Rudy Giuliani’s post-election meltdown starts to
become literal
By
Dan Zak and
November 19, 2020 at 10:17 p.m. CST
It’s
very simple, according to Rudolph W. Giuliani and the rest of President Trump’s
legal posse, but also very vast. China is in on it. Cuba is in on it. Antifa
and George Soros are in on it. At least two presidents of Venezuela, one dead
and one living, are in on it. Big Tech is in on it; a Web server from Germany
is involved (there’s always a server involved). Multiple major U.S. cities are
in on it, as are decent American citizens who volunteer at polling precincts.
Argentina is in on it, too, sort of. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was in on it
back in 1960, when, according to an unproved conspiracy theory, he stole the
presidency for John F. Kennedy, thereby launching an ongoing pattern of corrupt
cities stuffing or scrapping ballots. The “it” is a massive, premeditated
scheme to steal the election from Donald Trump, according to Giuliani, and it
also involved corralling poll watchers at great distances from the ballot
counting.
Perhaps
a cinematic example would help explain.
“Did
you all watch ‘My Cousin Vinny?’ You know, the movie?” Giuliani asked Thursday.
He was sweating at a lectern in the small lobby of the Republican National
Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill. “It’s one of my favorite law movies,
’cause he comes from Brooklyn.”
About
100 journalists and hangers-on had crammed into this potential coronavirus incubator
for a news conference on the perverse legal strategy of President Donald J.
Trump’s failed reelection campaign, which Giuliani is trying to hustle toward a
twist ending. As the former New York mayor digressed about votes that
could’ve been cast by dead people and Mickey Mouse, Trump campaign officials
were at their headquarters in nearby Rosslyn, Va., winding down operations and
closing out the budget.
“How
many finguhs do I got up?” Giuliani said at the lectern, doing a
terrible Joe Pesci, from the scene where he cross-examines an elderly
eyewitness with bad eyesight.
Giuliani
was trying to analogize the claims of Republican poll watchers, who say they
were too far away from ballot counting to adequately observe it. Fifteen
minutes later, as he was describing the election results as “a massive fraud,”
black liquid began to slowly streak from each of his temples, down his cheeks.
It might have been perspiration liquefying his hair dye, or sluicing the black
polymer off his eyeglasses. One Manhattan stylist told the New York Times that
it might’ve been running mascara; perhaps Giuliani had applied it to touch up the
color of his sideburns.
One
Trump campaign adviser texted a Washington Post journalist as the black streaks
inched toward Rudy’s jowls: “Is he deteriorating in real time?”
If Rudy
is deteriorating, then so is anyone who listens to him. For 90 minutes, an
unmasked Rudy and four maskless colleagues — “an elite strike force team,”
according to senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis — spun a confusing web of
conspiracies that indicate Trump won the election that he lost. A revolution,
they said, was at hand.
“It is
the 1775 of our generation,” declared fellow strike force team member Sidney
Powell, who once appeared on Fox Business to claim that an immigrant “invasion”
is spreading “polio-like paralysis” among American children. She continued:
“Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it — everybody’s against us
except President Trump.”
Brendan
Buck, previously a top aide to Paul D. Ryan (R) when Ryan was House speaker,
was streaming C-SPAN at his home in Northwest D.C.
“I
picture Trump glued to this and just lapping it up,” Buck said.
“I love
the president, I wanted him to win this election,” Geraldo Rivera would say
later, on Fox News. “What I saw with Rudy Giuliani, who I’ve known for decades,
was bizarre, was unfocused.”
Chris
Krebs, erstwhile director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, took to Twitter.
“That
press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in
American history,” typed Krebs, who vouched for the integrity of the election
and was subsequently fired by Trump this week. “And possibly the craziest.”
Things
certainly are craziest right now. The president is refusing to concede. And
Rudy has gone full Rudy.
Some
people in the Trump campaign thought Thursday’s news conference was a bad idea,
though they neither stopped it nor put their names on the record objecting to
it. Other Trump officials have described Giuliani’s effort as unserious. Since
becoming the president’s personal lawyer, Giuliani has clashed with White House
chiefs of staff.
