There are many mysteries in American life, but few more puzzling than Rudy Giuliani.
“America’s mayor” has been under federal investigation since roughly the Pliocene, though in August he did promise us that “I committed no crime,” and then the polymath added, “If you think I did commit a crime, you’re probably really stupid because you don’t know who I am.”
Case closed!
I mean, just because Rudy’s pals are on trial doesn’t mean he’s in any trouble. You’d have to be “really stupid” to think such a thing. Well, I must be really stupid, because it sure looks like he’s in deep shit.
Remember Rudy’s frequent travel buddies, Fraud Guarantee owners Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman? Well, Fruman pleaded guilty to soliciting political contributions while Parnas is facing six counts of campaign-finance charges for allegedly working with a co-defendant to give money on behalf of a Russian national: “Prosecutors say Parnas and [Andrei] Kukushkin conspired to use over $100,000 of a $1 million investment from a Russian financier to contribute to politicians who they thought could advance their business interests, including in an energy company and the legal marijuana industry.”
The best people! No wonder Trump didn’t want to pay his attorney, presently occupying himself by hawking gold bars and cigars on his crazy podcast and doing a filter-aided Abraham Lincoln impression (more on that in a bit) that’s about the worst thing an actor has done to Honest Abe in a couple of centuries.
A lot has come out at Parnas’ trial about all the dough he donated to a major pro-Trump super PAC, whose finance director at the time testified that a July 2018 article in The Daily Beast drew attention to a $325,000 contribution to the PAC America First Action that Parnas arranged through a largely unknown business called Global Energy Partners.” From that story, a formal Federal Election Commission complaint was filed accusing the morons of running a political donations shell company.
The trial would be particularly embarrassing for Rudy, if he was capable of being embarrassed, since he’s coming off as either an extremely easy mark or something more sinister. This is all delightfully ironic because he was at one point a cybersecurity adviser for Trump.
At one point, Kukushkin writes to Fruman to ask how Washington is and Fruman responds, “Everything is great!! We are taking over the country!!!!” A bit after that, Fruman’s business partner, Lev Parnas, produces some tangible evidence of the duo taking over Trumpworld, a picture of a jubilant Lev standing between Trump’s daughter and her husband, terrifying Slenderman look-alike Jared Kushner.
This was not how Rudy thought things would be going, especially since September was the 20th anniversary of his finest hour, when everyone forgot what a horrible mayor he had been. Rudy thought he’d be all over TV sweating hair dye but instead he’s been banned from Fox News.
Rudy has not taken this well, telling Steve Bannon he was “really hurt.” This slight was made much worse by the fact that a source close to Rudy told Politico that he’d been “instrumental in getting Fox on Time Warner so it could be watched in New York City” 25 years ago when that was a life-or-death matter for Rupert Murdoch’s brand new channel. As Wayne Barrett later recounted for The Daily Beast, Rudy moved heaven and earth and paid no mind to the law to get his pal on the air, even as Fox hired his wife at the time as a local reporter and then tripled her pay.
So there was Rudy, telling contemptuous Steve Bannon he was on “Double-secret probation, particularly over 9/11” and that the network had also banned his son, Andrew, who is running a pathetic campaign for governor of New York that’s being ignored by the rest of the media for the simple reason that he’s irrelevant and embarrassing but not embarrassing enough that it’s newsworthy. Back to the dad, he might want to consider if this has anything to do with the massive suit that Dominion has filed against Fox News for allegedly false claims about the election company on air that he delivered, along with others, in service of Trump’s big lie.
Rudy was probably also really hurt about having his license to practice law suspended in both Washington, D.C. and New York City. And as his legal woes and bills pile up, he still hasn’t been paid anything by his bestie, Trump, for the legal services he provided and tried to get paid $20,000 a day for. Now, the FBI is executing search warrants at his home and office, and the Southern District he led a very long time ago is coming for him, and Trump isn’t interested in helping him cover those bills, either.
You might think that this kind of dark cloud resting over Rudy might prevent him from weighing in on the extremely contentious Virginia’s governor race, but you would be “really stupid.” Rudy used a fake Lincoln filter to give an utterly incoherent anti-Bill Clinton rant that was somehow supposed to help Republican Glenn Youngkin, I guess? Though I could as easily see McAuliffe using it, because it shows that all of Trump’s super clowns support Youngkin, like Bannon showing up at a batshit rally for Trumpkin Youngkin where everyone pledged allegiance to a flag that had been “sanctified” at the insurrection on Jan 6.
With contempt charges coming Bannon’s way from the Justice Department, courtesy of the Jan. 6 special committee, one might pause to remember that Rudy was in that suite at the Willard Hotel that day with a squad of deviants including the Federalist’s own memo writer Jon Eastman and presidential pardon recipient and all-around creep Roger Stone, not to mention QAnon’s own Michael Flynn.
Sooner or later, all of us “really stupid” people may finally get an answer to the old riddle about how many separate messes one lawyer without his license can apparently be involved in before they catch him up.
