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The fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ tied his fate to Donald Trump and got indicted

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  • The fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ tied his fate to Donald Trump and got indicted

    The fall of Rudy Giuliani: How ‘America’s mayor’ tied his fate to Donald Trump and got indicted


    New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, center, leads New York Gov. George Pataki, left, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., on a tour of the site of the World Trade Center disaster, Sept. 12, 2001.


    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, arrives at a campaign rally after being introduced by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, left, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Aug. 9, 2016, in Wilmington, N.C.


    Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Nov. 19, 2020, in Washington.


    Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, speaks at the podium during a news conference on legal challenges to vote counting in Pennsylvania, Nov. 7, 2020, at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in Philadelphia.

    NEW YORK (AP) — Rudy Giuliani glared across a Washington hearing room as a lawyer seeking his disbarment after the Jan. 6 insurrection asked: How did this man, celebrated as “America’s mayor” after 9/11, become a leader of an attempt to overturn a national election?

    “It’s like there are two different people,” Hamilton “Phil” Fox III, the lead prosecuting attorney for the agency that disciplines Washington lawyers, said last December. “I don’t know if something happened to Mr. Giuliani or what.”

    Giuliani — feted, knighted and named Time magazine’s person of the year for his leadership as New York City mayor after the 2001 terrorist attack — has seen his reputation eviscerated and now his liberty imperiled for his steadfast defense of former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election.

    On Monday, Giuliani’s downfall sank to its lowest level yet with his indictment in Georgia on charges he acted as Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert President Joe Biden’s victory.

    Giuliani, Trump and 17 other people were charged under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The law, known as RICO, was once one of Giuliani’s favorite tools when he was cracking down on mobsters and Wall Street titans as Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor in the 1980s. Now, as he nears 80, it could put him behind bars.


    Giuliani called the indictment “an affront to American democracy” and said it “does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system.” On his radio show Wednesday, he described the case as an “atrocity” and an “out and out assault on the First Amendment.”

    How did it come to this? People who’ve studied Giuliani’s rise and fall see his failed 2008 presidential run as a turning point.

    Giuliani started as the front runner for the Republican nomination, capitalizing on his post-9/11 popularity. But he struggled in the primaries amid GOP concerns about his past support for abortion rights, gay rights and gun control, and questions about his personal life and business ties to the Middle East.

    For years following the race, Giuliani’s political career appeared over. After falling into a deep depression, he and his then-wife Judith decamped to Florida, where Trump put them up for a month in a bungalow at his Mar-a-Lago estate, biographer Andrew Kirtzman said.

    “Trump really took Giuliani under his wing at a very vulnerable moment,” said Kirtzman, whose second Giuliani biography, “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” was published last year. “And then in 2016, Trump decided to run for president, and he needed Giuliani and Giuliani needed Trump.”

    Trump, a first-time candidate, leaned on Giuliani’s political acumen and loyalty and put him to work as a surrogate leading attacks on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom Giuliani had faced in a 2000 U.S. Senate race.

    The 2016 campaign returned Giuliani to relevance, but he surprised many with the ferocity of his attacks and his frequent claims that Clinton had committed crimes. Giuliani was seen as squandering his image as an elder statesman of sorts on a candidate who, at the time, was written off as having little chance to win.

    Giuliani angled for a post in Trump’s cabinet but didn’t get it. Instead, he continued as Trump’s attack dog, a role that saw him traveling to Ukraine seeking damaging information about Biden’s son, Hunter.

    Giuliani’s contacts with Ukrainian figures later played a role in Trump’s first impeachment trial and prompted an FBI investigation. In April 2021, federal agents raided his home and office, seizing computers and cellphones, but the probe was later dropped without any charges.

    Some people who were once close to him say the Giuliani of today has little in common with the man they knew.

    “The man that I knew 20 years ago, the hero of Sept. 11 bears no resemblance to this man,” said Judith Giuliani, who was by his side in the aftermath of 9/11 and his 2008 election loss. “I actually feel sorry for him. It’s sad. He’s not the person that he used to be to any of us.”

