Jack Smith Just Wondering If Rudy Giuliani Was As Think As You Drunks He Was On Election Night
Buuuuuuuuuurp.
It has long been reported that Rudy Giuliani was extremely fucking drunk on election night 2020, and also a number of other days in his life. He’s always insisting he was not drunk at various times when it appeared he was very drunk.
Trump idiots Jason Miller and Bill Stepien told the January 6 UNSELECTS that Giuliani was shitwasted on election night. It was in Carol Leonnig’s and Philip Rucker’s book I Alone Can Fix It (Wonkette cut link).
We’re not covering revolutionary new material here. Oh look, a box of stories!
Riiiiiight.
It’s now being reported that Special Counsel Jack Smith is in particular kind of obsessed with figuring out just how drunk Giuliani was on election night, and also at points after, to assess whether Donald Trump — a famous teetotaler — was fully aware he was taking legal advice on stealing an election from a drunk lawyer. He apparently has asked lots of witnesses this.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report at Rolling Stone that it might be very handy in knocking down one of Trump’s most important defenses:
In their questioning of multiple witnesses, Smith’s team of federal investigators have asked questions about how seemingly intoxicated Giuliani was during the weeks he was giving Trump advice on how to cling to power, according to a source who’s been in the room with Smith’s team, one witness’s attorney, and a third person familiar with the matter.
They want to know if Trump “ever gossiped with them about Giuliani’s drinking habits, and if Trump had ever claimed Giuliani’s drinking impacted his decision making or judgment.” They want to know if anybody’s ever warned Trump about it, or said, hey Trump, you know how drunk old Roodles the Wonder Drunk is right now? Maybe you should not be listening to him at this partic moment?
Shit is getting extremely detailed here:
Furthermore, the special counsel’s office has probed how drunk witnesses and others believed Giuliani to be during specific and consequential moments of the tumultuous Trump-Biden presidential transition. Investigators asked for details that showed precisely how these witnesses knew firsthand the attorney was drinking while counseling Trump on subverting and overturning the 2020 presidential election.
And if Trump knew he was listening to a babbling drunk lawyer and taking their advice and did it anyway, because perhaps that babbling drunk lawyer was saying what he wanted to hear?
If that were the case, it could add to federal prosecutors’ argument that Trump behaved with willful recklessness in his attempts nullify the 2020 election — by relying heavily on a lawyer he believed to be working while inebriated, and another who he bashed for spouting “crazy” conspiracy theories that Trump ran with anyway.
(Sidney Powell.)
We have known for a while now that a big part of Trump’s defense would likely be the “advice of counsel” defense — namely that poor Trump was too helpless and stupid and led astray by bad influence lawyers to bear any culpability for trying to steal the election and overthrow the Republic. It’s bullshit. Trump knew, and was told repeatedly, per the indictment, that his lawyers’ cockamamie schemes for overturning the election were DSM-V-grade clownfuckery. Mike Pence told him. He told Pence, “You’re too honest.”
RS talks to Mitchell Epner, former Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, who briefly summarizes how “advice of counsel” defenses work. In essence, the defendant has to give all material facts to their lawyer. If they know their lawyer is drunk as shit, then that lawyer is not a good receptacle for all material facts. Moreover, Epner says:
Defendants looking to rely on that defense also have to have “reasonably followed the attorney’s recommended course of conduct in good faith,” according to Epner. “Now if, for example, Trump was getting two sets of advice from an attorney: one before 4 p.m. and when the attorney hadn’t been drinking and a second, much more aggressive set of advice after 4 p.m., when he had been drinking and this was a pattern, it would not be reasonable to rely on the drunk advice.”
So that’s what this is about. And it’s reportedly bearing fruit with Jack Smith’s witnesses — people saying they smelled booze on Rudy’s breath, on election night and other times; people saying they’ve seen him drinking “significant quantities of alcohol”; and of course:
Some have already told investigators that they were directly aware of moments when Trump had talked to others about Giuliani’s drinking, and that Trump spoke negatively about his then-top lawyer’s alcohol consumption.
In response to all this reporting, the Giuliani camp responds that nuh uh, and retorts that other people who are friends with Rudy say Rudy wasn’t drinking on election night, therefore nuh uh. And Rudy is always INSISTING he is not drunk.
Giuliani himself has repeatedly and vehemently denied allegations that he was drunk when he encouraged Trump, against the express wishes of some of the then-president’s senior aides, to falsely declare victory on Election Night 2020. The former New York City mayor has also pushed back on claims that his drinking contributed to his shift in public image from post-9/11 “America’s Mayor” to raging Trumpist. “I’m not an alcoholic,” Giuliani told NBC New York in 2021. “I probably function more effectively than 90 percent of the population.”
For sure.
Ninety percent of which population, sir?
Rereading the quotes again from the Leonnig/Rucker book seems germane right now, so here is how Guardian summarized them way back when:
A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near. [...]
“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. [...]
“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.”
Yeaaaaaaah, literally no idea what Jack Smith is so fixated on here.
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
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From my experience with alcohol (extensive during my late teens and early 20s), alcohol doesn't seem to make you do anything you weren't already considering doing, it just makes it seem like more of a good idea.
If you're happy when you start drinking then you end up a happy drunk, if you're miserable then you end up crying in a corner, if you're a treasonous bastard then you end up a treasonous drunk bastard.
If I had a nickel for every election I tried to overthrow while drunk, I could probably buy myself a South American dictatorship by now. Hic! 🥴