Ed Pilkington: Ukraine imbroglio confirms Giuliani's as Trump's most off-kilter advocate
On Thursday night Rudy Giuliani,
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and troubleshooter-in-chief, went on CNN to
defend his boss against the latest scandal swirling round him. Hours before Giuliani
went on air, it had been reported that
Trump had provoked a whistleblower complaint within the US intelligence
services by pressuring the government of Ukraine to provide dirt that could
help his bid for re-election. The information is thought to have related to
Trump’s main presidential rival, the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
A few minutes into the
interview, pugnacious anchor Chris Cuomo got to the point.
Cuomo: “Did you ask
the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?”
Giuliani: “No.
Actually I didn’t.”
Crystal clear. Except
that 83 words and about 30 seconds later, Cuomo asked the question again.
Cuomo: “So, you did
ask Ukraine to
look into Joe Biden?”
Giuliani: “Of course I
did.”
That Giuliani was
prepared so blatantly to contradict himself on live TV in the service of the
president perfectly encapsulates his transformation. “America’s
Mayor”, the hero of 9/11, has metamorphosed into what the New Yorker
dubbed “Trump’s
clown”.
The day after
Mueller’s testimony, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and
pressured Zelensky to help him win the 2020 election by investigating former
Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, The
Wall Street Journal reported Friday. In the weeks that followed, Trump
refused to grant Zelensky a meeting and halted $250 million
of authorized military aid to the country, raising the
possibility that the president was, as The Washington Post put it in an unsigned editorial,
“not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign” but using
U.S. military aid to “extort it.” That allegation, if true, would unambiguously
constitute an impeachable offense,” national
security expert Benjamin Wittes wrote Friday. “That would be a very big
deal indeed.”
This is not the first
time Giuliani has incurred ridicule and rebuke in the cause of protecting his
longtime friend – no, client. In the final days of the 2016 election the lawyer
was almost the only person willing to speak in favor of Trump after the “grab
’em by the pussy” tape was aired.
As the Mueller
investigation into Russian interference in that election reached its climax,
Giuliani threw lawyerly restraint to the winds and repeatedly denounced the
inquiry as a witch-hunt. Last August, he uttered
words that will forever haunt him: “Truth isn’t truth.”
But of all the scraps
in which Giuliani has engaged in recent months, of all the obfuscations and
verbal sleights of hand, this week’s performance could prove the most damaging,
both for him and for his White House buddy. America’s Mayor has tied himself in
ever-tighter knots over claims that at Trump’s behest he improperly sought to
coerce Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden in the hope of dredging up damaging
information....
