To Defend Trump, Giuliani Will Lean on Reputation and Connections

By hiring Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor and New York City mayor, as his lawyer, President Donald Trump will not be getting an agile trial tactician or a brilliant legal scholar.

Presumably, he will be getting what he wants: a trusted friend and a pit-bull supporter who can argue his side of the Russia investigation on the Sunday morning talk shows and behind closed doors.

On Thursday evening, not long after word emerged that he was joining Trump’s legal team, Giuliani acknowledged in an interview on CNN that his role would be a “limited” one and would largely focus on offering “a little push” to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to end his investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice or colluded with the Russians.

By his own account, Giuliani seemed to suggest that in defending the president, he would rely on his reputation, cellphone contacts and negotiating skills.

Although there was a time when Giuliani — a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan — was a courtroom lion who prosecuted Wall Street frauds, corrupt politicians and violent Mafia dons, a season or two has passed since he actually appeared before a judge or a jury. In the past 10 years or so, he has worked less as a lawyer and more as a pundit, security consultant and unofficial diplomat.

As an international fixer, Giuliani has developed something of a niche for working in — and with — troubled or unsavory regimes. He has, for instance, advised the police in Mexico City on how to deal with kidnappings and murders, instructed business leaders in El Salvador to eradicate their country’s rival street gangs and given counsel to the state-run oil company in Qatar.

In his televised appearances — often on Fox News — he has offered his opinions on such topics as Black Lives Matter (“inherently racist”) and Beyoncé's halftime performance at the Super Bowl (an “attack” on the police). He has also been one of Trump’s most ardent public advocates, supporting the president’s law-and-order platform while relentlessly attacking his opponents.

Which is not to say that Giuliani has let his law license expire. He played a potentially important — if narrow — role last year in the case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader who was charged in Manhattan with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran. And in 2014, he successfully defended video game designer Activision Blizzard against a lawsuit from former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who did not like his depiction in “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” one of the company’s most popular games.

It is, of course, unlikely that Giuliani will ever see the inside of a courtroom as the Russia investigation moves forward. The evidence so far suggests that he is planning a campaign of lawyerly diplomacy: less like Clarence Darrow and more like a volatile Clark Clifford. On CNN, for instance, Giuliani said, optimistically, that he would like to resolve the case in a “couple of weeks.”

Marc L. Mukasey, who has practiced law with Giuliani for more than a decade, most recently at the law firm Greenberg Traurig, noted that while Giuliani was “not often in the courtroom these days, he’s a counselor and he’ll be a great counselor to the president.”

“He has a track record of being a guy who can get things done,” Mukasey said, “and right now, getting this investigation done is important.”

The Zarrab case — which was prosecuted in Giuliani’s old stomping grounds, U.S. District Court in Manhattan — could offer a clue to how he will approach the Russia matter. In that proceeding, Giuliani has said in court filings that he and Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general, were retained by Zarrab to try to negotiate a diplomatic resolution to his case, outside of the court.

Giuliani and Mukasey, who is Marc Mukasey’s father, said in court papers that they had traveled to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and also discussed the Zarrab case with Trump administration officials outside the prosecutors’ office.

But their efforts appear to have been unsuccessful, as Zarrab ultimately pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

For several months now, Trump has been having trouble retaining legal talent, especially as the Russia investigation — and a separate inquiry into his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen — has started heating up. And according to officials at the White House, one reason that Giuliani was brought onboard was to beat back the narrative that the president’s legal ship is sinking.

With his connections in the Justice Department and his prosecutorial chops, Giuliani adds some ballast to a legal team that is currently composed of lesser lights. Trump’s other lawyers — at least, for the moment — include Jay Sekulow, who spent much of his career as a radio and TV host, and Jane Serene Raskin and Martin R. Raskin, who worked as federal prosecutors but are otherwise unknown. “Trump trusts him,” said Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Giuliani in the Southern District of New York. “Trump is his own guy and will do his own thing, but he trusts Rudy. He respects him and is more apt to listen to him than he might to someone else.”

McCarthy, now a columnist for the National Review, also noted that Giuliani was well positioned to advise the president on issues arising from the Cohen investigation. “He brings a unique knowledge of how the Southern District works — the bench, the office, the traditions,” he said.

Giuliani also shares the perspective of being investigated: James Comey, the former director of the FBI, said in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC this week that he had opened an investigation into whether agents in the New York office of the FBI leaked information to Giuliani about the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails. “I got fired before it was finished,” Comey said, “but I know I asked that it be investigated.”

If Giuliani’s central task is to persuade Mueller to set down his investigative sword, he is confronting an opponent who is, in many ways, his mirror image. Both men are 73 and spent a good portion of their lives in the federal criminal-justice system. In the early 1980s, when Giuliani was the associate attorney general, the No. 3 position in the Justice Department, Mueller was working in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. In 1989, when Mueller went to the Justice Department and served as an assistant to then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Giuliani was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.

“He’s a contemporary and a peer of Mueller and the president,” Marc Mukasey said. “He’s somebody with gravitas who’s been on both sides of the table.”