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Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’

Donald Trump’s personal attorney unleashes in a new phone call with The Atlantic while Trump allies turn on him.

#DeludedRudy

Rudy Giuliani: ‘You Should Be Happy for Your Country That I Uncovered This’

President Trump’s personal attorney unleashes in a new phone call with The Atlantic while Trump allies turn on him.

ELAINA PLOTT | Published September 26, 2019 2:25 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted September 26, 2019 5:15 PM ET

When I last saw Rudy Giuliani for lunch, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington four weeks ago, his most pressing concern was that he had been locked out of his Instagram account. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, had a young woman named Audra, who told me she had won the “hottiesfortrump” Reddit channel’s “Miss Deplorable” contest three years in a row, there to assist him. As Giuliani and I spoke, roughly a dozen tourists asked him to pose for photos and congratulated him on the “work” he was doing for the country.

Today, Giuliani, and specifically his “work” on behalf of the president’s 2020 reelection campaign, is a key part of a whistle-blower complaint describing alleged efforts to solicit foreign interference in the upcoming election—perhaps the most damning scandal of the Trump presidency to date. The complaint alleges that White House officials sought to “lock down” all records of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump offered the help of Attorney General William Barr and Giuliani to investigate the dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the country. It also alleges that State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about Giuliani’s subsequent conversations with Ukrainian leaders.

Even among the president’s closest allies, Giuliani is now the subject of scorn. When I reached him by phone this morning, following House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s release of the full whistle-blower complaint at the center of the Ukraine scandal, he was, put simply, very angry.

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.”

Giuliani unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the “deep state.” He has spoken freely about all these topics since the moment he became a surrogate in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Giuliani has aired far-right conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health on national television. He has discussed his convictions about alleged Biden-family corruption with Trump in the White House residence. Still, until the Ukraine scandal broke, Trump’s allies were almost uniformly supportive of Giuliani to reporters, and current and former administration officials would often praise him for his loyalty.

Not until the back-to-back release of the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call and the full whistle-blower complaint did the mood change among this group.

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”

Giuliani said he’s looking forward to watching the State Department “sink themselves” as officials try to create distance from him. In the complaint, the whistle-blower wrote that officials, including Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, “had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to ‘contain the damage’ to U.S. national security,” and that the ambassadors had tried to help the Ukrainian administration “understand and respond to the differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the one hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.”

When I asked him about this specifically, Giuliani nearly began shouting into the telephone. “The State Department is concerned about my activities? I gotta believe [the whistle-blower] is totally out of the loop, or just a liar,” he said.

Giuliani went on to say that State Department officials had asked for his assistance. “If they were so concerned about my activities, why did they ask for my help? Why did they send me a bunch of friendly text messages reaching out for my help, thanking me for my help?” Giuliani said he planned to make sure these “friendly text messages” came out “in a longer story.”

He continued to stress that “all his facts” were “true” about the Bidens, though there is no evidence so far that they are. Giuliani argued the reason his attempts to root out corruption were front-page news, and not the alleged corruption itself, was because “the press idolizes Joe Biden and despises Donald Trump.” In a tweet last night, Biden said it was “clear” that “Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent,” calling it “an abuse of power that violates the oath of office and undermines our democracy.”

Giuliani has no intention, however, of slowing the smear campaign. “If this guy is a whistle-blower, then I’m a whistle-blower too,” Giuliani said. “You should be happy for your country that I uncovered this.”

Trump Is Panicking

The president has lost control of the news cycle, and doesn’t know what to do next.

David A. Graham | Published September 25, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted September 26, 2019 5:30 PM ET |

When Donald Trump stepped to the dais at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, he had a speech full of sharp lines: swipes at socialism, assertions of nationalism versus globalism, harsh words for Iran. Though Trump doesn’t enjoy delivering scripted remarks, he sounded listless, tired, and bored even by his own standards, struggling through the speech.

The president had a good reason to be distracted. The same morning, he had spoken on the phone with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, trying to stem a growing tide of Democratic demands for his impeachment. According to NBC’s Heidi Przybyla, Trump asked Pelosi whether there was some way they could make a deal. Pelosi said the White House had to release the whistle-blower complaint to Congress, as required by statute. “Tell your people to obey the law,” she said.

After weeks of defiance, Trump seemed to change course. Yesterday afternoon, he announced that the White House would release a transcript of his July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Later in the day, Politico’s Nancy Cook reported that the White House would release the whistle-blower complaint to Congress.

It was not enough to satisfy Pelosi. At 5 p.m. yesterday, she stepped before microphones in Washington and announced an “official impeachment inquiry,” with her support, into the president. It’s still unclear what this means materially, but it rattled Trump. At home in Trump Tower, he was stunned, believing that he’d managed to put Pelosi off in their morning conversation, according to CNN.

