By Dana Milbank
Rudy Giuliani started Tuesday in the manner Americans have come to expect of the president’s lawyer: He attacked former FBI director James Comey by tweeting a cartoon image of Bashful from Disney’s “Snow White.”
Giuliani deleted the tweet, and anyway, it’s not clear why he chose Bashful. Considering Giuliani’s recent antics, the character that comes to mind is Dopey.
In fact, hours after the aborted Bashful missive, Giuliani was dopey once again. He had told CNN on Sunday that “no one signed” a letter of intent for Donald Trump to build a Moscow project. On Tuesday, CNN obtained the letter, signed by Trump.
Giuliani, asked by the New York Daily News to explain himself, said, “I don’t think I said nobody signed it.” Completing the reversal, he said “of course” Trump signed it: “How could you send it but nobody signed it?”
The “fool” has been a dramatic fixture at least since Shakespeare scribbled, and Giuliani is the fool for our time. Occasionally he speaks accidental truths, but mostly he plays the clown. He’s America’s crazy uncle at a time when, according to a Wired tally, seven sets of prosecutors and investigators are pursuing at least 17 court cases involving Trump.
“Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message,” an alarmed Giuliani tweeted a few weeks ago, calling Twitter “card-carrying anti-Trumpers.” In fact, Giuliani had accidentally sabotaged his own tweet with a punctuation error — “G-20.In” — that automatically created a hyperlink to a web address in India. A clever observer quickly bought the domain and created a page that said “Donald Trump is a traitor.” Giuliani’s errant accusation was all the funnier because he’s also Trump’s “cybersecurity adviser.”
Right after the hyperlink high jinks, Giuliani tweeted a string of gibberish: “Kimim ° has f.” A previous Giuliani tweet saying only the word “You” prompted a fill-in-the-blank festival.
The former New York mayor, 74, has long been a loose cannon, asserting that there had not been any “successful Islamic terrorist attacks” during the George W. Bush administration, saying Trump’s travel ban was a legal way to do a “Muslim ban,” and predicting a “pretty big surprise” right before Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Alternately ill-informed and indiscrete, he’s just the guy you’d want as your lawyer.
Giuliani began as Trump’s lawyer in the spring by comparing FBI agents to “stormtroopers” and later claiming a law-enforcement informant was a “spy.”
He pivoted from describing Michael Cohen as “an honest, honorable lawyer” who is “not going to lie” to a “proven liar” who has “lied all his life.”
He said he would charge special counsel Robert Mueller’s office “with a lance” to defend Ivanka Trump, but Jared Kushner is “disposable.”
He undermined months of Trump’s “no collusion” claims by proclaiming instead that “collusion is not a crime.”
He defended Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by saying “truth isn’t truth.”
He admitted publicly that the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was held “for the purpose of getting information about Clinton,” upending the official line that it was about adoption.
And, days ago, he raised the possibility that associate Roger Stone gave Trump advance notice that WikiLeaks would release emails about Clinton stolen by Russia, saying “if” Stone had, “it’s not a crime.”
Clearly, some Giuliani dopiness is an effort to divulge damaging information gently. But he often makes matters worse.
Giuliani announced that Trump reimbursed Cohen for hush money to a porn actress. But he seemed baffled when told Cohen had claimed it was his own money: “He did?” Retreating, Giuliani said Trump wasn’t told about the payments, “but even if he was told, he wouldn’t have remembered it.” Further backpedaling, Giuliani said, “I’m not an expert on the facts” and issued a written statement “to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days.”
A similar mop-up came after Giuliani volunteered on TV that there had been a second meeting between Trump associates and Russians. Hours later, he said the just-referenced meeting “never happened.”
On Sunday, Giuliani was back to truth-isn’t-truth, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that “unless you’re God … you will never know what the truth is” from Cohen. And Giuliani told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Mueller would interview Trump “over my dead body; but you know, I could be dead.”
Perish the thought! We need Giuliani’s entertainment. But when he dies, there should be a memorable scene when he goes before the One Who Knows Truth.
“I didn’t lie,” Giuliani will say, “but even if I did, it wasn’t a crime to be Dopey.”
Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter @Milbank.
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