    When Trump lost the 2020 election, Giuliani played a starring role in his effort to remain in the White House, which prosecutors say included illegal maneuvering to flip the results in key states.

    He was ridiculed for holding a news conference on Pennsylvania legal challenges outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, an out-of-the-way location next to a crematorium and a pornography shop, not the Four Seasons hotel in the heart of the city.

    A few weeks later, Giuliani appeared to have hair dye streaking down his face at another news conference, making him the butt of late-night television jokes and internet memes.

    Those blunders came in the wake of another embarrassment: clips from the “Borat” sequel showing Giuliani flirting with a young actress posing as a TV journalist and then lying on a bed, with his hand down his pants. Giuliani said he went to the hotel thinking he was going to be interviewed and was just tucking in his shirt.

    After his efforts to keep Trump in office failed in the courts, Giuliani on Jan. 6, 2021, made incendiary remarks to Trump supporters who later stormed the U.S. Capitol, suggesting they engage in “trial by combat.”

    The New York State Bar Association said his words were intended to encourage Trump supporters “to take matters into their own hands.” A panel of the D.C. Bar Association unanimously recommended that he be disbarred, saying his misconduct “sadly transcends all his past accomplishments.”


    Giuliani’s critics argue that he’s always been combative and abrasive, with a disdain for critics and a willingness to go after rivals.

    “The real Rudy Giuliani was hiding in plain sight,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Just because he was the face of a devastated and pained city after 9/11 doesn’t mean that he wasn’t still the authoritarian, anti-democratic bully” that he was “for 90% of his mayoralty,” which ran from 1994 to 2001.

    In the Georgia case, Giuliani is accused of making false statements, soliciting false testimony and seeking the illegal appointment of pro-Trump Electoral College voters. Giuliani was also described as a co-conspirator but not charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump.

    Giuliani maintains that he had every right to raise questions about what he believed to be election fraud.

    Today, he remains popular among conservatives in his hometown. He hosts a daily radio show in New York City and a nightly streaming show watched by a few hundred people on social media, which he calls “America’s Mayor Live.”

    After 9/11, Giuliani started a consulting firm that had $100 million in revenue in five years. Lately, though, he’s shown signs of financial strain, exacerbated by a third divorce, costly lawsuits and investigations.

    To generate cash, he’s hawked autographed 9/11 shirts for $911 dollars and pitched sandals sold by election denier Mike Lindell. He’s also joined Cameo, a service where celebrities record short videos for profit. Giuliani’s greetings cost $325 a pop.

    In July, he put his Manhattan apartment up for sale for $6.5 million.

    Last year, a judge threatened Giuliani with jail in a dispute over money owed to Judith, his third ex-wife. Giuliani said he was making progress paying the debt, which she said totaled more than $260,000.

    In May, a woman who says she worked for Giuliani sued him, alleging he owed her nearly $2 million in unpaid wages and that he had coerced her into sex. Giuliani denied the allegations.

    “His legacy is in tatters,” said Kirtzman, who was with Giuliani on 9/11 as they fled debris from the falling World Trade Center. He’s “gone through all of his money,” is facing prison and “will never change his feeling that he was right and everyone else was wrong.”
    ___

    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

  • #2
    This reminds me...I need to order a mulch delivery.
    “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
    Mark Twain

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by CNN
      23 August 2023
      Rudy Giuliani travels to Georgia to be arrested
      (10 min, 08 sec)

      Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says he will turn himself in to be arrested in Fulton County, Georgia, after he was charged with 13 crimes. Giuliani says he will plead not guilty.
      Originally posted by Trojan_Records
      23 May 2014
      Dandy Livingstone - Rudy, A Message to You
      (02 min, 50 sec)

      Dandy's original version of 'Rudy, A Message to You'

      First released in 1967 on R&B Records' Ska Beat label, the recording was acquired by Trojan Records in 1971 and later famously influenced the British ska revivalists, the Specials, who enjoyed significant UK chart action in 1979 with their version of the song.

