Who Trolled Amber? - Trump and Rudy: A bare-knuckle romance - Episode 3

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Twenty years ago, Rudy Giuliani was “America’s mayor”. Now he’s been indicted, along with Donald Trump, for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Will Rudy die in jail for The Don?Listen to the three part series today. For the premium Tortoise listening experience, curated by our journalists, download the free Tortoise audio app. For early and ad-free access to all our investigative series and daily and weekly shows, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts.If you’d like to further support slow journalism and help us build a different kind of newsroom, do consider donating to Tortoise at tortoisemedia.com/support-us. Your contributions allow us to investigate, campaign and explore, and to build a newsroom that is responsible and sustainable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of a nation. Hollywood Exiles, from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com Tortoise

The people, my people are so smart. And you know what else they say about my people? The polls. They say, I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay? It was true. It was also true he could brag about sexual assault on national television and get away with it. Donald Trump had impunity

written into his DNA. And he had Rudy Giuliani on his side. I'm Giles Whittle, and from Tortoise, this is episode three of Trump and Rudy, a bare-knuckle bromance. On Sunday, October 9th, 2016, two days after a tape emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women's genitals because, quote, when you're a star, you can do anything, Giuliani had gone to bat for him on television. He'd introduced the so-called locker room defence. The fact is that men at times talk like that. Not all men, but men do. You've talked like that? He was wrong for doing it. I am not justifying it. I believe it's wrong. I know he believes

it's wrong. I believe that this is not the man that we're talking about today. I know he believes it's wrong. I believe that this is not the man that we're talking about today. In essence, OK, this stuff wasn't harmless, but it was banter. Trump used the same defense the next day in his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. It's worth a listen for the brass neck and for the brutal change of subject. That was locker room talk.

I'm not proud of it. I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for the people of this country. And certainly I'm not proud of it. But that was something that happened. If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse, minor words, and his was action. His was what he's done to women. There's never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that's been so abusive to women. In the meantime, Giuliani seems to have been talking to sources in the FBI. Another October surprise was coming down the track, and from hints that Giuliani dropped beforehand, it looks as if he knew it was coming down the track, and from hints that Giuliani dropped beforehand,

it looks as if he knew it was coming. Tonight, a federal sexting investigation into Anthony Weiner leading to an October shocker, putting Hillary Clinton on the defensive. The FBI announcing that it's investigating newly discovered evidence related to her emails. The bizarre twist? It's all connected to the tawdry messages of a disgraced former congressman. This new investigation, announced by the FBI chief James Comey, went nowhere. But that wasn't the point. The point was it revived conspiracy theories about Clinton's emails just when the Trump campaign needed them back in the headlines. Andrew Kurtzman, Giuliani's biographer, suggests that Comey dropped his bombshell because he feared that if he didn't, Giuliani would.

And either way, it was enough. Two weeks later, Donald Trump was elected 45th president of the United States. In his victory speech, he singled out Giuliani for special thanks. And that night, Giuliani joined Trump for a private celebration in Trump Tower. In the inner sanctum, Rudy was there. Here's the political consultant Hank Sheinkopf remembering the two of them from 9-11. First on Rudy. He was bigger than life. He was Superman.

He stood up in the middle of this most amazing calamity and was unbeatable. And here was the guy who built Trump Tower, was the unbelievably unbeatable, fair-haired boy of nobody who said fuck you to everybody and did what he wanted. What an extraordinary pairing. an extraordinary pairing. Back then, their relationship had been strictly transactional. 15 years on, it was closer to mutual dependence. They needed each other now. Giuliani needed the adrenaline. It's hard to get back to a normal life, no matter how much money you're making. You're used to being in the public eye. You enjoy being in the public eye. It's what energizes you. And I think he's angry. I think that he is probably depressed. His life is a bit of a mess. His personal life is a bit of a mess.

Fran Reiter was Giuliani's deputy mayor in his first term. I think when Trump decides to run for president, I think Rudy sees this as a way of getting back into the public eye. I think it's as simple as that. And Trump needs Giuliani because he needs a lawyer, and not just any lawyer. Starting four months into his presidency, he's been under investigation by a special prosecutor for allegedly colluding with Russia to get elected.

