On election night, as it started to become clear that the presidency was slipping away from Donald Trump, his son-in-law and senior aide Jared Kushner was looking for a hero.
He wanted someone like James Baker, the New York Times reported, the former White House chief of staff, Treasury secretary and secretary of state, who led George W Bush’s legal team during the Florida recount in 2000 in a role that won him praise as a strategic and diplomatic genius.
He got Rudy Giuliani.
A fortnight ago, Giuliani was angrily defending himself after a clip from the new Borat film showed him apparently fiddling with his crotch as he lay on the bed in a hotel room where he had gone for a drink with a young woman who was posing as a Kazakh television journalist. “I was tucking in my shirt,” he explained later. He denied any wrongdoing and described the footage as “complete fabrication”.
Now the president’s personal attorney is accusing his opponents of being “an embarrassment to our reputation throughout the world” and leading Trump’s last stand, helming the legal effort to keep Joe Biden out of the White House.
On Wednesday afternoon he tweeted that he was “en route to Philadelphia with legal team” to challenge what he called – without offering any evidence – “massive cheating”. Since then, six of his tweets have been flagged by Twitter as containing misleading information.
At a press conference on Thursday, he gave a speech in which he claimed – again without providing evidence – that one person could have voted 100,000 times. Giuliani, with no neck and a pocket square, declared his interest in launching a nebulous “national lawsuit” to challenge the results. “Do you think we’re stupid?” he asked. “Do you think we’re fools?”
His attempts to keep Trump in the White House, if they result in failure as most experts seem to think they will, may mark some sort of end point for the 76-year-old Giuliani, once a fearless criminal prosecutor and hero of 9/11 who few people disputed had earned his honorary knighthood and the title of America’s Mayor.
Three months after the twin towers fell, he completed his term in New York and embarked on a highly lucrative career on the speaking circuit, commanding as much as $200,000 per engagement, for each of which his contract demanded transportation in the form of a private jet that “MUST BE a Gulfstream IV or bigger”.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
