Trump Case in Georgia What We Know The Indictment The Prosecutor Key Players The Judge Trump’s Lies

tment The Prosecutor Key Players The Judge Trump’s Lies The Investigation

From ‘America’s Mayor’ to Criminal

Defendant: Giuliani’s Long Tumble
An indictment in the Georgia election conspiracy case marked
perhaps the lowest point in the career of Rudolph W. Giuliani,
who had staked his legacy on blind allegiance to the Trump
administration.

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Rudolph W. Giuliani speaking about voter fraud in November 2020. His efforts to
undermine the election led to criminal charges on Monday. Erin Schaff/The New York
Times

By Dan Barry

Aug. 15, 2023

Early the scrum of the 2016 presidential campaign, the political

in
strategist Rick Wilson bumped into an old boss and strongly
advised him not to cast his lot with Donald J. Trump. No good
would come of it.
“Even if he wins, he’s going to destroy you,” Mr. Wilson
remembered telling Rudolph W. Giuliani. “This guy’s going to
humiliate you.”
Mr. Wilson recalled being dismissed as a provincial Floridian
unable to understand the bond between two New Yorkers — outer-
orough strivers who walked the Manhattan streets with
proprietary airs and were now within grasp of once-unimaginable
power.
“He’s going to take care of me,” Mr. Wilson said Mr. Giuliani would
tell those around him. A cabinet post, probably. Maybe secretary of
state.

Never happened. Instead, Mr. Giuliani became Mr. Trump’s

secretary of aggression and blind allegiance: his attack dog, legal
adviser, unindicted co-conspirator — and now, co-defendant in a
criminal conspiracy case.
The two friends from New York, along with 17 others, were indicted
Monday in Georgia in a broad racketeering case centered on the
sobering charge that they illegally plotted to overturn the 2020
presidential election in favor of its loser, Mr. Trump. Adding to the
ignominy for Mr. Giuliani, 79, is that he was once an innovative
prosecutor who specialized in federal racketeering cases.
“I think it’s going to be scary for him,” said Mr. Wilson, a former
Republican who worked as an adviser to Mr. Giuliani a quarter-
entury ago and is a leading conservative critic of Mr. Trump. “The
justice system is ringing his bell and calling him to account.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani responded to his indictment by calling it
“just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing
President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling
regime.” The Georgia case, he added in his prepared statement, “ is
an affront to American democracy and does permanent,
irrevocable harm to our justice system.”
On Monday night, as the grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., prepared
to hand up the 41-count indictment, Mr. Giuliani could be seen on
his nightly livestream show, “America’s Mayor Live,” watching a
broadcast of the goings-on at the Atlanta courthouse, making
sardonic comments and trying to appear unfazed.
“He’s the consummate happy warrior,” Ted Goodman, Mr.
Giuliani’s political adviser, maintained.
Still, the criminal indictment of Mr. Giuliani, his first, marks the
lowest point so far in his yearslong reputational tumble. Once
heralded as a fearless lawman, game-changing New York City
mayor and Sept. 11 hero, he is now defined by a subservience to the
45th president that sometimes veered into buffoonery.
Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who worked under
Mr. Giuliani when he was the United States attorney in Manhattan,
is among a legion of former colleagues who struggle to reconcile
the Rudys of then and now.
“I found him to be an inspiring leader,” recalled Mr. Richman, now a
professor at Columbia Law School. “He was very focused on the
law, committed to what the right thing was — and doing it.”
He said that while Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, from 1994
through 2001, had its highs and lows, “he rose to the occasion on
Sept. 11th,” reassuring New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in Georgia

A fourth criminal case. Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a
fourth time on Aug. 14 , this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described
as his efforts to unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. The
indictment includes 13 charges against Trump, as well as charges against 18
of his allies. Here are some key takeaways:

Now?
“In his sad commitment to be relevant, he has thrown himself in
with a crew where facts and the law are either irrelevant or there
to be twisted,” Mr. Richman said. “It’s the thirst for relevance. The
thirst to be in the mix.”

Less than decade after leaving City Hall amid international

a
acclaim — he was Time magazine’s 2001 Person of the Year — Mr.
Giuliani was a political also-ran. His inept and costly bid for the
Republican presidential nomination in 2008 left the campaign
about $3.6 million in debt and the candidate, as he later admitted,
feeling intimations of irrelevance.

In 2008, Mr. Giuliani made a failed bid for the presidency, leaving him with feelings of irrelevance. Chip
Litherland for The New York Times

This was
an especially dark period for Mr. Giuliani, according to
the journalist Andrew Kirtzman, whose 2022 book, “Giuliani: The
Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” describes the former
mayor as depressed, self-pitying and drinking to excess.
But Mr. Trump came to his aid, Mr. Kirtzman wrote, providing Mr.
Giuliani and his then wife, Judith Nathan, with several weeks of
refuge in a secluded cottage at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.
Mr. Giuliani was able to return the favor, as well as return to the
spotlight, several years later. During the 2016 presidential election
season, he not only endorsed Mr. Trump — against the advice of
the likes of Mr. Wilson — he became a defender so ferocious that
some wondered about his mental well-being.
But when Mr. Trump became embroiled in a federal investigation,
led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, into possible
Russian interference in the 2016 election, Mr. Giuliani replaced the
president’s personal lawyer and, once again, emerged as his
fiercest defender. Dealing with a divorce from his third wife and no
longer holding a well-paying position at a prominent law firm, he
thrust himself ever deeper into the chaotic Trumpian sphere.