And there's Stormy Daniels, the porn star to whom he paid hush money in an alleged violation of campaign finance laws. Of course, Trump already has lawyers like other people have kitchen cabinets, but a certain moxie is required here. A facility with smoke and mirrors, an intimidation factor. And Giuliani seems the obvious choice. Because he's changed.

He is unrecognisable now from the upright, uptight prosecutor of the early 1980s. From the man Daniel Richman and Ken Friedman and Fran Reiter so admired. As Andrew Kurtzman writes in his book, Giuliani was, quote, unconstrained by the mannered conventions that presidential lawyers were expected to practice. He was gleefully ferocious, an attack machine perpetually set to kill. He would say anything, do anything to win. He was, in short, just like Trump. Giuliani's stint as personal lawyer to the president began in April 2018. It was a disaster from the start. Here he is talking about Stormy Daniels to a befuddled Sean Hannity, the most

loyal of all the Trump acolytes on Fox News. Sorry, I'm giving you a fact now that you don't know. It's not campaign money. No campaign finance violation. So they funneled it through the law firm? Funneled through the law firm and the president repaid it. Oh, I didn't know he did. Yeah.

But do you know the president didn't know about this? I believe that's what Michael said. He didn't know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this for my clients. I don't burden them with every single thing that comes along. Now, this is exactly what the president needs his lawyer not to say, that Trump paid the money and knew what it was for. But Giuliani blunders in and says it, and Trump, for some reason, lets it go.

Next, Giuliani hurls himself at the Russia problem. And he's not concerned with facts or truth or whatever the special prosecutor Robert Mueller may find he's not concerned with facts or truth or whatever the special prosecutor Robert Mueller may find. He's concerned with perception. And his strategy is simple. Find something to distract public attention from the investigation. Anything will do. And so Giuliani launches a freelance American foreign policy on Trump's behalf. Andrew Kurtzman explains. Giuliani was trying every which way to discredit that investigation. He was under the impression, and as was Trump, that Hillary Clinton kept a secret computer server somewhere in Ukraine that had damaging information. And it goes back to this

controversy over her emails, which the Republicans made a great deal of hay over. So he went searching for this alleged server in Ukraine, and he came across what he felt was some dirt about Joe Biden, who was the vice president at the time, made aware that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, had been placed on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. For a long time, Democrats would roll their eyes at the mention of Burisma, assuming the story would go away. Well, it didn't.

But in the meantime... Giuliani developed this theory that Hunter, who was clearly capitalizing on his father's influence to make millions of dollars as a board member, Giuliani made the leap to say that Joe Biden was profiting off of it. There were any number of shadowy figures in Ukraine who figured into this story. And many of them were opportunists who were using Giuliani to get their way in their own parochial interest. Giuliani made several trips to Ukraine, each one crazier than the last. On one of them, accompanied by a glamorous young TV reporter who was also a QAnon conspiracist, he was handed supposedly incriminating documents by an obliging Ukrainian MP, who the CIA concluded was a Russian spy. All this buccaneering didn't

come from nowhere. It came from long years of jet-setting after 9-11, a time when people believed Giuliani could do anything. Here's Ken Friedman. Rudy saw the chance to make a lot of money traveling the world, you know, without portfolio as a cybersecurity expert who had access to the president, and people threw money at him. You know, going back to when he formed Giuliani Partners, I think his first client was Mexico City.

