Rudy Giuliani

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      in US Politics

      Rudy Giuliani has coronavirus, Donald Trump says

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      Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has tested positive for Covid-19, the president tweeted on Sunday.
      Giuliani, 76 and a former mayor of New York City, has been leading Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, through lawsuits in battleground states.
      Trump did not specify when Giuliani tested positive or if he was experiencing symptoms. Giuliani did not immediately comment. Citing an anonymous source, the New York Times reported that Giuliani was being treated at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC.
      “Rudy Giuliani, by far the greatest mayor in the history of NYC, and who has been working tirelessly exposing the most corrupt election (by far!) in the history of the USA, has tested positive for the China Virus,” Trump tweeted, using a racist term for the coronavirus.
      “Get better soon Rudy, we will carry on!!!”
      Hours before Trump made the announcement, Giuliani was interviewed on Fox News. He appeared in good spirits while sharing baseless claims of election fraud during the 10-minute interview.
      Though Giuliani is at high risk of complications from the virus because of his age, he has been traveling frequently in the aftermath of the election, often appearing in public without a mask.
      Last week, he appeared maskless before state lawmakers in Michigan, to challenge votes in the state. On Thursday, he spoke at the Georgia capitol building in a crowded legislative session, again without a mask.
      In the Michigan session, Giuliani asked one witness to remove her mask so the audience could hear her better, though she declined.
      Giuliani has repeatedly been exposed to be others who tested positive, including after his son, Andrew.
      A White House staffer, Andrew Giuliani said on 20 November he had tested positive for the virus and was in quarantine with mild symptoms.
      Trump himself contracted Covid-19 in October, spending three days in hospital near Washington DC.
      At least 40 people in the president’s orbit have tested positive since late September, including first lady Melania Trump, her son Barron, Donald Trump Jr, and senior aides and Republican politicians.
      Vaccines are on the brink of approval for use but the pandemic has surged in recent months, as Trump has faced criticism for apparently giving up the fight for control.
      Johns Hopkins University recorded 213,875 new cases in the US on Saturday. Amid figures worsened by Thanksgiving travel and gatherings whose full impact experts say is not yet apparent, there were 2,254 new deaths, making the full US death toll 280,979 from nearly 14.6m cases. The seven-day average for deaths from Covid-19 has climbed over 2,000.
      Trump has repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus and resisted public health guidance meant to prevent the spread of the illness.
      As Christmas approaches, the White House is hosting a string of holiday parties featuring large crowds indoors. Photos from a party on Tuesday showed people without masks engaging in the festivities.
      On Sunday, a member of the White House coronavirus taskforce, Deborah Birx, was questioned about the contradictions between Trump’s actions and comments and public health guidance.
      “I hear community members parroting back those situations, parroting back that masks don’t work, parroting back that we should work towards herd immunity, parroting back that gatherings don’t result in super-spreading events,” Birx told NBC’s Meet the Press.
      “And I think our job is to constantly say those are myths.” More

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      in US Politics

      Giuliani and Trump reported to have discussed 'pre-emptive pardon'

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      [embedded content]
      Donald Trump and Rudy Giulani discussed as recently as last week the possibility of a “pre-emptive pardon”, the New York Times reported.
      A spokeswoman for the president’s personal attorney, Christianne Allen, told the Times: “Mayor Giuliani cannot comment on any discussions that he has with his client.”
      Shortly after the Times published its story, however, Giuliani tweeted a denial.
      “Fake News NYT lies again,” he wrote. “Never had the discussion they falsely attribute to an anonymous source. Hard to keep up with all their lies.”
      The Times cited two anonymous sources.
      Presidential pardons are a common feature of the waning days of any White House term. Trump has not conceded defeat by Joe Biden but he will leave office on 20 January regardless.
      Last week, the president pardoned his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Russian official.
      Trump had already pardoned political allies including Bernard Kerik and Joe Arpaio and commuted a sentence handed to longtime ally Roger Stone. Former Trump aides Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates are all thought to be possible pardon recipients.
      Gates, a former deputy campaign chair who also worked on Trump’s inauguration, pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators and was sentenced to 45 days’ confinement.
      Last week, he told the Times Trump “knows how much those of us who worked for him have suffered, and I hope he takes that into consideration if and when he grants any pardons”.
      Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, has not been convicted of any federal crime. But he has been reported to be under investigation by federal prosecutors, regarding his dealings in Ukraine and possible violations of lobbying law.
      Giuliani’s own lawyer, Robert Costello, told the Times: “He’s not concerned about this investigation, because he didn’t do anything wrong and that’s been our position from day one.”
      Presidential pardons pre-empting charges or conviction are extremely rare but not unknown. Jimmy Carter, for example, pardoned thousands of men who illegally avoided the draft for the Vietnam war.
      Richard Nixon’s pardon from Gerald Ford after resigning over the Watergate scandal covered all his actions as president.
      On Monday, conservative commentator Sean Hannity said on his radio show that Trump “needs to pardon his whole family and himself”.
      Most observers think a self-pardon would be both unconstitutional and not likely to work. If Trump did try it, it would have no effect on prosecutors in New York state investigating his tax affairs and possible violations of campaign finance law.
      According to the Department of Justice, presidential pardons do not signify that the recipient is innocent.
      The White House did not comment on the Times report. More

