Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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When Rudy Giuliani made his supposedly errant calls to an NBC News reporter in recent weeks, it was largely seen as a case of a bumbling idiot tripping over his own feet.
Maybe so. Giuliani certainly isn’t a picture of professionalism — he often seems to be competing with his client, President Donald Trump, to see who can appear more erratic, unhinged and unfit to do their job.
But given the Trump team’s chronic lying, scheming and scamming, nothing emerging from this administration can be taken at face value. So until there’s corroborating evidence proving that Giuliani simply goofed up, it’s entirely possible that he intentionally placed the calls to plant bad information or promote a false narrative.
This group loves to play at being super spies and masters of dark political arts, after all. Trump has been at it for decades, back to his days of masquerading as his own spokesman, “John Barron,” in calls to publicists and the media promoting himself and his business. As president, he was central in concocting the phony cover story about adoption being the subject of Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous meeting with Russian operatives to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Now come the two alleged butt-dials, including one in which Giuliani repeated his unfounded allegations about Joe and Hunter Biden’s activities in the Ukraine and claimed he was being unfairly attacked by the left for going after a prominent Democratic politician.
“The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you,” he says in one voice message.
Perhaps this was indeed Giuliani making a mistake many of us have made.
But there’s at least some possibility the calls were the latest strategy by Trump and his fellow goons — William Barr, Giuliani, Stephen Miller and the like — to defend against the indefensible. When they can no longer get their GOP minions to storm barricaded secure rooms with their cellphones in hand, when they can no longer prevent patriotic Americans from telling the truth to Congress in an impeachment inquiry, when most thinking Americans no longer believe a word that is tweeted by POTUS or uttered to the whir of helicopter blades, then resorting to butt-dials as a strategy could be next.
Keep in mind, Giuliani’s calls came while the administration was trying to concoct a phony story about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election, which would allow it to exonerate Russia and thus provide justification for ending sanctions against that hostile nation.
People are eager to think the president and all of his men are idiots, and are laughing at them.
But idiots or not, they’re crooked. Anything these rats say or do should be viewed as suspect until there is evidence to authenticate it.