You know, violent crime problem there, and he and Bernie Kerik flew down to Mexico City. Kerik was Giuliani's second police commissioner as mayor. And told them that they had a terrible, violent crime problem there, and they jetted out with a million dollars. They did nothing to cure that problem, right? It was easy money, free money, and people were throwing at him. $100,000 to give the same speech of derring-do over and over and over and over again,

and first-class accommodations everywhere. So naturally it went to his head, as it would anybody. and over and over again, and first class accommodations everywhere. And so it naturally went to his head, as it would anybody. You get accustomed to that lifestyle, and here's this opportunity to continue it, you know, by representing Trump. When Trump became president, Giuliani wanted to be Secretary of State. Didn't just want to, he believed he was eminently qualified. That ambition was skewered by 25 pages of potential conflicts of interest identified by the State Department when he was vetted for the job. But Giuliani's grand delusion that he could play diplomat as well as celebrity slash businessman because, well, because he was Rudy, that delusion persisted. In May 2019,

he wrote to Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, requesting a meeting. At the meeting, Giuliani planned to drop a hint that US military aid to Kyiv might have to be put on pause if Ukraine's security services didn't launch a proper investigation into Hunter Biden. Giuliani didn't get his meeting. In the end, Trump had to call Zelensky and drop the hint himself. The call was from the Oval Office. Official. Recorded. Transcribed. And it led directly to Trump's impeachment. This is the first impeachment where there's no crime. I say, tell me what I did, please. Well, we don't know. You violated the Constitution.

I'm the first person to ever get impeached and there's no crime. I feel guilty. You know what they call it? Impeachment-like. It's impeachment-like. It was the first time Giuliani had led his presidential client to the edge of the abyss. But it wouldn't be the last. On June 4th, 2020, Rudy Giuliani stayed up late to do a live interview with Piers Morgan, one of Britain's blunter breakfast TV hosts.

America was at war with itself at the time over the murder of George Floyd, an African-American man murdered by police in Minneapolis. There were protests all over the Midwest. Morgan wanted to ask Giuliani why his client, President Trump, had tweeted a notorious phrase first uttered by a racist Miami police chief in the 1960s. That phrase was, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Morgan and Giuliani went at it for 13 minutes. Here's a flavour of it.

What, you're talking over me all the time? You're darn right I am because you're lying to people. I'm not lying, I'm quoting directly what the president said. That was not deliberately taken from a racist. Where did he get it from? It happens to be factually correct, no matter who it came from. If you start looting, people are going to start shooting. Where did he get it from? Right. So... Right. So you, just to clarify...

Oh, really? You know what, Rudy? Rudy, what happened to you? What happened to you, Rudy? Why has President Trump... What happened to me is the same thing that always happened to me. I happen to be in favour of truth and justice. Really?

And you people are in favour of a phony political narrative. Really? You know what, Rudy, I'm sorry, but you... And the interview is over as far as I'm concerned. You sound completely barking mad. Do you know that? No, I don't. Piers Morgan had a point.

To Trump supporters, Giuliani was doing his job, defending the president against all critics, foreign as well as domestic, even at one in the morning. To everyone else, he sounded frankly unhinged. through the Mueller investigation, through the Ukraine scandal, through all sorts of controversies, Giuliani's behavior has deteriorated dramatically. He's a drinker. He's lost his edge. He's lost his discipline. I mean, when he was a prosecutor, when he was a mayor, he had a brilliant strategic mind. I mean, he was explosive. He was authoritarian. He was arguably racist. But there was a logic.

Not anymore, Andrew Kurtzman says. Now in his late 70s, after a lifetime of kind of selling out his principles, and he's gone through two divorces, and he's a drinker, you know, a different type of Giuliani emerges. He's sloppy, he's forgetful, he says crazy things on television, he's making, he's making tatters out of his once godlike reputation. And he's not caring what people think. once godlike reputation. And he's not caring what people think. Harry Siegel, a veteran of New York state politics and newspapers, says this attitude is something Trump adopts. What fascinates me is he is so contemptuous of the press by the end. I think what Trump takes from him is contempt for

the press, for a weed opinion, and for how upset people can be, and the space between that and what popular opinion actually registers. That people can protest, they can write really dramatic and beautiful pieces about what's wrong with their policies and how cruel they are. And if these actually align with what people want, none of that really matters. I think that that's a signal lesson that Trump does pick up from Giuliani. He's not just crazy. He's not just a drunk.