Chaos is a constant in the Trump administration, but this week there are signs of a far rarer impulse: panic. The indications come in Trump’s demeanor, including the listless speech; a combative, brief press availability with Zelensky at the UN this morning; and a rambling, stream-of-semi- consciousness press availability this afternoon. They also manifest in his actions, with the White House suddenly scrambling to release documents that it had spent weeks zealously defending. This is not strategic withdrawal, but a wholesale rout. Trump is probably right to be shaken. No matter how many administration officials try to spin an impeachment inquiry as somehow constituting good news for Trump, it’s not persuasive, even if the president is never impeached, much less convicted.

Though such moments are rare, this is not the first instance of panic in Trump’s political career. Each time has seemed like a moment of peril, and after each he has engineered a comeback. The first came in October 2016, after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women. Republican officials began pressuring Trump to drop out of the race, and his running mate, Mike Pence, even considered attempting to depose him, my colleague McKay Coppins reported. Trump appeared on television and apologized, showing unusual contrition. Within days, however, he’d gone back on the offensive, aided in part by WikiLeaks’ release of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

A second came in May 2017. Trump had impulsively fired FBI Director James Comey, apparently expecting that Democrats, who were furious over Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, would back him. Instead, he set off a furious political backlash, culminating in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment. Trump was apoplectic. “Oh my God,” he said. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.” But Trump weathered that, too.

Months later, he panicked again after his response to a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump initially condemned “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides.” Reeling from the backlash, Trump then offered a stronger statement condemning white supremacists, then flipped back, insisting there were “very fine people” marching with the white supremacists. This furor eventually calmed as well, though not without doing some permanent damage to Trump’s reputation.

There have been other moments of panic—in January 2018, around the release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, or the December 2018–January 2019 government shutdown. These were all times when control of the news cycle, consistently Trump’s most powerful political skill, has slipped from his grasp. In that regard, this moment could be even more dangerous. As I wrote yesterday, impeachment inquiries are unpredictable, protean things, prone to spinning off in unexpected directions. The president’s mastery of the news cycle is predicated in part on his control of what gets released and when, a power that seems to be slipping from his grasp at the moment.

But these past cases also demonstrate Trump’s remarkable resilience. Each crisis saps his standing a little, but he has repeatedly managed to pull himself out of a free fall in situations that would probably have toppled a less agile politician. The Ukraine crisis will be the greatest test yet of his abilities.

Trump’s Intelligence Chief Didn’t Make Anyone Happy

Joseph Maguire did not endorse the explosive allegations of an anonymous whistle-blower, but neither did he rise to the president’s defense.

Russell Berman | Published September 26, 2019 4:30 PM ET | The Atlantic | Posted September 26, 2019 5:27 PM ET

If President Donald Trump thought his handpicked choice to lead the nation’s intelligence community would unconditionally have his back before Congress, he discovered today he was sorely mistaken.

Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, was the first in what Democrats hope will be a line of Trump administration officials to testify in an investigation now officially pointed toward impeachment. And while the intelligence chief did not come close to denouncing the president, he made no effort to flatter him, either. He spent more than three hours testifying before a House committee trying in every which way to distance himself both from the White House and the explosive whistle-blower complaint that Democrats hauled him to Capitol Hill to discuss.

“I am not partisan, and I am not political,” Maguire said at the outset, as the former Navy vice admiral practically pleaded with lawmakers not to draw him into the scandal that prompted Speaker Nancy Pelosi to drop her long-standing opposition to pursuing Trump’s impeachment.

Maguire defended his own handling of the nine-page whistle-blower complaint, which landed on his desk 10 days after he started the job in mid-August and which the House Intelligence Committee released publicly just before this morning’s hearing began. But more consequentially for the president, Maguire defended the unnamed intelligence-community official who lodged the complaint, even as he repeatedly refused to judge the credibility of the allegations that were made.

“I think the whistle-blower did the right thing,” Maguire said under questioning from Representative Adam Schiff of California, the committee’s Democratic chairman. “I think he followed the law every step of the way.” That characterization stands in stark contrast to Trump’s denunciation of the whistle-blower as “partisan” and “a political hack job.” Maguire said it was his job to “protect and defend” the whistle-blower, whose identity he said he did not know; hours later, the president said whoever gave information to the whistle-blower was “close to a spy,” and should be punished.

The complaint alleges that Trump “is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” It relies heavily on the phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump repeatedly seeks to enlist his help in investigating actions by a potential Democratic rival for the White House, former Vice President Joe Biden. At Trump’s direction, the White House released a reconstruction of the call, and Maguire acknowledged that the complaint is “in alignment” with what those notes revealed. The complaint also alleges that senior White House officials acted immediately to “lock down” records of the call.

Democrats at the hearing immediately argued that the allegations amounted to a “betrayal” by the president of his oath of office and the nation, as well as a cover-up. They saw them as bolstering their case for an impeachment investigation. But they spent most of today’s hearing pressing Maguire on why he withheld the complaint from Congress, in contravention, they argued, of a federal whistle-blower law requiring him to turn it over.

