Attending a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Rudy Giuliani was asked if he would testify at the impeachment trial of his client, Donald Trump . But though Giuliani said that he would testify in the Senate trial , his answer created more confusion than it cleared up, as the former New York City mayor and United States attorney appeared to say that he would also want to prosecute the case against Trump.
In fact, Giuliani said, if he were to be given the job of the prosecution, “I will prosecute it as a racketeering case, which I kind of invented anyway,” as quoted by USA Today .
Giuliani, who was known for his high-profile prosecution of New York Mafia cases during his period as U.S. attorney in the 1980s, went on to say that it had been 30 years since he prosecuted a racketeering case, “but let’s see if I can still do it,” he said.
In addition to saying that he would testify, Giuliani also said he would “do demonstrations,” as well as “lectures” and “summations.” But Giuliani then said that he would “love to try the case.”
Giuliani, who has been at the center of a scandal involving Trump’s dealings with Ukraine that ultimately resulted in last month’s impeachment vote, did not explain what he meant by his desire to “try the case.” Why he would act as a prosecutor against his own client remained unclear.
Watch this clip while keeping in mind that Giuliani is talking about an impeachment case in which his client could be removed from office pic.twitter.com/l8nWMAqSu1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 1, 2020
According to an NBC News report, Giuliani himself may have become confused and believed for some reason that he was being asked whether he would testify not against Trump, but against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Giuliani has aggressively pushed the largely debunked conspiracy theory that Biden and his son were involved in corrupt business and money laundering in Ukraine. Even in the midst of the investigation into Trump’s attempt to force Ukraine into an “investigation” of Biden, Giuliani traveled to Ukraine to gather interviews for a low-budget cable “documentary” that should supposedly exonerate Trump and show “corruption” by the Bidens.
But the Ukrainian figures with whom Giuliani associated in his “research” for the documentary were largely a “questionable” cast of characters whose information would be “extremely dubious” at best, according to Ukraine-based journalist Christopher Miller.
When Giuliani returned from Ukraine on his “research” trip, he quickly met with Trump, who proclaimed that his lawyer “has a lot of good information,” and would present a report of his findings to Congress as well as to Attorney General William Barr, according to The Daily Beast . But there has been no indication that Giuliani has made a formal presentation of his findings to any legal authority as of yet.