Reince
Priebus tried to block him from the Oval Office, John Kelly tried never to be
in the room when Trump spoke with him, and former acting White House chief of
staff Mick Mulvaney told others that Giuliani was an albatross during the
impeachment process. But Mark Meadows, the current chief of staff, appreciates
that Giuliani is willing to fight aggressively on television. Campaign
officials said that they had a broader, strategic legal plan to fight in
various states but that Giuliani convinced Trump that his advisers were
misleading him. Trump also was livid, two campaign officials said, that his
lawyers were not appearing on TV enough.
Cue
Rudy.
“I know
crimes,” he said at the lectern Thursday. “I can smell ’em.”
RNC
officials were not involved in setting up the event and wanted to distance
themselves from it. Many stayed away from their own headquarters; the
committee’s chief of staff was infected with the novel coronavirus and
quarantining at home. Sean Spicer, a former RNC official and White House press
secretary, was there, but only to gather material for his 6 p.m. show on the
conservative website Newsmax. Trump has told his people, including RNC
Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, to take their cues from Rudy.
“It’s
Rudy’s show,” one senior campaign official said, describing why other party and
campaign officials were not present.
Thursday’s
setting in the lobby of the RNC — with its bust of Eisenhower and framed
photographs of Trump — was a bit more formal than Rudy’s last show, a news
conference held behind a landscaping company in an
industrial stretch of Northeast Philadelphia, near an adult-video store and a
crematorium. When asked why Giuliani was permitted to use the RNC lobby — and
whether the RNC agreed with the former mayor’s wild claims — party spokesman
Mike Reed demurred.
“There
have been hundreds of reports of election irregularities across the country,
and the American people deserve to have them examined,” Reed said without
specifying any (though last week, 16 assistant U.S.
attorneys said that they searched for and found no evidence of substantial
anomalies). “We will continue to shine light on these with the Trump
campaign so Americans can have confidence in the outcome of a free and fair
election, which we think would be the same hope of the Democrats and media.”
After
the sad spectacle at the landscaping company, many of Trump’s legal advisers
backed away; Corey Lewandowski contracted the coronavirus, and Pam Bondi went
back to Florida. That left a handful of strike force teammates, including
Giuliani, Powell and Ellis, who has booked her TV hits without the campaign’s
permission and told others that being on TV is key to success. Ellis has
completed little actual legal work for the campaign but often speaks to the
president, particularly on voter-fraud issues — though her opinion of Trump was
very different in 2016, according to social-media posts collected by CNN.
Trump’s
“supporters DON’T CARE about facts or logic,” Ellis posted on Facebook in
March of that year. “They aren’t seeking truth.”
But
Thursday, she described herself as standing between law and lawlessness while
“defending President Trump.” She defined the news conference as merely an
“opening statement” in the court of public opinion, to be followed by
additional legal action in courts around the country, and possible remedy in
the electoral college.
“I
would encourage all of you to go home and actually read Alexander Hamilton’s
Federalist 68,” Ellis said at the lectern. The United States selects a
president “through the electoral college not because it disenfranchises voters,
but because it is a security mechanism for exactly the type of corruption that
we are uncovering.”
Federalist
No. 68, though, predated the emergence of political parties and did not
envision state legislatures that certify electors on the basis of the results
of a popular statewide vote, according to John Greabe, a professor at the
Franklin Pierce School of Law at the University of New Hampshire. Nothing in
No. 68 justifies a state legislature, for partisan reasons, certifying a
different slate of electors from the slate chosen by the people.
Giuliani’s
strategy isn’t geared toward winning legal arguments, Greabe theorizes. Rather,
the goal is to lay the groundwork for political intervention.
Giuliani
has indeed told the president that his goal is to disrupt next month’s meeting
of the electoral college, The Washington Post reported this week.
“It’s a
threat to our constitutional order that’s unfolding right now,” Greabe said by
phone Thursday.
After
the news conference, Giuliani emerged from the RNC headquarters carrying a
briefcase and wearing a trench coat and a “MAGA” face mask. As he tottered to a
waiting SUV, the former mayor was asked whether his stunts are
undermining an election that, by all serious accounts, was fair and accurate.
“Just
the opposite,” he said, guided by the elbow by Bernard Kerik, the former New
York City police commissioner who was pardoned by Trump in February for eight
felony convictions, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
As
Giuliani was ushered away, he made yet another claim with no supporting
evidence: “We’re saving our democracy.”
