What a fall. Rudy Giuliani has to appear before a special jury in Atlanta on Wednesday. The 78-year-old is not summoned there as a witness, but as a possible suspect.
At the height of his career, he was the most famous mayor in the world. In 2001 he was honored for his work after the terrorist attacks in New York Time Magazine was named Person of the Year and received an Honorary Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. In 2008, even the White House seemed to be within reach.
Then came Donald Trump, for whom Rudy Giuliani worked as a lawyer. He was one of the driving forces behind attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result. The focus was on the state of Georgia, where the election was particularly close. Trump personally called the authorities in the capital Atlanta and asked them to find 11,780 votes for him.
Previously, he had sent Giuliani to the Atlanta Capitol for meetings of Republican-dominated legislatures. She tried to persuade the lawyer to annul the election result and to throw Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, not Joe Biden, but Donald Trump. To do this, he recruited 16 Trump-loyal electors to compete with the official electors.
Initially, the prosecutor was smiled at
Giuliani told one lie after another. At a meeting on December 3, 2020, he presented a video and claimed it showed two poll workers pulling a suitcase full of fake Biden votes from under a table. Although the authorities immediately clarified the facts, Giuliani continued to spread his claims. The women “secretly passed around USB sticks as if they were bottles of heroin or cocaine,” Giuliani said a week later. The women received death threats, as they were later to relate in Washington at the hearings on Trump’s attempted coup; all they had done was slip each other mints.
Manipulation of elections is a punishable offense in Georgia, as is lying to the authorities. That’s why Fani Willis, the prosecutor of Fulton County, the district of the capital Atlanta, opened a criminal investigation in January 2021. It was initially ridiculed as a self-portrayal of a vengeful democrat; as is customary in the United States, Willis was elected prosecutor by voters. But now many Republicans have lost their laughter because Willis has proven to be a tough lawyer whose previous actions have been supported by several courts.
With judicial approval, Willis has convened a special grand jury that has been working on the events and questioning witnesses for several months now. Giuliani was also initially summoned in this role, but now he is considered a possible suspect, as it became known on Monday. Most of the false electors are now also possible suspects. The Special Grand Jury will not determine her guilt, including an indictment. But she will prepare a report that the prosecutor can later use to bring charges. That now seems increasingly likely.
Giuliani tried to avoid questioning: his lawyers argued that he had several stents inserted in July and could not fly to Atlanta. But Giuliani had bought several plane tickets with cash in mid-July, including to Zurich and Rome.
Giuliani could face several years in prison
Whether he will say much in front of the Special Grand Jury is doubtful. As a possible suspect, he can refuse to testify if he would incriminate himself by doing so. Giuliani told right-wing broadcaster Newsmax that he was acting as Trump’s attorney and that their meetings were confidential. “When you turn lawyers into suspects because they defend their clients, then we start living in a fascist state,” said Giuliani, himself a former prosecutor in New York. However, not only the judges in Georgia see things differently, but also in the state of New York and the capital Washington. They suspended Giuliani’s law license for lying in Georgia.
If convicted in Georgia, Giuliani faces several years in prison. That would put Donald Trump in serious trouble: If the lawyer acts criminally, what then applies to his client? For John Bolton it is a clear case. Trump’s national security adviser is now one of his arch-enemies. At CNN, he commented on the latest developments in Georgia: “If Rudy Giuliani gets in trouble, then surely Trump does too.”