"Giuliani Is at Risk of Criminal Exposure": Why His Ukrainian Adventure Could End His Legal Career

Rudy Giuliani pursued the presidency twice and never came anywhere close to becoming a contender. His official campaign for the nomination in 2008 and his exploratory effort in 2012 burned through more than $65 million and won (at most) one Republican delegate. Yet Giuliani has somehow made himself into a central figure—and perhaps an indispensable one—enabling and shaping the presidency of Donald Trump. He has turned up as a key player during the three most important moments of Trump’s political career: In late October 2016, when he fanned the flames around Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio; for much of 2018 and 2019, when he became Trump’s personal lawyer and helped talk the president out of being questioned by special counsel Robert Mueller; and now, as Trump’s freelance muscle and investigator in Ukraine, trying to dig up dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

For anyone who lived through Giuliani’s two terms as mayor of New York City, his pivotal, histrionic place in the Trump drama is both mind-blowing and totally consistent: “A small man in search of a balcony,” in the words of the immortal Jimmy Breslin. Giuliani’s current role has roots in his long-running animosity toward Hillary Clinton, who won the U.S. Senate seat Giuliani desired way back in 2000. Now the extended ripples of that fixation, which seem to include an eagerness to exonerate Paul Manafort, may end up sinking both Giuliani and his White House client.

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has been tracking Giuliani’s involvement in Ukraine for months, long before a whistle-blower came forward with detailed allegations in August. “All of [what Giuliani has said about it] is damaging, incriminating, and worrisome,” Murphy told me on Monday. “It’s unprecedented to have the president running a parallel foreign policy operation through his campaign. This is totally unacceptable, to have the president’s political fixer openly bragging about coordinating with the State Department. You have to have some kind of wall between the White House and the reelection campaign, and the president is openly conflating the two. In Ukraine, it’s not surprising that they’re very confused about whether to treat Giuliani’s overtures as official U.S. policy or not.”

Murphy traveled to Kiev in early September and—along with Republican Senator Ron Johnson—met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. On Wednesday, at the United Nations, Trump accused Murphy of threatening Zelensky in that conversation. “I raised for [Zelensky] the danger of Ukraine appearing to be a political agent of the president’s reelection campaign,” Murphy told me before Trump’s attack. “This was an official diplomatic meeting. I did not have a specific conversation with [Zelensky] about the details of Giuliani’s communications with his administration…I find it extraordinary that both [Trump] and Rudy Giuliani are so brazenly open about their belief that it’s okay for the two of them to be pressing the Ukrainian president into the service of the president’s reelection campaign.”

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