Crime

Never Let Rudy Giuliani Forget What He Did

Giuliani is going around marching in parades like he’s some kind of hero. He's not.

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rudy giuliani

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

We live in a complicated world. At the root of many of the problems we face in America is the human instinct to seek simple explanations for complicated phenomena.

However, those of us who accept, and routinely grapple with, complexity can also suffer from an inverse source of paralysis. If you know that things in the world are complicated, and spend a great deal of your time looking into such things, it can start to seem like everything needs to be deeply investigated, at the risk of conclusions being jumped to.

Some things are just what they appear to be though. A guy kneeling on another guy’s neck for eight or nine minutes is a murder. One country invading another on the purported basis of the latter being ruled by Nazis despite having a Jewish president is a shameless land grab. And spending months spreading lies in an attempt to overturn a democratic election then telling an assembled mob to go engage in combat before they storm the U.S. Capitol is treason.

Yes, we’re talking about our old pal Rudy Giuliani once again.

Giuliani had a degree of success as a public servant early in his career, and he does deserve some credit for it. But then he spent the better part of the past decade as Donald Trump’s lackey and bumbling disinformation czar (and notably not as Trump’s attorney: remember that trying to blackmail Ukraine’s government, lying on cable news, chasing women young enough to be your granddaughter including in your unwitting role for the second “Borat” movie, and setting up press conferences at landscaping companies is not actually legal work). You shouldn’t get to ride the wave of your early legal success right on through your later crimes against your own country, especially when many of those crimes were committed on camera and in front of large crowds.

Yet, that seems to be just what Giuliani is doing. As my fellow Above the Law contributor Liz Dye pointed out this week, Giuliani is going around marching in f*cking parades like he’s some kind of hero.

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At least one patriot out there had the courage to rain on Giuliani’s parade a little bit, by shouting something indiscernible that caused him to lose his shit.

This was cool, although it is cold comfort. Your punishment for trying to overthrow American democracy should be more severe than getting yelled at as you parade around.

But it seems that’s what we’re left with. More than two years after the January 6 insurrection, Giuliani hasn’t really been subjected to any formal punishment. Licensing authorities in New York and D.C. suspended his law license. But since he wasn’t really practicing law anyway, that’s not much of a consequence.

We’re often encouraged by the powers that be to be patient, to let justice run its course. Which serves people in power well, because it means they don’t have to do anything or take any risks.

Despite what we’re told, there is no real reason that investigations into conduct that largely happened on TV have to take years. Emphasizing the importance of thoroughness is an easy copout for authorities. An investigation which only takes, say, a year, can still be quite thorough. You also can’t tell me that witnesses’ memories are just as clear years after the fact, or that tangible evidence does not degrade or get lost over time like anything else does.

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Before I went to law school, when I was an undergrad majoring in Justice Systems, I had a very smart professor who repeatedly hammered into students the idea that “justice delayed is justice denied.” Whatever happened to that concept?

Giuliani is reportedly facing multiple ongoing investigations into his obvious misconduct. I do hope that one of them eventually moves forward. Betting on human laziness is generally a good bet though, so I’m not exactly holding my breath at this point.

In the meantime, if you do see Rudy Giuliani somewhere, and your opinion is that he is a traitor based on observing his traitorous conduct, go ahead and call him a traitor. Or choose your own adventure and pick another relevant insult. Sometimes things really are exactly what they appear to be.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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