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      in US Politics

      Federal court rejects Trump election lawsuit in Pennsylvania

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      Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel.The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to offer any tangible proof of that in court.The US district judge Matthew Brann had said the campaign’s error-filled complaint, “like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it for a second time.The 3rd US circuit court of appeals called that decision justified. The three judges on the panel were all appointed by Republican presidents. including Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor appointed by Trump. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking”.In fact, Pennsylvania officials had certified their vote count Monday for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in US presidential elections.Trump has said he hopes the supreme court will intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the election to Republican George W Bush. On November 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying the “US Supreme Court should decide!”Ever since, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they’ve found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.Trump perhaps hopes a supreme court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority would be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through 6 November by only a 4-4 vote last month. Since then, the Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”In the case before Brann, the Trump campaign asked to disenfranchise the state’s 6.8 million voters, or at least the 700,000 who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas.“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote in his scathing ruling on 21 November. “That has not happened.”A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania supreme court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. The Democratic governor Tom Wolf’s administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.On Thursday, Trump said the 3 November election was still far from over. Yet he offered the clearest signal to date that he would leave the White House peaceably on January 20 if the electoral college formalized Biden’s win.“Certainly I will. But you know that,” Trump said at the White House, taking questions from reporters for the first time since election day.On Friday, however, he continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large Black populations as the source of “massive voter fraud”. And he claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” apiece.All 50 states must certify their results before the electoral college meets on 14 December, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by 8 December. Biden won both the electoral college and popular vote by wide margins. More

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      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      in Elections

      Trump campaign cuts ties with attorney Sidney Powell after bizarre election fraud claims

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      Perhaps Sidney Powell has gone too far even for Rudy Giuliani this time.
      The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.
      “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.
      Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
      There was no immediate clarification from the campaign and Powell did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
      The statement hints at chaos in a legal team that has lost case after case in its efforts to overturn the results of the 3 November election. Law firms have withdrawn from cases, and in the latest setback, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.
      “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.
      It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.
      The statement on Powell was the latest sign of wariness over her approach even within some conservative circles. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on his show last week that his team had asked Powell for evidence to support her claims, but that Powell had provided none.
      Powell made headlines with her statements at a Thursday news conference where, joined by Giuliani and Ellis, she incorrectly suggested that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was located in Germany, that voting software used by Georgia and other states was created at the direction of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and that votes for Trump had probably been switched in favour of Biden.
      However, her contributions that day were largely overshadowed by Giuliani’s hair dye malfunction.
      In a subsequent interview with Newsmax on Saturday, she appeared to accuse Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and its Republican secretary of state of being part of a conspiracy involving a voting-system contract award that she contends harmed Trump’s re-election bid.
      “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and Mr Kemp and the secretary of state need to go with it,” she said, later adding that a lawsuit she planned to file against the state would be “biblical”.
      The status of that lawsuit was unclear on Sunday night.
      Powell, a former federal prosecutor, took over last year as the lead lawyer for Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
      Since then, a federal judge has rejected her claims of prosecutorial misconduct and has responded quizzically to some of her arguments, including her suggestion at a hearing several weeks ago that her conversations with Trump about the Flynn case were privileged.
      She has supported a Justice Department motion to dismiss the prosecution, a request that remains pending before US district judge Emmet Sullivan. More

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      Rudy Giuliani and Death in Venice | Brief letters

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      Re your report (Proportion of students in England awarded first-class degrees soars, 19 November), I got my BA degree from Nottingham University in 1970. When we began our final year we were told that there would be no first-class degrees for politics students that year. “We mark on the bell curve,” they said. “And we get one first per 30 students. There are only 15 students each year for politics, and a student got a first last year. So none of you lot can get one.”Stephen ReesVancouver, Canada
      • To while away the time during this lockdown, we are going through over 40 years of photographic slides. To save space, we are digitising the slides and discarding the originals. We now have a large number of empty yellow plastic boxes. Suggestions, please, for alternative uses – like 35mm film canisters, they must be useful for something!Elizabeth and Les BrettWelling, London
      • “Unintentional” bullying surely implies a lack of empathy, compassion and self-awareness (Bullying inquiry ‘found evidence Priti Patel broke ministerial code’, 19 November). Strange characteristics for a British home secretary, especially in the aftermath of the Windrush fiasco.Sandy DerbyshireLondon
      • What a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye running down his face (Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan, 19 November) reminded me of the closing scenes of Death in Venice.Angela BogleBakewell, Derbyshire
      • Your editorial (18 November) rightly condemns the cronyism displayed by the Tories in their procurement of PPE, but let’s give it its proper name: looting.Deirdre BurrellMortimer, Berkshire More

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      No time to dye: Rudy Giuliani channels My Cousin Vinny amid hair malfunction

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      [embedded content]
      On 7 November, the day the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani addressed the media at a landscaping company between a sex shop and a crematorium on Philadelphia’s industrial fringe.
      For two weeks, as the Trump campaign continued to claim without evidence that the election had been stolen, America wondered if Giuliani could possibly ever top that.
      On Thursday, he gave it a damned good try.
      A day after his claims of massive voter fraud fell flat in a Pennsylvania court room, Giuliani staged another press conference, this time in slightly more salubrious surrounds, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But it did not go well.
      First, while claiming Republican poll observers had been kept too far away from ballot counters in Philadelphia, a key Trump claim in a vital state which like others fell to Biden, Giuliani attempted to recite a scene from My Cousin Vinny, an Oscar-winning comedy from 1992.
      “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn,” he said.
      Giuliani, who also comes from Brooklyn, tried to sum up a key plot point from Jonathan Lynn’s film, in which Joe Pesci’s personal injury lawyer, hitherto out of his depth in a murder trial, manages to discredit a key witness by proving her vision to be impaired.
      “And when the nice lady said she saw …” Giuliani said, switching into a very rough approximation of Pesci’s Brooklyn accent. “And then he says to her, ‘How many fingers do I … How many fingers do I got up? And she says three. Oh, she was too far away to see it was only two.
      “These people [the poll observers] were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing,” he added, apparently drawing a line between the movie scene and claims about the problems faced by poll observers in Philadelphia.
      So far, so predictably surreal. But things got stickier. More