It was a scene right out of Bonfire of the Vanities, a line of press neatly tucked behind metal police gates watching as a gray-haired socialite with enormous gold earrings stood behind a column of microphones and conveyed all of the excitement of seeing a search warrant served in her building on the man who had once been called “America’s mayor.”
She was followed by Andrew Giuliani, the poor man’s Eric Trump, who jabbed the air awkwardly while yelling furiously about how, “If this can happen to the president’s lawyer, this can happen to any one of us”—the idea being that if Rudy were subject to the rule of law perhaps the rest of us would be too. It was a fascinating line of defense from Rudy’s large adult fail son, who’s now dreaming of taking his impressive career golfing with President Trump and being a famous person’s son into a run for governor against Andrew Cuomo.
But first this pastry-faced Andrew, still not ready for primetime 20 years after Chris Farley played him on SNL, was outside of his dad’s Madison Ave. apartment, talking pointlessly about Hunter Biden and declaring he was “speaking as a son and a concerned American” in reference to the 6 a.m. execution of search warrants at his father’s Manhattan office and home. Speaking as a daughter and a concerned American, the question the rest of us are asking is why it took so long? I’ll take interference from Bill Barr’s Justice Department for $200.
For years, scandals have swirled around the former mayor’s erratic behavior. Remember the one where he kept tampering with foreign governments and trying to get American officials fired and helped get his client, Donald Trump, impeached for a second time? So these warrants surprised no one except young Giuliani, whose hot take was: How dare they?
They dare.
Later, the kid did an interview with Erin Burnett on CNN where he wouldn’t answer a direct question about whether his dad would flip on the president if he’s facing five years in prison.
You’ll remember that Trump’s lawyer before Rudy, Michael Cohen, ended up in Otisville after pleading guilty to “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” mostly committed at the boss’ behest.
As to Rudy, he’s been raving about how the search warrants, requested by the feds and signed off on by a judge, were a “corrupt double standard.” That’s the same Rudy who was obsessed with the firing of career foreign servant Marie Yovanovitch and who traveled to Kyiv in 2019 after being warned that he might be being “manipulated by the Russian government to promote its interests.” What, him worry?
Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien warned that anything “Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia.” Rudy went on the trip with One America News’s Chanel Rion anyway. You’ll remember OAN as the network that had to pay $250,000 of Rachel Maddow’s lawyer’s fees after they sued her for calling them “Russian propaganda.” And you’ll remember Chanel Rion for teeing up questions for Trump’s press secretary Kayleigh “I’ll never lie to you” McEnany.
But Rudy’s trip to Ukraine wasn’t all just a vacation with a much younger woman who works for a sketchy third-rate news operation that occasionally launders Russian propaganda. While in Ukraine, Rudy met with a Ukrainian lawmaker who the United States government considers to be “an active Russian agent.”
On his first television appearance after the raid, Rudy told Tucker Carlson that, “They also were completely content to rely on my word that these were Hunter Biden’s hard drives… I mean, they could have been Donald Trump’s, they could have been Vladimir Putin’s. They could have been anybody’s, but they relied on me, the man who had to be raided in the morning. Because, what, I’m going to destroy the evidence? I’ve known about this for two years, Tucker.” So I guess that’s proof that he didn’t? At one point he jerked his thumb up while talking about the great iCloud in the sky that supposedly rendered this raid unnecessary.
In another interview, Rudy suggested that perhaps the FBI was “jealous” of his career. The judge too, I guess.
Maybe Rudy’s worried now that the senior political appointees at Trump’s Justice Department who sought to block the warrants after the election, “as it was gaining momentum last year” are gone, and now that it’s too late for him to get the sort of pardon or commutation that loyal soldiers like Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and Paul Manafort were rewarded with. Even Jared’s dad got one.
And maybe that’s why Rudy’s not taking legal advice from Andrew but from Alan, as in Dershowitz, who’s now consulting with Giuliani’s lawyers. The best people, folks. As to Rudy, who was once a lawyer himself and has been talking about how far his beloved Southern District has fallen, as it closes in on him, he told Tucker, "I could have destroyed evidence years ago. I’ve had it for two years, and I haven’t destroyed it,” and since no one ever lies on Fox News, I guess that’s case closed.