He is a guy who doesn't give many shits. Sometimes it's as if Rudy Giuliani has a self-destruct button that he keeps tapping just for the hell of it. Around the time of the Morgan interview, he did another one for a film crew that said it was making a documentary about his career. The film was released by 20th Century Fox in October 2020. I was in prison many years, so I have techniques with my mouth.

What's going on here? Look at this guy. I forbid this union. Seconds before Sacha Baron Cohen's entrance, in that clip from Borat's subsequent movie film, the Borat sequel,

Giuliani is on his back in a fancy New York hotel room with a young blonde actress hovering nearby and with his hand down his trousers. He says afterwards he was removing his microphone.

It doesn't wash. The clip is played and replayed on national television. It's re-enacted for Saturday Night Live. This is peak Giuliani laughing stock. Or so you'd think. His humiliation is complete. Or so it should be. But it isn't.

Like Trump after the Pussygate tape, Giuliani simply brazened it out. He's invulnerable because he feels invulnerable. And Hank Sheinkopf reckons this has something to do with his place of work. If you've ever been in the White House or ever been around a president, worked for a president, worked with a president, you know that there was nothing like that in the history of the world. It takes certain kind of brains to know that it's not real.

You have to actually understand that it's not real. This is fantasy land. The White House is a museum with an attic where people live. It's a large attic, but it's really an attic to a museum. That president is the most important person in the world. And there is an immediate sense by many people who show up in the White House, having been there, is that they belong there. On election night 2020, Giuliani is quite certain the White House is where he belongs. He sets up shop with his son Andrew, who by this time is

Trump's golf coach, in the Red Room, which is part of the main residence rather than the West Wing. in the Red Room, which is part of the main residence rather than the West Wing. Independent pollsters are predicting a red mirage, which means big early returns for Trump, followed by a late surge for Biden as postal votes are counted. This forecast is based on clear evidence that voters who prefer to mail in their ballots rather than risk getting COVID at a polling station skew heavily Democratic. Team Trump doesn't buy it, at least not officially. And so the White House is decked out for a victory party. But Giuliani knows there'll be a fight ahead. That afternoon, he tells a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, who was Trump's chief strategist from his 2016 campaign,

that the president needs to be ready. He needs to be ready to declare victory early and confidently, state by state, wherever early results show a credible lead. And so it all kind of comes to a head when on election night, they're waiting for the returns and Giuliani starts agitating during the run-up inside the White House at the party in the grand ballroom. He starts agitating for Trump just to announce that he had won. This is not normal. Normal procedure is to wait for the networks to call it.

is not normal. Normal procedure is to wait for the networks to call it. And this gets back to Trump's aides who've got a war room underneath the grand ballroom in the White House. And they call Giuliani down because they're scared that Giuliani is going to find Trump and convince him to do something reckless. And so Giuliani comes down to the war room and he starts urging them to declare that Trump had won. And these are White House aides, they're campaign officials, they're campaign attorneys. And they're like, Rudy, name a state where Trump has won that would be pivotal to a victory. And Giuliani says, it doesn't matter. Michigan, pick Michigan, say we won Michigan. And they're like, well, Trump is behind in Michigan. Clocks are ticking. And so they leave Giuliani out there. He goes and he finds Trump. And he urges Trump,

just declare you've won. And Trump gets up before the American people and announces he's won the election. This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. And there it is. If you had to pick a moment when Trump crosses over, truly crosses over into the twilight zone,

where nothing is real anymore and normal people have their jaws on the floor, this is it. And Giuliani's voice is the voice in his ear. He was right there. I mean, you know, it's Rudy on election night 2020, right, saying this was stolen. Let's go for it as stolen. This like pushing. There's a moment where Trump is maybe ready to accept that he lost. This is Eileen Markey. Like, he's like a, he had once been a respectable person, but it's off the rails Rudy pushing him on election night 2020 to say, no, it was stolen. We're going to keep going with this. And of course, that, that leads in all the way to the January 6th. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Hi, I'm Una Chaplin, and I'm the host of a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles.

a new podcast called Hollywood Exiles. It tells the story of how my grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others were caught up in a campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It's a story of glamour and scandal and political intrigue and a battle for the soul of the nation. Hollywood Exiles from CBC Podcasts and the BBC World Service. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com I know Donald Trump. People think he's dumb. He's not dumb, okay? People think he's not canny. He's very canny.

