, you just take the incriminating things they accidentally said, and you read the transcript aloud during the public hearings.
That’s all coming soon enough. The committee announced today that public televised hearings will take place in early June. In the meantime it’s becoming more clear than ever that the committee’s strategy of getting Steve Bannon indicted for refusing to testify, and getting lower level witnesses to testify against the people above them, has indeed scared numerous high profile witnesses into deciding to roll the dice on testifying. The committee’s strategy is working.
