The Trump Bus tire marks on Rudy Giuliani are becoming more apparent, and now Donald Trump has reportedly ordered him to stay off Fox News.
Gabriel Sherman’s latest In Vanity Fair notes that for more than a year, “a chorus of West Wing advisers,” including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have been advising Trump to fire Giuliani. But Trump resisted, apparently because, “He liked [Giuliani] on television,” according to Sherman’s source.
Now, not so much.
But as Giuliani’s legal woes mount, Trump is coming around to his advisers’ view that Giuliani is a liability, three Republicans close to the White House told me. The relationship has grown so strained that Trump has even directed Giuliani not to appear on Fox News, a Republican briefed on the conversations said. (A Fox source said Giuliani has declined producers’ requests to appear on the network in recent days). “Rudy is cut off from Fox News,” the Republican told me. One Republican close to Trump put it this way: “We had to do something, we don’t want Rudy out there. Every time he talks it’s bad for Trump.”
The turning point seems to be Giuliani’s Fox News interview on November 23 in which he claimed to have an “insurance policy” in case Trump throws him overboard. “Trump was pissed,” a source told me. Giuliani tweeted that his comment was “sarcastic” and later called Trump to apologize. The next day, the news broke that Giuliani associate Lev Parnas had turned over tape recordings of Trump and Giuliani to Congress. Then, on November 27, the New York Times reported that Giuliani tried to land business deals in Ukraine at the same time Trump assigned him to conduct a shadow foreign policy campaign to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Trump, sources said, was furious. “Trump hates when people make money off working for him,” a second former West Wing official said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
I’ve been reporting that Trump’s Fox buddies have been subtly and not-so-subtly telling him to dump Giuliani, too.
The strain between these two codgers is bound to get worse now that the House Intelligence Committee has just released phone records that, according to The New York Times, “illustrate the sprawling reach of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign first to remove the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, then to force Ukraine’s new government to announce criminal investigations for Mr. Trump’s political gain.”
I have a feeling Giuliani may need that “insurance” he claims to have against Trump before long.
Giuliani's bonkers November 23 interview, in which he sees the bus coming for him, is below.
(Giuliani image via screen grab)
The extent to which so many people around Trump apparently feel that they are above the law is jaw-dropping. And they continue to behave with that mindset that has already got so many in jail. Is that stupid? or what?
It would be totally self-serving of the Trumpsters to exploit Giuliani’s witnesses if they were credible, for example. Yet he appears to be struggling to get Pompeo’s State Department to grant them visas and Barr’s DoJ won’t take them seriously. This is the same Barr globe trotting to force through the Durham investigation into the origins of the Russia probe and who is in a fight with the IG to force the result he wants.
Then you have Giuliani being a bit of a weasel in denying his business dealings. I hear him saying he has no business in Ukraine. Yet, I understand the accusation by the NYT to be he tried to land deals, not that he was successful.
And, of course, the 3 ton pachyderm in the room is since this Giuliani screed we’ve learned he had multiple phone conversations with OMB around the time Ukrainian aid was being held up. Which in itself is a criminal act that 2 OMB officials quit over as did a staff lawyer to escape.
Giuliani runs his mouth on Fox News with such confidence. So if he’s so confident he’s got all this slam-dunk Biden criminality to spill why didn’t he testify before the House Intelligence Committee where GOP lawyers could have softballed him for 45 minutes to put a stake in the heart of the Biden campaign? Probably because this isn’t confidence, but brazen bravado!