      RUDY A MESSAGE TO YOU LYRICS
      (Robert Thompson)

      Stop your running about
      It’s time you straightened right out
      Stop your running around
      Making problems in the town, ah-ah-ah

      Rudy, a message to you
      Rudy, a message to you

      You’re growing older each day
      You want to think of your future
      Or you might wind up in jail
      Then you will suffer, ah-ah-ha


      Rudy, a message to you
      Rudy, a message to you

      Stop your running about
      It’s time you straightened right out
      Stop your running around
      Making trouble in the town, ah-ah-ah

      Rudy, a message to you
      Rudy, a message to you

      Rudy, a message to you
      Rudy, a message to you
      ...
      .
      .
      .

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by JRT View Post
        Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says he will turn himself in to be arrested in Fulton County, Georgia, after he was charged with 13 crimes. Giuliani says he will plead not guilty.

        ...
        Some serious Philippe Pétain shit going down
        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

        Comment


        • #5
          Elon Musk Almost Hired Rudy Giuliani Until He Met Him in Person



          Elon Musk had wanted to recruit Rudy Giuliani in the early 2000s to help turn PayPal into a bank, but the outgoing New York mayor was too skeezy even for Musk, according to a new biography of the Tesla founder.

          Musk co-founded PayPal in 2000. He originally wanted to name the company X and dreamed it would disrupt the finance sector (sound familiar?). Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, which was released Tuesday, reports that Musk and investor Michael Moritz flew to New York soon after to see if they could recruit Giuliani to act as their political fixer and banking policy adviser.

          When Musk and Moritz met with Giuliani, “it was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says in Isaacson’s biography. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.”

          “They asked for 10% of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. ‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”


          Giuliani went on to become known as “America’s mayor” after shepherding New York City through the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He then unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and eventually became Donald Trump’s personal attorney. While he initially amassed millions as a lawyer, consultant, and public speaker, his finances have been struggling of late.

          Trump has refused to pay Giuliani’s legal fees, forcing Giuliani to fly to Mar-a-Lago and beg for Trump to pay up. Giuliani is also struggling to pay his own legal bills as he battles an indictment in Georgia for trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
          _________

          Apparently the whole "America's Mayor" thing was planted by Rudy's publicity team
          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

          Comment


          • #6
            Giuliani’s Drinking, Long a Fraught Subject, Has Trump Prosecutors’ Attention



            NEW YORK — Rudy Giuliani had always been hard to miss at the Grand Havana Room, a magnet for well-wishers and hangers-on at the midtown Manhattan cigar club that still treated him like the king of New York.

            In recent years, many close to him feared, he was becoming even harder to miss.

            For more than a decade, friends conceded grimly, Giuliani’s drinking had been a problem. And as he surged back to prominence during the presidency of Donald Trump, it was getting more difficult to hide it.

            On some nights when Giuliani was overserved, an associate discreetly signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion, out of the former mayor’s line of sight, in case others preferred to keep their distance. Some allies, watching Giuliani down Scotch before leaving for Fox News interviews, would slip away to find a television, clenching through his rickety defenses of Trump.

            Even at less rollicking venues — a book party, a Sept. 11 anniversary dinner, an intimate gathering at Giuliani’s own apartment — his consistent, conspicuous intoxication often startled his company.

            “It’s no secret, nor do I do him any favors if I don’t mention that problem, because he has it,” said Andrew Stein, a former New York City Council president who has known Giuliani for decades. “It’s actually one of the saddest things I can think about in politics.”

            No one close to Giuliani, 79, has suggested that drinking could excuse or explain away his present legal and personal disrepair. He arrived for a mug shot in Georgia in August not over rowdy nightlife behavior or reckless cable interviews but for allegedly abusing the laws he defended aggressively as a federal prosecutor, subverting the democracy of a nation that once lionized him.

            Yet to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Giuliani’s drinking has been the pulsing drumbeat punctuating his descent — not the cause of his reputational collapse but the ubiquitous evidence, well before Election Day in 2020, that something was not right with the former president’s most incautious lieutenant.

            Now, prosecutors in the federal election case against Trump have shown an interest in the drinking habits of Giuliani — and whether the former president ignored what his aides described as the plain inebriation of the former mayor referred to in court documents as “Co-Conspirator 1.”

