The notion that an "apparently inebriated" Rudy Giuliani gave Donald Trump a decisive reason to ignore other advisers and declare victory on election night 2020 has been hyped ever since House select committee vice-chair Liz Cheney mentioned it last week during a hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection. But as I showed in the New Republic last week and will now amplify here, Cheney and the committee's many witnesses, as well as some terrific journalism from the past 20 years, have demonstrated that Giuliani and Trump were working together long before 2020 — with more than a little "help" from millions of us — to turn the rule of law into a shield and sword for their distortions of the rule of law itself. They've been doing it together since at least 1989, although not as nakedly and brutally as since Trump became president.
In 2007, as Giuliani prepared to run his own (losing) presidential race in 2008, I warned in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other venues that anyone who'd pushed the limits of his mayoral prerogatives as fanatically as Rudy had done would be an imperious, overreaching president. Even in the 1980s, when he was the leading federal prosecutor in New York, some of his prosecutions had been overzealous and vengeful, and had failed. But at least he'd had to obey juries and federal judges back then. Had he been elected president in 2008, he would have appointed many of those very judges and U.S. attorneys.