Rudy Giuliani, not dumb, very canny. And both of them have a very charming side to them. Very charming, very polite. Germophobia, of course, he wasn't shaking hands with people at the time. Very well groomed, but greeting everyone very pleasant. That was Hank Sheinkopf and then Virginia Fields, the former New York City councillor, talking about Trump, Giuliani and Trump again. A pair of charmers.

From Wednesday, November 3rd, 2020, the day after the election, they both had their backs to the wall. The media and most of Trump's campaign staff were telling him he'd lost. But not Giuliani. You're only as good as your client, right? So he had a very difficult client in this case, didn't he? And somebody who would only be appeased by telling him what he wanted to hear. People came and went. They fell by the wayside because they had a counterpoint that Trump didn't like. But Rudy just fed his ego, just say you won. This was a continuation of his election night strategy, but it had to be more than that. Giuliani now had six weeks to turn fantasy into a new reality.

So he set up his own guerrilla war room in the White House. Yeah, Giuliani referred to his squad as the elite strike force. And what they really were were a bunch of crackpots. and the Trump election lawyers, who were kind of these mainstream Republican lawyers, election lawyers, referred to themselves as Team Normal. Team Normal assumed it would prevail. But it lost Trump's ear for good when its leader,

first son-in-law Jared Kushner, quietly accepted defeat and left for Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, the strike force took the first of three fateful steps. It sued election officials in every swing state with baseless claims of voter fraud. Next, Giuliani flew to Georgia, where he defamed two black election workers, Ruby Freeman and Jay Moss. He had security camera footage edited to make it look as if they were stuffing ballot boxes. For good measure, he said the two women were seen passing around thumb drives as if they were vials of heroin. And then, thirdly, Giuliani threw his weight behind what became known as the fake electors plan. On January the 6th, Congress

and Vice President Mike Pence were scheduled to certify the delegate lists sent by each state to Washington to reflect the result of the election. Giuliani persuaded Trump it was worth putting fake lists in front of Pence and simply demanding that he sign them. Giuliani wasn't the only Trump acolyte working feverishly to steal the election, but he was the front man. He was on TV. He was knocking heads together in the White House. He was leading the charge at press conferences. Yes, including that one. So I'm here on behalf of the Trump campaign as an attorney for the president to describe to you. Trump announces that Giuliani will be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. And it turns out that Giuliani does a press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping Company in the middle of nowhere down the street from a sex shop and

a crematorium. And it was, you know, it became a national joke. In the middle of it, the networks finally called the race for Biden. Giuliani tried to laugh it off. What was it called by? All the, oh my goodness, all the networks. Wow. All the networks. We have to forget about the law. Judges don't count. All the networks, all the networks. All the networks thought Biden was going to win by 10%. Gee, what happened?

He said only the courts could call the race. Courts like one nearby, in which a judge later threw out his challenge to the Pennsylvania election result, calling it a, quote, Frankenstein's monster, unquote. And at another press conference, brown hair dye ran down both sides of Giuliani's face in front of the world's cameras.

Virginia Fields was one of those watching. I just thought, how pathetic. 9-11. How far a person has fallen from grace of notoriety to where he now stands, sweating, die, dripping down on his face, lying. How pathetic is that? Fran Reiter, his former deputy mayor, remembers the hair dye moment as well. At this point, as well as I have thought over the years that I knew who this person was,

I no longer think I know who this person was at all. So I think it's hard to project what he may or may not do. The next thing he did was fire up the crowd outside the White House on January the 6th, 2021. Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we're wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail.

So, let's have trial by combat. Ken Friedman thinks Steve Bannon whispered the trial by combat line in Giuliani's ear as he stepped up to address the crowd that day. He thinks Bannon knew it from Game of Thrones, but Giuliani just thought it sounded good. Either way, it's a problem for America's mayor. And so is this. Even the phony ballots of Ruby Freeman, known scammer.