            Their entwined legal peril has turned a matter long whispered about by former City Hall aides, White House advisers and political socialites into an investigative subplot in an unprecedented case.

            The office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, has questioned witnesses about Giuliani’s alcohol consumption as he was advising Trump, including on election night, according to a person familiar with the matter. Smith’s investigators have also asked about Trump’s level of awareness of his lawyer’s drinking as they worked to overturn the election and prevent Joe Biden from being certified as the 2020 winner at almost any cost. (A spokesperson for the special counsel declined to comment.)

            The answers to those prompts could complicate any efforts by Trump’s team to lean on a so-called advice-of-counsel defense, a strategy that could portray him as a client merely taking professional cues from his lawyers. If such guidance came from someone whom Trump knew to be compromised by alcohol, especially when many others told Trump definitively that he had lost, his argument could weaken.

            In interviews and in testimony to Congress, several people at the White House on election night — the evening when Giuliani urged Trump to declare victory despite the results — have said that the former mayor appeared to be drunk, slurring and carrying an odor of alcohol.

            “The mayor was definitely intoxicated,” Jason Miller, a top Trump adviser and a veteran of Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, told the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in a deposition early last year. “But I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president.” (Giuliani furiously denied this account and condemned Miller, who had spoken glowingly of him in public, in vicious terms.)

            Privately, Trump, who has long described himself as a teetotaler, has spoken derisively about Giuliani’s drinking, according to a person familiar with his remarks. But Trump’s monologues to associates can betray a layered view of the former mayor, one that many Republicans share: He credits Giuliani with turning around New York City after the high-crime 1970s and 1980s and contends that it has suffered lately without him in charge. Then he returns to a lament about Giuliani’s image today.

            Trump does not dwell on his own role in that trajectory.

            In a statement that did not address specific accounts about Giuliani’s drinking or its potential relevance to prosecutors, Ted Goodman, a political adviser to the former mayor, praised Giuliani’s career and suggested he was being maligned because “he has the courage to defend an innocent man” in Trump.

            “I’m with the mayor on a regular basis for the past year, and the idea that he is an alcoholic is a flat-out lie,” Goodman said, adding that it had “become fashionable in certain circles to smear the mayor in an effort to stay in the good graces of New York’s so-called ‘high society’ and the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit.”

            “The Rudy Giuliani you all see today,” Goodman continued, “is the same man who took down the mafia, cleaned up the streets of New York and comforted the nation following 9/11.”

            A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

            Many who know Giuliani best are careful to discuss his life, and especially his drinking, with considerable nuance. Most elements of today’s Giuliani were always there, they say, if less visible.

            Long before alcohol became a concern, Giuliani was prone to sweeping, unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. (“They stole that election from me,” he once said of his 1989 mayoral loss, alluding to supposed chicanery “in the Black parts of Brooklyn and in Washington Heights.”)

            Long before alcohol became a concern, he could be quick to lash out at enemies real or perceived. (“A small man in search of a balcony,” Jimmy Breslin once said of him.)

            In interviews with friends, associates and former aides, the consensus was that, more than wholly transforming Giuliani, his drinking had accelerated a change in his existing alchemy, amplifying qualities that had long burbled within him: conspiracism, gullibility, a weakness for grandeur.

            A lover of opera — with a suitably operatic sense of his own story — Giuliani has long invited supporters, as Trump has, to process his personal trials as their own, tugging the masses along through tumult, tragedy, public divorce.

            Yet there is a smallness to his world now, a narrowing to reflect his circumstances.

            He faces a racketeering charge (among others) in Georgia, a defamation case brought by two election workers and accusations of sexual misconduct from a former employee (he has said this was a consensual relationship) and a former White House aide (he has denied this account).

            One of his lawyers has said Giuliani is “close to broke.” Another, Robert Costello, once a protégé of the former mayor’s, is suing him for unpaid legal fees.

            Giuliani’s circle has shrunk as old friends have fallen away. His law license was suspended in New York. The Grand Havana Room closed in 2020.

            Most days, Giuliani hosts a radio show in Manhattan, stopping for sidewalk selfies with the occasional stranger.

