Rudy Giuliani back in the limelight as a Trump factotum
The U.S. Southern District of New York, where Rudy Giuliani once generated the positive publicity that launched his elected career, becomes a major crossroads for matters of concern to President Donald Trump.
Now that Giuliani, 73, joins the legal team representing the president, he gets to refresh his public profile and to top the Google searches with something other than his recent announcement of the end of his third marriage.
Whatever he actually does for Trump to fend off special counsel Robert Mueller, Giuliani’s less-than-stellar history with his president in the past two years becomes worthy of note.
On March 2, Giuliani was schmoozing with Trump’s crew at a gala for some 250 Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago when he got up to the stage and recalled being in town for Trump’s 2005 wedding.
“Hillary was also here,” he was reported by Axios as saying. “and she actually fit through the door.” Even Trump, who is sometimes the political version of an insult comic, later told the audience, “I’m just glad I didn’t say it.”
Also in the audience was Trump’s longtime lawyer and associate Michael Cohen of Manhattan. He recently won some notice of his own by having both office and home raided by federal officials armed with a search warrant.
Giuliani’s involvement in the current federal probe drama has brought up another episode.
For one thing, it has yet to be fully detailed how Giuliani, a Trump surrogate, seemed to know an “October surprise” involving Hillary Clinton’s emails was brewing in 2016.
This brings us to ex-FBI Director James Comey. Three days after the Giuliani comment, Comey told Congress he was reopening the probe of the email matter that had already ended without criminal charges being filed.
Giuliani said on Oct. 28, 2016, that there was “a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion being completely unjustified.”
“I know that from former agents and I know that even from a few active agents — who obviously don’t want to identify themselves,” he told radio host Lars Larsen.
That’s interesting in light of former deputy director Andrew McCabe’s recent comeuppance for leaking sensitive information to news media and then denying it.
Was Giuliani’s assertion about “active agents” even true? Comey has said Giuliani’s broadcast remarks during the election prompted an internal leak probe — the results of which he said he was not in the job long enough to see.
In his book “A Higher Loyalty,” which came out last week, Comey , who worked for U.S. Attorney Giuliani in the 1980s, likened his former boss to “an emperor” who chased fame.
“It took me a while to realize that Giuliani’s confidence was not leavened with a whole lot of humility,” Comey writes. “The cost of that imbalance was that there was very little oxygen left for others.”
Less widely remembered is that Comey, while serving as U.S. attorney for SDNY from 2002 to 2003, also prosecuted patronage appointees of the ex-mayor on corruption charges.
Chief among these was the late Russell Harding, who admitted that on Giuliani’s watch he embezzled more than $400,000 as the mayor’s hand-picked president of the New York City Housing Development Corporation.
Up to now, Trump had occasion to humiliate his ally Giuliani.
During the pre-inaugural transition, the new president passed up his longtime friend for secretary of state — and would leave him waiting for hours to see him at Trump Tower, sources said.
But Trump did hire son Andrew Giuliani as an aide in the White House Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs.
Giuliani may yet be useful to Trump in the Southern District nexus. As ever, SDNY is a political-legal crossroads, now with especially heavy traffic.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