You know the internet? You know what was trending on the internet? Where's Ruby? Because they thought you'd be in jail. Where's Ruby? It's crazy. It's crazy. That was, the minimum number is 18,000 for Ruby, but they think it's probably about 56,000.

But the minimum number is 18,000 on the Ruby Freeman night where she ran back in there when everybody was gone and stuff. She stuffed the ballot boxes. Let's face it, Brad. I mean, they did it in slow motion replay magnified. Right. She stuffed the ballot boxes. They were stuffed like nobody's ever seen them stuffed before. Yeah, go ahead. You're talking about the State Farm video, and I think it's extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video

and took it out of context. So the next day we brought in WSB TV and we let them see the full run of tape. And what you'll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected by... But where were the poll watchers, Brad? There were no poll watchers there. There were no Democrats or Republicans. There was no security there. That's the voice of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State, speaking truth to power when Trump phones to ask for help overturning the Georgia election result. That Raffensperger call was instantly famous. It shows Trump asking for exactly the number of

votes he needs to win the state. It names Giuliani in almost the same breath as an election theft co-conspirator. And it's an important piece of evidence in the Georgia racketeering case brought against the pair of them and 17 others. Which brings us, full circle, Rico to Rico, Giuliani the prosecutor to Giuliani the spider in another prosecutor's web. to Giuliani the spider in another prosecutor's web. That other prosecutor is Fannie Willis, district attorney of Fulton County in Greater Atlanta. I mean, this woman is so phenomenal. I pray for her every day, her family, her staff,

because these people are insane. Fannie Willis is an expert at putting together RICO cases. The jury was heavily African-American, the grand jury. African-Americans are not particularly fond of Rudy Giuliani. And he had the wrong prosecutor. I'm sure that she studied the Rudy Giuliani RICO playbook. So think of RICO as creating a very capacious housing for putting together an array of charges and people with a legal framework that will most likely withstand scrutiny from a court. So to put it in English, if there is a complex conspiracy, in the United States, conspiracy law really allows you to lump together as long as you can show some sort of agreement.

Daniel Richman is the former prosecutor who learned his trade on Giuliani's staff. Say you're dealing with organized crime, as he was. You'll have your gambling, you'll have your extortion operation, you'll have your labor racketeering, and they really don't fit together as easily as you'd like for a conspiracy charge. How great it would be, if you're a prosecutor, to have a legal framework that lets you to focus on a larger organization in which each of these activities plays a component part. What if you could show that this gambling operation

was really the money-making arm of an operation that also did extortion, used violent methods, including murder, to achieve its goal. Then all of a sudden, the gambling piece takes on a completely new, is seen in a completely new light. new light. And that's the value of RICO. And I think there's enormous value for Willis to have put together what she did in this indictment. What she did is to draw in evidence from around the country. In other words, there's a horizontal aspect to what she did, because what she's showing is that efforts to perpetuate claims of fraud in Georgia as a basis for manufacturing these fake electors was not a unique effort in Georgia, but was really part of a larger effort that involved activity in at least four other states. And when you hear that, all of a sudden the call to Raffensperg becomes a whole lot more meaningful. It's put in a context that gets you to understand what the defendants were really trying to pull off. They were trying to steal a US

presidential election. Willis is trying to hold them to account. Can she pull it off? Daniel Richman says the case is unwieldy and could easily be derailed. Harry Siegel says, remember you're dealing not just with Giuliani, but with Trump. Corey Siegel says, remember, you're dealing not just with Giuliani, but with Trump. This is a man who spent 40 years fucking people in court and with what seemed to be pretty good cases, who knows how to delay, to get evidentiary hearings, to win on appeals, to do things just within the letter of the law, to shred things when things happen that weren't fully within the letter of the law. And the idea that we're going to have an orderly trial, a set of established facts, juries decide, and that will be the end of this matter, is so childish and dishonest at this juncture, it just blows my mind. So what happened here? How does it end, really? Eileen Markey talks about a Trump-Rudy vortex that made New York meaner. Harry Siegel says it leads to nothing less than the end of American exceptionalism.