            Most nights, he stays in for a livestream from the apartment he long shared with his third ex-wife, Judith Giuliani. It recently went up for sale.

            “Rudy loves opera,” said William J. Bratton, his first police commissioner, to whom Giuliani once gave a CD collection of “La Bohčme” as a gift. “Few operas end in a happy place.”

            A Crushing Defeat and a Growing Concern

            Giuliani was always the kind of elected official who kept opposition researchers busy: romantic entanglements, personnel conflicts, a trail of incendiary remarks.

            But as he prepared for life after City Hall — mounting a short-lived Senate campaign in 2000 and harboring visions of the presidency — Democratic operatives say Giuliani’s drinking was one issue that never came up.

            There was a reason for that. As mayor, former aides said, Giuliani did not generally drink to excess and expected his team to follow his lead.

            Part of this seemed to flow from insecurity: Reared outside Manhattan in a family of modest means, Giuliani always took care to keep his wits about him, one senior city official said, because he did not want to lower his guard in view of New York’s elites.

            Another consideration was practical. Giuliani thrilled to the all-hours nature of the mayoralty, hustling toward scenes of emergency to project authority and control long before 9/11 showcased this instinct to the wider world, and he was vigilant about staying ready.

            No one doubts that the attack, and his ascendant profile, profoundly reshaped him. On Sept. 10, 2001, he was the polarizing lame duck who had antagonized artists, warred gratuitously with ferret owners and defended his police department through high-profile killings of unarmed Black men — including one episode in which Giuliani attacked the deceased and authorized the release of his arrest record.

            By midweek, he had become a global emblem of tenacious resolve, held up as the city’s essential man. (Giuliani quickly came to see himself this way, too: With the election to succeed him weeks away, he began pushing by late September to postpone the next mayor’s start date and remain in office for a few more months, even asking the Republican governor, George Pataki, to extend his term, according to Pataki. The idea had few takers and was abandoned.)

            The years that followed were a swirl of mourning and celebrity — wrenching remembrances, lucrative business ventures, an honorary British knighthood — a tension that Giuliani can still sound as if he is struggling to reconcile.

            He faced criticism last year for calling Sept. 11 “in some ways, you know, the greatest day of my life.” He has also seemed haunted by it, no matter what doors it opened: After a colonoscopy in 2018, he told people then, he was informed that he had been talking in his sleep as if he was establishing a command center at ground zero when the towers fell.

            Giuliani’s stewardship in crisis was supposed to hypercharge his long-planned presidential campaign, enshrining him as the early Republican front-runner in 2008. It did not.

            Instead, the earliest accounts of Giuliani’s excessive drinking date to this period of campaign failure. Though any political flop can sting, those who know Giuliani say that this one, his first loss in nearly two decades, was especially shattering.

            When his big electoral bet on Florida ended in humiliation, Giuliani fell into what Judith Giuliani later called a clinical depression. He stayed for weeks afterward at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Florida. The two were not especially close friends but had known each other for years through New York politics and real estate.

            Around this time, Giuliani was drinking heavily, according to comments Judith Giuliani made to Andrew Kirtzman, the author of “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” published last year.

            “Literally falling-down drunk,” Kirtzman said in an interview, noting that several incidents over the years, in Judith Giuliani’s telling, required medical attention. Kirtzman said that he came to consider Giuliani’s drinking “part of the overall erosion of his self-discipline.” (Giuliani has said he spent a month “relaxing” at Mar-a-Lago. Judith Giuliani declined through her lawyer to be interviewed.)

            Some who encountered Giuliani after the campaign were struck by how transparently he missed the attention he once commanded, how desperate he seemed to recapture what he had lost.

            George Arzt, a longtime aide to former Mayor Edward Koch, with whom Giuliani often clashed, recalled watching Giuliani wander on a loop through a restaurant in the Hamptons, as if waiting to be stopped by anyone, while the rest of his party dined in a backroom.

            “He would walk back and forth like he wanted everyone to see him, more than once,” Arzt said. “He just wanted to be recognized.”