“I believe that everything in this matter is totally unprecedented,” Maguire testified in his defense. He explained that because the complaint touched on a phone call between the president and a foreign leader, he thought it was “prudent” to first seek guidance from the White House counsel and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel as to whether the allegations would be protected by executive privilege. He also disagreed with a finding by the intelligence community’s inspector general that the complaint raised an “urgent concern,” which by law would require its prompt transmission to Congress.

Democrats harped on Maguire’s decision to go first to the White House and the Department of Justice on the grounds that there was an inherent conflict of interest given that the complaint implicated both Trump and Attorney General William Barr. Maguire said he felt he had no choice. “I am not authorized as the director of national intelligence to waive executive privilege,” he said.

Maguire denied a report in The Washington Post that he’d threatened to resign if the White House ordered him to withhold the complaint from Congress. But throughout the hearing, he did little to challenge the notion that this was a job he did not seek and, given his current predicament, did not particularly want. Maguire, 68, was running the National Counterterrorism Center when Trump asked him to serve as acting DNI after Dan Coats, a former senator from Indiana, resigned this summer. He picked him over Coats’s deputy, Sue Gordon, who left the government after Trump made clear he would not allow her to become acting director.

When Maguire was asked today whether he had discussed the whistle-blower complaint with Coats, he quickly replied: “I would not have taken the job if I did.” It was not entirely clear whether he was joking. (He added that he didn’t believe Coats or Gordon were aware of the allegations when they left the government.)

Democrats repeatedly tried to get Maguire to weigh in on the substance of the complaint and to judge the president’s actions. For the most part, he held his ground. Representative Jackie Speier of California asked if he was “shocked” by what he read in the complaint. After stammering for a moment, Maguire admitted, “When I saw that, I anticipated having to sit in front of some committee sometime to discuss it.”

Again and again, he said he did not know if the allegations were true. His only job, he contended, was to pass them along to the FBI and to Congress. “I have done my responsibility,” Maguire told Schiff. “It was not swept under the rug,” he said at another point.

The closest he came to defending Trump was when he told the committee that the president did not ask him to find out who the whistle-blower was. But he wouldn’t say more about his conversations with the president, even to admit that he and Trump had discussed the whistle-blower complaint. “My conversations with the president, because I’m the director of national intelligence, are privileged,” Maguire said. “It would destroy my relationship with the president in intelligence matters to divulge any of my conversations with the president of the United States.”

Republicans largely tried to enlist Maguire in the president’s defense, as they questioned how the notes or transcript of a call between Trump and a foreign leader wound up in the whistle-blower’s hands. One GOP member, Representative Michael Turner of Ohio, did criticize the president, saying his conversation with Zelensky was “not okay.” But he went on to dismiss the complaint as hearsay and needle Democrats for rushing to judgment.

Even if Maguire seemed to try his best to remain impartial, he could not resist a chuckle at the expense of Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer who is mentioned throughout the complaint as trying to get the Ukraine government to investigate Biden and his son Hunter. Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois got Maguire to say that, yes, he is concerned about private citizens taking on the role of a quasi-ambassador without vetting or approval by the Senate. Then, when Quigley asked the intelligence director if he knew what Giuliani’s role was, Maguire laughed. “Congressman Quigley,” he replied, “my only knowledge of what Mr. Giuliani does, I have to be honest with you, I get from TV and the news media.” He added: “I’m not aware of what he does, in fact, for the president.”

Maguire also broke implicitly with Trump on the question of election interference. The president has consistently questioned or rejected the conclusion of the intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and that its efforts continue. Maguire, however, not only endorsed that finding, he also labeled election security as the greatest national-security challenge the country faces—over the threat of a kinetic attack from North Korea, China, or another foreign foe.

He frustrated Democrats repeatedly by refusing to opine on the whistle-blower’s allegations or even to acknowledge they concerned a threat of election interference. But when Representative Denny Heck of Washington State asked Maguire whether it would be okay for any president to solicit electoral help from a foreign government, the man Trump wanted as his top intelligence officer briefly let down his guard. “It is unwarranted, it is unwelcome, it is bad for the nation,” Maguire replied, “to have outside interference from any foreign power.”

It’s that impulse Democrats hope to capitalize on during their impeachment inquiry—any feeling on the part of administration officials that they have to stick up for the country, no matter what it means for the president. If they can convince more officials to break ranks, their investigation will be that much easier.

Trump has littered the senior level of his administration with “acting” officials, a designation he has said he prefers because it gives him more “flexibility.” The implication is that they are easier to control and keep close, as Trump forces them to essentially audition for a permanent job they are fulfilling only temporarily. Maguire, however, doesn’t seem to want to play along. He may have frustrated the Democrats, but by not rising to the president’s defense, he may have frustrated his boss just as much.

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