Most of the people we've talked to for this series agree on one thing. If you look carefully, the seeds of this bare-knuckle bromance and of its destructiveness were planted a long time ago. I would have to say to you, I've not been surprised at anything I've seen from Rudolph Giuliani and I'm not surprised at anything I've seen from Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I think as we have seen, extracts a lot from everybody and gives very little back. So Rudolph Giuliani was a good pawn to kind of tie up. And he had certainly,

obviously, legal background, and he was very well connected in many ways. And he had knowledge of Rico, how to be a crook. And so that was a marriage there that was just sort of solidified. Perhaps they had been dating and courting for all of these years. Tom Robbins, now a journalism professor at the City University of New York, has been watching them both for as long as anyone. So I don't see what Giuliani ultimately did to be a break from who he was before. I think that given the circumstances, he could do brave, good things, as he did right after 9-11, but at his heart, he was a heartless man. He was a cold and heartless man, very much like Donald J. Trump,

both of them driven by power and quest for fame and money. Giuliani is the supplicant now, selling his New York apartment, pleading with Trump to pay his legal bills. Could he flip? Does he have the goods on Trump if he wanted to? That is how RICO cases are supposed to work, and Ken Friedman thinks it's possible.

I believe him when he says he has insurance, in case Donald Trump throws him under the bus, as he said back then. So he's not going to jail for Donald Trump. I mean, I know him and I know the guy and I know the personality. And he's 79 years old. And if his lawyers are telling him he's going to be acquitted of all those charges. They're probably wrong. Same with Trump.

91 charges. All felonies. Can you imagine a jury saying not guilty 91 times? I can't. Or in Rudy's case, 13. I can't either. Whatever happens, they already have a serious legacy. They've shown it's still all too easy to weaponize race and crime in American politics

60 years after George Wallace became governor of Alabama. They've shown you can invent your own facts and drive the country to the brink of constitutional collapse by setting out to win at any cost. Trump could win a second term and pardon his old conciliare. In principle, there could be a wild geriatric White House reunion. But Hank Sheinkopf doesn't see it, especially for Giuliani. I understand cops. I understand politicians. I understand reporters. These things I understand. cops, I understand politicians, I understand reporters. These things I

understand. Do I think that this is going to work out well for him? It doesn't matter what happens whether there's a trial or there's a jury trial or he gets convicted or doesn't get convicted. He's finished. He's finished because he's, not because he's finished, finished.

He's finished because he can't be what he thought he was going to be. He thought he was going to rise above it all. He was going to be that Italian Catholic president. He was going to be the guy that could say, fuck you, I'm with the Yankees and I live in Brooklyn. You could kiss my ass. He was going to be the guy that took unorganized crime, who made Italian Catholics look good. He was going to be the guy that got rid of corruption and become President of the United States. Not going to happen. He'll be a footnote to a lot of this. By right, there should be a footnote at the bottom of Giuliani's Wikipedia page, noting his cameo in Painkiller, the recent Netflix series on OxyContin.

He's played by Ned Van Sant, taking Purdue Farmers' money in return for placing late-night calls to Congress to keep the Sackler family out of jail despite its central role in America's opioid epidemic. Right at the end, one Sackler brother berates another for hiring Giuliani. He says, In The Lift, after our interview with Andrew Kurtzman, Kurtzman offered a kinder summing up.

What happened, he asked? I know what happened. Giuliani got old and crazy and sold out. And drink. I don't think there's anything more to it than that. We said goodbye and crossed over to Brooklyn to meet Daniel Richman, who thought long and hard about what he called the real tragedy of Rudy. Somebody who was truly a player, truly a protagonist in his own story,

has become not a bit player, but a minion. plus subscriber, you get early access to episodes and ad-free listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do rate and review the show. This episode was written and reported by me, Giles Whittle. The producer was Charlie Bell. The editor was Jasper Corbett, with sound design by Carla Patella. TOTUS