I Want Giuliani Taken Down to the Studs

I’m glad that Rudy Giuliani is now on the hook for $148 million. Whether he ultimately dies in jail or not, I want to see him ruined and penniless. There are many reasons for this, and there’s no need to exhaust them here. His behavior toward Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won this defamation judgment against him, is just one reason for my thirst for justice. His behavior in Ukraine which led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment is another one. But my main beef involves Election Night in 2020.

Jason Miller testified to the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee that Rudy Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” that night.

Before I go on, I need to pause to discuss Mr. Miller. He was the chief spokesman for the 2016 Trump campaign and was supposed to serve as the administration’s communications director. But that was derailed when it emerged that he had an extramarital affair with campaign staffer Arlene Delgado. Their child was born in July 2017, and nasty custody and support battles ensued.

This record seemed unproblematic to CNN, which promptly hired him to represent the Trumpist point of view on their network. But he was terminated from that job later in 2017 after allegations were published that he had impregnated an erotic dancer and then surreptitiously put abortion medication in her fruit smoothie, terminating the pregnancy. Miller denied this claim and sued for defamation, but his case was thrown out of court and he was ordered to pay the defendants’ court fees. For what it’s worth, the dancer denies the incident ever happened.

The latest twist is that Delgado is suing Miller for engaging in a “cycle of sexual coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking” during the time they were together.

According to excerpts of the court filing published by the Daily Beast, the first incident cited occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 19, 2016—the night before a presidential debate in the city.

The lawsuit claims Miller plied her with alcohol before taking her and another female colleague back to his room for a debate prep session. It said he then asked the other woman to leave.

“Delgado, who had had an extremely busy day and had had very little to eat, was inebriated, nauseated, and felt unwell,” the lawsuit said, according to the outlet. “The next morning, Delgado awoke in the bedroom portion of the suite, partially dressed, with her jumpsuit hanging around her ankle, what appeared to be vomit on the side of her pillow, and one of her high heels on the bed.

I am not endorsing Delgado’s claims, here, just pointing out that Miller is a sketchy individual.  More recently, he worked for the fascist Jair Bolsonaro both during and after his time as president of Brazil. He’s also behind the alt-right social media platform, GETTR, which is alleged to be under the control of Guo Wengui, the Chinese tycoon who was indicted in New York in June in a billion-dollar fraud case. When Steve Bannon was arrested for fraud by US Postal Service agents in August 2020, it was on Guo’s 28 million-dollar 152 foot-long yacht. Of course, Bannon received a pardon from Trump but New York State revived the charges and the case will be heard in May 2024.

That long digression was necessary, I think, because it illustrates the kind of people we’re dealing with here. This is TrumpWorld, and these folks lie more readily than they tell the truth. So, I wouldn’t necessarily take Miller’s word for it that Giuliani was drunk on election night in 2020, except that he has nothing to gain from lying about it. All things being equal, Miller would rather attack the TrumpWorld’s accusers than give them any kind of satisfaction. I suspect he told the truth in this case simply because he was under oath and saw no angle in perjuring himself on the former New York mayor’s behalf.

But, frankly, Giuliani’s drinking problem is so well-known and well-documented that it’s simply implausible that he’d be sober in any social situation.

…to almost anyone in proximity, friends say, Mr. Giuliani’s drinking has been the pulsing drumbeat punctuating his descent — not the cause of his reputational collapse but the ubiquitous evidence, well before Election Day in 2020, that something was not right with the former president’s most incautious lieutenant.

So, there Giuliani was on election night in a highly inebriated state. And how did he conduct himself and what result did it have?

According to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, authors of the forthcoming I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, Giuliani approached senior Trump aides early on election night at the White House.

“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.

The campaign manager, Bill Stepien, chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and senior adviser Jason Miller told him it was too early to know.

“Just say we won,” Giuliani said.

The aides said it was the same in Pennsylvania.

“Just say we won,” Giuliani said.

“Giuliani’s grand plan,” the authors report, “was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.”

Meadows reportedly responded, angrily: “We can’t do that. We can’t.”

But Trump did.

Now, if you’re familiar with the history here, you know that this wasn’t just a drunk man saying irresponsible shit. However impaired he may have been, Giuliani was following a pre-established playbook. Here’s an excerpt from Mother Jones.

On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Bannon repeated this publicly on his podcast on November 3, 2020, as detailed at the time by Media Matters.

I want to talk about something about stealing the vote. I was on Maria Bartiromo early this morning laying down — and even with Rudy [Giuliani] here a minute ago — the president is going to step up tonight between 10 and 11 o’clock. I’m going to pick a random number — 10:45, right before the 11 o’clock news he’s going to claim victory. He’s going to claim victory. He’s going to set the ground rules. He’s going to set the parameters.

Bannon’s timing prediction was a little off. It wasn’t until after Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, basically ending any chance Trump had of being reelected, that things got in motion.

Leonnig and Rucker, co-authors of another Trump bestseller, A Very Stable Genius, report that Giuliani refused to accept the early call of Arizona, another key state, by Fox News.

“Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani reportedly told a furious Trump. “You’ve got to go declare victory now.”

At 2am, Trump walked into the East Room.

“This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”

That was the moment that this country went from rectifying the error of Trump’s presidency to falling into a warring state from which there appears to be no cure at all. Giuliani was right in the heart of the plot. And he dutifully followed it up by unloading a torrent of misinformation in the press, in courtrooms, and even at landscaping centers.

The damage he has done to our nation has surpassed anything al-Qaeda accomplished on 9/11, a day on which Rudy actually performed admirably. He and Trump have broken the brains of the right in this country, to a point that they cannot discern truth from falsehood, and are actually clamoring for a fascist dictatorship.

Normally, I’d have pity on someone whose poor choices are partially explained by their substance abuse, but in this case Giuliani’s drunken behavior on election night in 2020 just makes me angrier. It made it all the more obvious that his advice shouldn’t be heeded, and yet it was followed to a tee.

I want to see him holding a cup begging for change. I wan’t him taken down to the studs.