As has been noted ad nauseum, if you were a writer of fiction and you put all the oddities of Trump world into one script, nobody would believe it. They would throw it back over the transom at you. In fact, they’d throw the transom. You may have heard Michael Cohen refer to “the garbage can orbit of Donald Trump,” when talking to Alisyn Camerota in a TV interview. Rudy Giuliani is the chief bag of rotted shrimp tails and cat food cans in that sphere, and he’s plenty worried. We mean mucho mas, break the scales worried.  Ay caramba. Bess Levin, Vanity Fair

Ask Rudy Giuliani, or his son, Andrew, if the former mayor of New York City is in legal trouble at the moment, and you’ll undoubtedly get an eye-bulginghands-flailing response that Donald Trump’s personal attorney has done nothing wrong in his life and that the only person who should be worried about his legal exposure is Hunter Biden. Obviously, that is not true at all given that (1) Giuliani’s multiyear quest to dig up dirt on the president‘s son uncovered nothing, and (2) experts say Rudy is very much in trouble. Calling Wednesday‘s raid on Giuliani‘s apartment and office an “extremely significant” escalation of the federal investigation into his Ukraine dealings, former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara said this week that there is a strong chance the former New York City mayor will be charged. At that point, prison could be in his future.

All of which makes Michael Cohen, who was once in a very similar situation, think Giuliani is “absolutely” going to turn on Trump to save himself. Appearing on CNN on Thursday, the ex-president’s former “fixer,” who was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, predicted that Rudy is panicking circa now, and despite whatever he and his son claim, knows that he’s in trouble. Why? For starters, he ran the Southern District of New York, which is currently investigating him, from 1983 to 1989 and knows what kind of power it holds. “There’s no doubt that he’s nervous…. And it’s rightfully so that he’s nervous, because he knows the power of the SDNY is unlimited, and they use that power,” Cohen told Alisyn Camerota. Noting that Giuliani likely “has no interest in going to prison and spending the golden years of his life behind bars,” Cohen said, “Do I think Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat? Absolutely. He certainly doesn’t want to follow my path down into a 36-month sentence.” […]

Asked if he thinks Donald Trump is scared about what may come out of the Rudy situation, Cohen said there was no question the ex-president is presently soiling himself, right there in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. “He was afraid even when they raided my home and my law office,” Cohen said. “Because Donald Trump cares about only one person, and I say it all the time. He cares about only himself. So, he doesn’t care that they raided Rudy’s home. He doesn’t care that they raided Rudy’s law office. What is it going to do to affect me, is all that he’s thinking right now. What did stupid Rudy do? What did stupid Rudy write? What sort of text messages or emails? What sort of stupid things was Rudy up to that’s now going to implicate me? Because Donald knows he has enough trouble right now between Tish James and the attorney general’s office, as well as Cy Vance and the district attorney’s office here in New York…. He knows that he has all sorts of legal issues. He didn’t need more. That’s one thing I can assure you. He definitely didn’t need more. And Rudy is going to be, you know, a treasure trove. In all fairness, Merrick Garland is like Santa Claus, and Rudy’s devices are going to be like the presents that are waiting for you on Christmas day…. And what do I think? I think Rudy knows that he has trouble. I think Donald understands that Rudy will provide whatever information that he has to the SDNY.”

That will keep the Orange One sweating into his tanning spray, there is no question of that. And it wouldn’t matter if Joe Biden cloned Hunter and Hunter bought a new laptop every hour, that deflection isn’t going to save Trump, and he knows it.

Meanwhile, Giuliani goes on Fox News and calls Tucker Carlson “Hunter” by mistake, because he has Hunter on the brain, and points skyward when he talks about the iCloud. In this state of mind, Rudy decided it was a great idea to call up Alan Dershowitz, frequently an opponent in the past, but a fellow soldier in the Trump brigade now and for some time. Daily Beast:

Dershowitz said he has agreed to offer Giuliani and his team “constitutional advice” following the raid but isn’t one of his counsels of record. Dershowitz reiterated that his position is that “a subpoena should be the first recourse.”

“You do a search warrant only when you have reason to believe that the lawyer would destroy evidence,” Dershowitz said, adding that the Fourth Amendment provides particular protections when it comes to “lawyers and doctors and priests—anybody who has privileged information.” […]

Dershowitz’s involvement in the Giuliani case largely mirrors his involvement in advising the defense team for another Trump friend, pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell. Facing a $1.6 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems over his false claims about the company, Lindell turned to Dershowitz to provide advice on the case. While not an attorney of record in the Dominion suit, Dershowitz has offered legal theories for the Lindell legal team to pursue, regarding the possible First Amendment implications of the Dominion suit.