A meeting with President-Elect Donald J. Trump in November 2016 at his golf club in Bedminster,
N.J. Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Before long he was working to further the president’s political

ambitions by trying to persuade top Ukrainian officials to
investigate and damage Mr. Trump’s likely rival for the 2020
election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. His immersion into Ukrainian matters
was so deep that federal prosecutors in Manhattan opened a
criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani that was eventually closed,
but not before a search warrant had been executed at his Upper
East Side apartment.
All the while, Mr. Giuliani’s pattern of curious legal interpretations,
provocative statements and odd behavior kept him in an often
unflattering spotlight.
One example: He was duped into appearing in the Sacha Baron
Cohen satire “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which the
president’s personal lawyer is seen putting his hands down his
pants while reclining on the bed of a young actress posing as a
reporter. He later said he was tucking in his shirt after removing a
microphone.
All mere prologue.

On Election Night 2020, with Mr. Trump’s chances fading by the

hour, the president nevertheless declared victory, while also
alleging electoral fraud, egged on by a conspiracy-focused Mr.
Giuliani. Later, in testifying before the congressional commission
investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump aides described Mr.
Giuliani as having been highly intoxicated that night, a description
he has rejected.
Several days later, on Nov. 12, Mr. Trump’s election lawyers advised
the president that they could find no evidence of election fraud,
notwithstanding what he had been asserting publicly. But Mr.
Giuliani prevailed again, this time by sharing the specious theory
that Dominion voting machines had converted thousands of Trump
votes into Biden votes, and by encouraging the president to file a
lawsuit in Georgia.
Mr. Giuliani’s actions from this point on are detailed in Monday
night’s indictment, which echoes the federal indictment filed earlier
this month, in which Mr. Trump was charged with plotting to
overturn the results of the 2020 election and Mr. Giuliani appears
as unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1.”
The most recent indictment describes, step by frantic step, how Mr.
Giuliani possessed a bullheaded determination to prove against all
evidence that the election had been stolen, leading a supposedly
“elite” team of lawyers that filed dozens of legal challenges across
the country and hitting the road with outlandish theories.
Each step, the indictment said, constituted “an overt act in
furtherance of the conspiracy” — legal terminology no doubt
acutely familiar to the former federal prosecutor.
Two of his news conferences approached political farce. The first
came outside the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company in
Philadelphia, near a crematorium and a sex shop, where he made
easily refuted allegations about ballots cast by the dead. The
second is remembered for a dark liquid, possibly hair dye, trickling
down Mr. Giuliani’s face as he cast further doubt on the election
results.

Mr. Giuliani held an election-fraud news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia,
near a crematorium and a sex shop. Mark Makela/Reuters

A central stop on his fraudulent-election tour was Georgia, where

an audit of ballots had already confirmed that Mr. Trump had lost
the state. Still, Mr. Giuliani appeared at state legislative
hearings to
make a series of false, even outrageous, claims. Among them:
That election workers had suitcases filled with questionable ballots
that they would count after Republican poll watchers left; that
10,315 dead people had voted; that some ballots had been counted
five times; and that two Black election workers, Ruby Freeman
and her daughter, Wandrea Moss, who goes by Shaye, had been
“quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if
they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.”
The women were actually passing a ginger mint. They have since
sued Mr. Giuliani, who recently acknowledged that his statements
were false.

A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations

Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President
Donald Trump? We’re here to help.

Key Cases and Inquiries: The former president faces several

investigations at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related
to his business and political careers. Here is a close look at each .

Case Tracker: Trump is at the center of four criminal investigations. Keep

track of thedevelopments in each here .

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s

2024 presidential campaign? Can a convicted felon even run for office?
Here is what we know, and what we don’t know .

By early January 2021, some 60 legal challenges to the election

results in battleground states, including Georgia, had failed. Yet Mr.
Giuliani remained committed to blocking the presidential
inauguration of Mr. Biden.
On the morning of Jan. 6, he addressed a pro-Trump rally in
Washington, shortly before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol
and violently disrupted the congressional certification of the
election. “Let’s have trial by combat,” Mr. Giuliani exhorted the
crowd.
That night -— with the Capitol damaged and the nation
traumatized — he continued to lobby members of Congress
to
block the certification of the election results, at one point leaving a
voice mail message meant for Senator Tommy Tuberville, an
Alabama Republican, with Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from
Utah.
Mr. Lee later texted Robert C. O’Brien, then the national security
adviser, to say, in part: “You’ve got to listen to that message. Rudy
is walking malpractice .”

