How Rudy Giuliani Became Co-Conspirator 1 in the Trump Indictment

Rudolph W. Giuliani is Co-Conspirator 1.

Mr. Giuliani, the crime-fighter who rose from a federal prosecutor’s office to lead New York City at its moment of deepest crisis, is not named in the indictment that was filed Tuesday accusing his former client, Donald J. Trump, of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

But Co-Conspirator 1, who Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer acknowledged appeared to be his client, figures in each of the three conspiracies it alleges took place — leaving open the possibility that Mr. Giuliani could be charged himself.

The next chapter in his long public life will now be written by the special counsel who filed the indictment, Jack Smith, who can prosecute him, pressure him into cooperating or leave him dangling, potentially to be indicted by a district attorney investigating election interference in Georgia.

The former mayor who made his name as a lawman now faces a reckoning with the law.

Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Mr. Trump hangs in the balance. A person close to Mr. Trump who spoke confidentially to describe a private relationship said that while they don’t speak regularly, the former president retains a fondness for Mr. Giuliani born from his stint as mayor, when the two dealt with each other often.

But in recent years, their relationship has been on uneven footing as the former president had refused to pay his former lawyer’s legal bills amid mounting legal troubles for both, infuriating Mr. Giuliani’s allies. The former president had told advisers that he did not want Mr. Giuliani to be reimbursed, The New York Times reported.

This year, filings suggest, Mr. Trump’s super PAC paid a legal vendor working on Mr. Giuliani’s behalf. The $340,000 payment was made weeks before Mr. Giuliani met voluntarily with Mr. Smith’s office — a meeting that took place under a proffer agreement, in which prosecutors consent to not use any statements during an interview in criminal proceedings unless it is determined that the subject was lying. The agreement does not mean that prosecutors will not charge Mr. Giuliani, nor does it indicate they will seek his cooperation.

The payment appeared to bail Mr. Giuliani out of a difficult financial situation. Before it was made, he had told the federal judge presiding over a defamation lawsuit filed against him by two Georgia election workers that he could not afford to pay some of his legal expenses.

Tuesday’s indictment, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, details five ways in which six co-conspirators aided Mr. Trump. The attempts begin with efforts to persuade state officials — sometimes by using threats — to overturn the legitimate vote so that false electors could deliver their support to Mr. Trump in the Electoral College. They end with attempts to flip the result even after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Giuliani, 79, was involved in every step, the indictment says. He bullied and cajoled officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; helped convene slates of fraudulent electors to cast ballots for Mr. Trump; falsely claimed that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election; and, finally, called lawmakers after the attack on the Capitol, asking that they delay the election’s certification.

On Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, said that his client appeared to be the person identified as Co-Conspirator 1 before blasting the indictment, saying it “eviscerates the First Amendment” and was meant to disrupt Mr. Trump’s third presidential campaign.

“Every fact that Mayor Giuliani possesses about this case establishes the good-faith basis President Donald Trump had for the action that he took,” Mr. Costello said.

“This indictment underscores the tragic reality of our two-tiered justice system — one for the regime in power and the other for anyone who dares to oppose the ruling regime,” Ted Goodman, political adviser to Mr. Giuliani, said on Wednesday.

By this stage of his alliance with the former president, Mr. Giuliani is used to legal trouble.

The two men have known each other for decades. After serving in the Reagan Justice Department, Mr. Giuliani in 1983 became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prominent legal posts in the government. There, he focused on disrupting organized crime, zeroing in on the five Mafia families of New York. At the same time, Mr. Trump was leveraging his real estate empire to burnish his tabloid celebrity.

The men shared a thirst for public attention and a harsh law-and-order politics that kept them aligned after Mr. Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993.

His leadership after the Sept. 11 attacks briefly vaulted Mr. Giuliani to the pinnacle of American public life; he was named Time magazine’s person of the year, his leadership compared to that of Winston Churchill. But after Mr. Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 he sank toward irrelevancy, a decline reflected in his failed 2008 Republican presidential campaign.

When he re-emerged, it was on behalf of Mr. Trump. He was an omnipresent surrogate for the candidate in the final stages of the 2016 campaign and never abandoned Mr. Trump once he became president. In 2018 — despite having been passed over for the position he coveted, secretary of state — Mr. Giuliani began working as a lawyer for Mr. Trump.

By that time, the president was fighting a first special counsel investigation, led by Robert S. Mueller III, which concerned possible Russian interference in the election. Mr. Giuliani joined the battle with gusto, saying that Mr. Trump was being targeted for his politics.

Like several of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Giuliani became embroiled in the legal travails of his client. He had tried to push a new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. as Mr. Biden emerged as Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the 2020 presidential race. Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine prompted federal prosecutors in Manhattan to open an investigation into the man who had once led the office.

Mr. Smith has homed in on the aftermath of Mr. Biden’s victory that year. The indictment says that Mr. Trump on Nov. 14, 2020, appointed Mr. Giuliani to “spearhead his efforts going forward to challenge the election results.”

Mr. Giuliani took up the mission, meeting with speakers of the house in Arizona and Michigan, asking them to replace their proper electors with groups that would cast votes for Mr. Trump. In all, Mr. Giuliani helped coordinate a scheme to put forward fraudulent slates of electors in seven states, the indictment said.

In Georgia, Mr. Giuliani organized a presentation for lawmakers where people claiming to be electoral fraud experts falsely claimed that 10,000 dead people had voted.

And after the attack on the U.S. Capitol delayed the certification of the election, Mr. Giuliani helped Mr. Trump lobby lawmakers, unsuccessfully, to keep Mr. Biden out of the White House.

When Mr. Trump left office, the legal pressure on Mr. Giuliani escalated.

FB.I. agents searched his home and office, seizing cellphones and computers. The federal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine ended in 2022 with no charges, but he was sued by voting machine companies that he claimed had helped engineer Mr. Biden’s victory.

In June, his law license was suspended in connection with the statements he made about the 2020 election. Mr. Giuliani’s legal bills piled up. Mr. Trump was declining to pay him even as Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, investigated him for his attempts to overturn the election in Georgia.

Soon, Mr. Smith would join her.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.