Dershowitz embodies that famous illustration of the lawyer. A cow is in the middle of the picture, and two people are fighting over it. One pulls the cow’s head, the other pulls the cow’s tail, as they glare at one another, across the length of the cow. The lawyer, however, is sitting on a stool in the middle, calmly milking the cow.

Maybe tomorrow’s headlines will read, “Matt Gaetz Turns to Dershowitz.” Would you even bat an eyelash? In this news cycle? With these people?

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11 COMMENTS

  1. “You do a search warrant only when you have reason to believe that the lawyer would destroy evidence,” Dershowitz said, adding that the Fourth Amendment provides particular protections when it comes to “lawyers and doctors and priests—anybody who has privileged information.” […]
    – – – – – – – – – – – – –
    Hmm. That’s funny since the following is the FULL text of the Fourth Amendment:

    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

    I’m not seeing anything in there that “provides particular protections” to any of the professions in the quoted section. There ARE laws that afford certain protections to CERTAIN information to members of those professions against UNREASONABLE SEARCHES but, with PROPER WARRANTS, those “protections” can be undone. For instance, a cop can’t just waltz into a medical office and demand privileged medical information regarding a suspect BUT that doesn’t mean investigators can’t subpoena such records WITH CAUSE (as the Fourth requires). The same applies to attorneys: What an attorney and a client discuss is generally privileged, but if said attorney isn’t acting AS an attorney at the time of a conversation (eg, the attorney and the nominal client are at a dinner party and are engaging in more-or-less routine party chatter, the attorney cannot be reasonably expected to be acting AS the other person’s attorney in that instance), then “attorney-client privilege” is determined not to exist. (And, of course, if someone brings charges against their attorney, the attorney can be expected to waive the privilege and the person cannot reasonably expect the attorney to maintain confidentiality during his own defense.) And as for priests, the line is very blurry. They are–by CHURCH law–required to break the silence of the confessional if the person confesses to killing someone (of course, there’s the sticky wicket that the person confessing may not be readily known to the priest) and if there’s a reasonable expectation that a priest isn’t really acting AS a priest (think of a young priest engaging in a pick-up basketball game with members of his parish and he’s being thought of as “one of the guys” rather than “the priest”), then anything told to him may not really be within the confines of “confidentiality.”

  2. I think there are, and should be more, people in line for this kind of resolution … the GOP has operated for so long in the open with their obvious plots to keep the money flowing to them and their donors, and to hell with fixing the roads and bridges or paying good wages to teachers and not to mention young new-hires trying to live with minimum wages …

    We all have heard and had a chance to surmise the guilt of the bigger fish in this pond, but there are SO MANY complicit Republicans of note that we don’t hear about by name or video reports …

    Biden seems to be the one to release the Kraken on republicans that have worked for themselves and NOT for the public good …

    The border wall is a good example of ill-spent money and Trumpism at its extreme, a painful drag on our country … something that never works and accounts for billions of dollars spent instead of setting up a better system of processing the frightened and poor people in need from the south … we the people, were spending about $700, a day for the secure and awful treatment of a detained child removed from the arms of their parents … an amount that could place each one in a nice hotel with clean rooms and bedding and food services and medical treatments … where did all those millions of dollars go?

  3. Considering the number of people in Trump**’s immediate circle who have been connected with sex with monors (Epstein Gaetz, Duggar, just to name a few0, I would not think that comparing Rudy to a priest is the best strategy here.

    • He did not compare Rudy to a priest, and besides “compare” does not mean “make equal to.” Dersh is only pointing out that lawyers, as well as doctors and priests, receive privileged information. A lot of the comments to this piece show how susceptible people, right or left, are to assimilating propaganda frames.

  4. DERSH now on Rudy’s Legal team ? See what #MichaelCohen says about it.
    THAT Rudy will turn on TRUMP and blab everything he knows…
    I dunno about that … if he does his life expectancy will match #JeffreyEpsteins.

  5. If someone told the world I was “like a priest”, I would wonder if I was being slandered. Not a very comforting message. I do notice however he is not an attorney of record for any of these skeeves so I would guess his day is over. Just one more has-been blowing hot air. Does he have a show on Faux Nuz yet?

    • Except he did not say he was like a priest. He only said that lawyers have privileged information, and so do doctors and priests. Notice that the outrage meter goes way down if you try to claim Drersh argues that Rudy is like a doctor.

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