            People close to Giuliani particularly worried about him as his third marriage began to fray, growing unnerved at snapshots of his behavior even at nominally sanctified gatherings, like an annual dinner for close associates around Sept. 11.

            In almost any company, Giuliani seemed liable to make a scene. In May 2016, he derailed a major client dinner at the law firm he had recently joined with a fire hose of Islamophobic remarks while drunk, according to a book last year by Geoffrey S. Berman, who would later become the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

            At the 9/11 anniversary dinner that year, a former aide remembered, Giuliani appeared intoxicated as he delivered remarks that were blisteringly partisan — and tonally jarring for guests, given the event being commemorated.

            The next year, a longtime attendee recalled, the traditional dinner was scrapped. Weeks before the anniversary, Giuliani had been rushed to the hospital with a leg injury.

            After drinking too much, Judith Giuliani would say later, the former mayor had taken a fall.

            Recklessness, Grievance and Increased Isolation

            With a few days left in the Trump presidency — and the specter of a second impeachment trial looming after the Capitol riot — Giuliani was unambiguous.

            Short on allies and angling for another public showcase, the former mayor did not just want to represent Trump before the Senate: “I need to be his lawyer,” Giuliani told a confidant, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

            By then, much of Trump’s orbit was quite certain that this was a bad idea. Giuliani’s legal efforts since the election had roundly failed. He was the source of infighting, highlighted by an associate’s email to campaign officials asking that Giuliani be paid $20,000 a day for his work. (Giuliani has said he has unaware of the request.) He was also destined to be a potential witness.

            Giuliani’s foray into Ukrainian politics had already helped get Trump impeached the first time. And for years, some in the White House had viewed Giuliani’s indiscipline and unpredictability — his web of foreign business affairs, his mysterious travel companions and, often enough, his drinking — as a significant liability.

            Before some of Giuliani’s television appearances, allies of the president were known to share messages about the former mayor’s nightly condition as he imbibed at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where Giuliani was such a regular that a custom plaque was placed at his table: “Rudolph W. Giuliani Private Office.” (“You could tell,” one Trump adviser said of the nights when Giuliani went on the air after drinking.)

            Giuliani has said he does not think he ever gave an interview while drunk. “I like Scotch,” he told NBC New York in 2021, adding: “I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a functioning — I probably function more effectively than 90% of the population.”

            At the Grand Havana in New York, some steered clear when Giuliani’s near-shouting conversations gave him away.

            “People would walk by after he started drinking a lot and act like he wasn’t there,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime antagonist and a fellow member at the cigar club. (Sharpton said he did indulge in a running gag: He and others who opposed Trump sometimes playfully encouraged a server to double Giuliani’s liquor orders before he went on Fox.)

            But Sharpton attributed the former mayor’s troubles to a different vice, as many friends have privately.

            “When he started running after Trump, I said, ‘This guy’s addicted to cameras,’” Sharpton recalled, adding that Giuliani “had to know the negative sides of Donald Trump.” Before long, Sharpton observed, Giuliani was “running with guys that he would have put in jail when he was U.S. attorney.”

            Giuliani can seem wistful now about the days when he held such influence — and fanatical about settling old scores and destroying new adversaries, forever insisting that he is denied his due.

            Reflecting on the death last month of his second police commissioner, Howard Safir, Giuliani swerved suddenly during his livestream into Trump-style projection, using the occasion to smear Safir’s predecessor, Bratton, with whom Giuliani fell out.

            “Maybe Bratton going to Elaine’s every night and getting drunk actually helped,” Giuliani said. (“If the show wasn’t so sad, it would be hilarious,” Bratton said via text.)

            Other complaints from Giuliani have been more current. Fox News stopped inviting him on, he has groused repeatedly, even though he was working to highlight scandals surrounding Hunter Biden — and was vilified for it — well before they became a prime Republican talking point.

            Giuliani’s home was searched, and his devices were seized, by federal authorities in 2021 as part of an investigation that produced embarrassing headlines and, ultimately, no charges, further inflaming his sense of persecution.

            He can seem wounded that some past friends have drifted away.

            “He feels betrayed by some of the friends who used to be his friends,” said John Catsimatidis, the billionaire political fixture who owns the local station that carries Giuliani’s radio show. “How’d you like to have those friends as friends?”