By positioning himself as Mr. Trump’s spearhead, Mr. Giuliani

assured himself of the relevance he craved — but at irreversible
cost to his legacy as an American of consequence in the late 20th
and early 21st centuries.
Many who served in the Trump White House blame Mr. Giuliani in
part for the two impeachments of their leader. He has been
suspended from practicing law in New York and Washington for
his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and an ethics panel in
Washington recently recommended that he be disbarred.
“We have considered in mitigation Mr. Giuliani’s conduct following
the Sept. attacks as well as his prior service in the Justice
11
Department and as Mayor of New York City,” wrote the District of
Columbia Bar’s board on professional responsibility. “But all of that
happened long ago.
“The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past
accomplishments. It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose
and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists
in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done.”

Mr. Giuliani has other legal woes, among them a recent lawsuit
filed by Noelle Dunphy, a former assistant, that accuses him of
wage theft, sexual harassment and alcohol-fueled boorishness,
saying that his sexual gratification was an “absolute requirement”
of her job.
The lawsuit includes squirm-inducing audio transcripts. Through
his adviser, Mr. Giuliani has said that the relationship was
consensual, and he emphatically denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Giuliani, who has intimated to friends that he is nearly broke,
also faces financial challenges, rooted at least in part in his fealty to
Mr. Trump, who refused to pay him for his legal work. Finally, this
year, Mr. Trump’s super PAC paid $340,000 to a vendor working on
Mr. Giuliani’s behalf.
Some recent career choices smack of desperation. Last year, Mr.
Giuliani participated as a costumed contestant on “The Masked
Singer” reality program. Dressed as a jack-in-the-box, he sang an
off-key version of “Bad to the Bone.” And through the personalized
video app called Cameo, he has been recording a customized video
for weddings, birthdays and other events for $325.

On his Cameo account, Mr. Giuliani sells personal video greetings for $325. Cameo

“I can do a happy birthday greeting, or a happy anniversary

greeting, or wish someone good luck on a wedding, or the birth of a
child,” Mr. Giuliani says in a Cameo prototype. “We can talk about
politics, we can talk about sports, or maybe motivation, or a pep
talk. Sometimes people need that.”

Mr. Goodman, Mr. Giuliani’s aide-de-camp, said the former mayor

and personal lawyer to a president remained the “ultimate
Renaissance man and consummate all-American.” As for the many
challenges before him, Mr. Goodman said it was all part of a
“concerted effort by the ruling regime to send a message: Look
what we can do to America’s Mayor.”
On Monday night, Mr. Giuliani bantered away on his “America’s
Mayor Live” program, as the chyron below his image prophetically
read “Indictment could come **ANY MINUTE** now.”
He had dressed formally for the occasion, in a dark-blue suit with
the requisite American-flag pin affixed to its lapel, and was sitting
at a desk in his longtime Upper East Side apartment, which he
recently put on the market for $6.5 million.
For more than an hour, Mr. Giuliani described Mr. Biden as feeble
and corrupt, referred to himself as “a real prosecutor,” decried plots
to block another Trump presidency and urged viewers not to be
down.
“We’ve got a chance to fight back,” he said. “It’s called the 2024
election.”

Mr. Giuliani discussing the Georgia indictment Monday on YouTube. via YouTube

In the middle of the vitriol and resignation, though, Mr. Giuliani

paused to promote the dietary supplements of a company that
recently agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a consumer-protection
lawsuit in California over false-advertising claims.
He opened two bottles of the stuff, called Balance of Nature, and
shook out a few tablets.
“I’m going to need some strength,” America’s Mayor said as he
washed the pills down with water. “We have to make a trip down to
Atlanta, Georgia.”
Dan Barry longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and
is a
“About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics,
including New York City, sports, culture and the nation. More about Dan Barry
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 17, 2023 , Section A , Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Allegiance That Hastened Giuliani’s Slide . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Our Coverage of the Georgia Case Trump

Former President Donald Trump and 18 others face a sprawling series of charges
for their roles in attempting to interfere in the state’s 2020 presidential election.

A Fourth Indictment: For the fourth time in as many months, Trump was charged
with serious crimes — a development that shows how what was once
unprecedented has now become surreally routine .

What Happens Next: Trump has until noon on Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender to
authorities in Fulton County. The script that officials in Atlanta will follow for his
arrest and booking is likely to deviate from the standard operating procedure .

The Trial: Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, filed a motion seeking
a March 4 start date for the trial of Trump and his allies. But experts say this could
be a stretch .

RICO Charges: At Georgia are racketeering charges

the heart of the indictment in
under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act . Here’s
why such charges could prove to be a powerful tool for the prosecution .

Who Else Was Charged?: Rudy Giuliani , who led legal efforts in several states to
keep the former president in power, and Mark Meadows, the former White House
chief of staff, were among the 18 Trump allies charged in the Georgia case.

A Scoop Long in the Making: Reporting

Chidi, a freelance journalist, by George
played an important role in the indictment in Georgia. Finding himself in the right
place at the right time had been no fluke , he said.

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