President Donald Trump and his closest associates are having to face the reality of the mountain of implicating facts in the ongoing Ukraine scandal, and personal Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is responding in a definitely attention-grabbing fashion. This weekend in an appearance on Fox News, he suggested that he has some kind of leverage against Trump that would keep the president from shifting blame onto the former New York City mayor or otherwise throwing him under the bus. To be clear, Giuliani did personally direct a lot of the plot to exchange military aid for dirt from Ukraine on the Bidens — but he doesn’t seem concerned anyway.
Host Ed Henry asked Giuliani about his ongoing relationship with the president, and the lawyer replied:
‘I do not discuss my conversations with my client. You can assume that I talk to him early and often and have a very, very good relationship with him, and all of these comments, which are totally insulting — I’ve seen things written like ‘He is going to throw me under the bus.’ When they say that, I say, ‘He isn’t, but I have insurance.”
Watch:
WOW: @RudyGiuliani seems to suggest he has dirt that would prevent TRUMP from turning on him: “I’ve seen things written like ‘he is going to throw me under the bus.’ When they say that, I say ‘he isn’t, but I have insurance.”
Asserts he as a “very good relationship” with Trump. pic.twitter.com/cD70LM5EJq— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) November 23, 2019
Former Office of Government Ethics head Walter Shaub quipped:
‘Blackmailing a client doesn’t seem like the kind of behavior the state bar encourages.’
Giuliani left the exact form of that insurance open-ended, but it could indicate a broad awareness on his part that he and the president are so intertwined that one of them going down means the other one will as well. Throughout the Ukraine plot that has culminated in the impeachment scandal, Giuliani worked with a dizzying array of players to try and push the president’s idea to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and a completely baseless conspiracy theory indicating that a Democratic email server was in their country.
Giuliani has reportedly been under investigation by federal authorities. Henry asked the lawyer if he was worried about being indicted, and he replied:
‘How long have you known me? Do you think I’m afraid? Do you think I get afraid?’
So in other words, the personal lawyer for the president of the United States is responding to the threat of criminal charges over his personal dealings for the president of the United States like it’s a challenge instead of having even a moment of self-awareness.
Giuliani has appeared numerous times in testimony surrounding the impeachment inquiry so far.
In response to E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s recent public Congressional testimony, Fox News host Chris Wallace quipped:
‘I think what Gordon Sondland was trying to do here is protect himself more than he is to protect anybody else. To a certain degree, he took out the bus and ran over President Trump, Vice President Pence, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney. He implicates all of them.’
Sondland himself was pretty blunt along those lines. During his testimony, describing the Ukraine plot, Sondland asserted:
‘Everyone was in the loop.’
Going forward, investigators will be continuing to pursue their case against the president and moving to the stage of seemingly developing actual articles of impeachment.