            While Giuliani does not seem to place Trump in this category — still publicly fawning over a man to whom he has appealed for financial help — their relationship has endured some strain. On Trump’s final weekend in office, he excoriated Giuliani in a private meeting, according to a person briefed on it.

            Last month, Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey, was the site of a fundraiser for Giuliani’s legal defense.

            But days later, on the Sept. 11 anniversary, Trump did not say a public word about the New Yorker most associated with the tragedy.

            Giuliani focused his objections elsewhere, remarking often on his allotted location among dignitaries at the memorial. “They don’t put those of us who had anything to do with Sept. 11 too close,” he said.

            Appraising his own legacy later that week on his livestream, where he called himself New York’s most successful mayor in history, Giuliani still seemed consumed by his standing now in his city.

            He also sounded resigned.

            “This crooked Democratic city,” he said, “would never have a plaque for me.”
            _________

            Damn...what a sad comedown.
            “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

            Comment


            • #7
              Giuliani to lose 2nd attorney in Georgia, leaving him without local legal team



              A second lawyer for Rudy Giuliani is seeking to depart his legal team in Georgia, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News, a move that would appear to leave the former New York City mayor without any local lawyers in the state.

              A motion to withdraw has been submitted to the clerk, the sources said. A judge in the case has to sign off on the motion.

              News of the move comes after several other former attorneys of the Trump ally have sued Giuliani for failure to pay his bills, including his longtime friend and attorney Bob Costello, who sued Giuliani for over $1 million in payments due to his firm.

              Earlier, an additional lawyer for Giuliani in Georgia, David Wolfe, submitted his own motion to withdraw from his representation of Giuliani.

              Sources close to Giuliani say the former mayor is close to retaining new local representation.

              Giuliani, along with former President Donald Trump and 17 others, have pleaded not guilty to all charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
              _________

              Man, it just keeps getting worse for this guy. I'll be surprised if he's still with us a year from now.
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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              • #8
                "He left me no option": Giuliani canned from conservative radio show, due to election lies


                Rudy Giuliani’s daily talk show on WABC — a New York radio station — was canceled Friday, after he ignored repeated warnings about denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election on air.

                WABC’s owner and GOP donor John Catsimatidis, who runs his own talk show on the station, said he repeatedly warned him, prior to cutting him loose.

                “We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning, that he refuses not to talk about it,” Catsimatidis told the New York Times. “So, he left me no option. I suspended him.”

                Catsimatidis, who co-chaired a massive April fundraiser for former President Donald Trump, told Giuliani not to speak on “the legitimacy of the election results, allegations of fraud effectuated by election workers, and your personal lawsuits relating to those allegations” in a letter read aloud by Giuliani on his podcast Friday night.

                Once a powerful attorney and the mayor of New York City, he was canned from one of his few remaining jobs, deep in financial woes and reportedly overspending on a $43,000-a-month budget set by a bankruptcy court. He will still be able to broadcast his daily podcast, on which he continues to spew election misinformation.

                Charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia and Arizona, Giuliani also lost a slew of civil cases involving false statements, including a defamation suit from Georgia election officials.

                “What John Catsimatidis has done is disgraceful,” Giuliani said on his podcast. “You can’t tell somebody not to talk about the 2020 presidential election and tell me that you have a respect for free speech.”

                He has repeatedly denied being aware of a policy prohibiting him from discussing the election, but said he had been issued a warning letter. Maria Ryan, a regular co-host on Giuliani’s show, was also reportedly fired.
                __________
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by TopHatter View Post

                  “What John Catsimatidis has done is disgraceful,” Giuliani said on his podcast. “You can’t tell somebody not to talk about the 2020 presidential election and tell me that you have a respect for free speech.”
                  Catsimatidis is not the Federal Government you idiot. He runs his own show and can set whatever rules he wants and you, OTOH, are free to quit.

                  I wondered where he went as the air was a bit clearer with him out of the weekly news. Imagine if Trump pulls something off in November as I am amazed how many people just go what the hell it is only four years...

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