***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***
“In Giuliani’s ungainly mugshot, there are no traces of myth, just a brittle resignation - the face of a man who flew too close to the sun.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, for Byline Times, 7 October 2023
Author’s note: I was speaking with a friend from Finland yesterday who was sharing details about Russian influence operations in Europe, and he noted: “It is indeed difficult for people to grasp that the Kremlin is operating from many different political perspectives at the same time.” Having devoured every Peter Pomerantsev book, I see how the Theater of Chaos and Despair is crafted. For those new to these pages, here is a compilation of my reporting on Pomerantsev’s work:
In his book, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” Pomerantsev writes:
“With no idea of the future left, facts become unnecessary. They are, after all, unpleasant things, reminders of one’s mortality and limitations… The process occurred in Russia harder and faster because cynicism and disillusionment set in earlier… everything turned into a dark carnival more rapidly. The Russian president turned politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first century entertainment.”
I begin here, because it’s difficult to grasp that media outlets such as Newsmax mask its torrent of conspiracies, Russian propaganda, and pro-Trump fealty with a backdrop of stars and stripes. This veneer of patriotism is designed to obfuscate links to Russian funding and encourage you to memory hole its $100 million payout to settle lawsuits brought by electronic voting systems firms for promoting Trump and his loyalists’ ‘Big Lie’ about the 2020 election. With those reminders now fresh in your mind, it’s maybe less surprising that Newsmax has chosen to offer a platform for disgraced and disbarred former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to spew racist venom on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
Longtime readers of Bette Dangerous are aware of Giuliani’s real history. As I wrote three years ago: American needs heroes. But a deep dive into Giuliani’s background reveals he was ‘a dictator in search of a balcony.’
Below is my original Byline report, which was published on 7 October 2023, another traumatic day in history.—hsc
Rudy Giuliani Was Never a Hero
Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates the spectacular fall of the former New York Mayor turned Trump associate
Originally published in Byline Times, 7 October 2023
On September 12, 2001, America needed a hero. The horror of the attacks the day before — terrorism on US soil — left a gaping hole in the soul of the country.
Nearly 3,000 people perished in the suicide attacks, carried out by 19 terrorists who had hijacked four planes. The first two planes flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted, preventing it from reaching its likely target — the nation’s capital.
Suddenly, the mayor of New York City was everywhere. Media appearances around the clock, a 79% approval rating that more than doubled from the 36% rating from the year before — seven years into his administration. Time magazine named him Person of the Year for 2001. It was Rudy Giuliani’s moment of glory.
Like Vladimir Putin, who went from faceless bureaucrat to national hero after multiple apartment bombings in Russia in 1999 killed hundreds of people, Giuliani had become a national figure. Putin, who was on TV vowing revenge each day, used the suspicious and conveniently timed bombings to boost his popularity and to launch the Second Chechen War. He became president just a few months after the bombings.
Giuliani, too, would use his newfound celebrity to attempt runs for higher office.
“Rudy became ‘America’s Mayor’ when the entire country adopted New York City as their own upon the demise of the World Trade Center at the hands of terrorists 22-years ago,” Martin Sheil told Byline Supplement. Sheil, a retired criminal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, worked with Giuliani in the 1980s and recalled a very different man.
“Rudy was larger than life back then,” said Sheil. “His fall was nothing short of Shakespearian. Cognac and cigars became a go-to habit of Rudy’s when surrounded by folks who never let him buy his own.”
Sheil told Byline Supplement the consensus among former colleagues was that Giuliani began to believe his own myth.
“He took off in hot pursuit of the ultimate political ambition - the Presidency - and flew too close to the sun, and just like in mythology crashed and burned when the voting public did not share in his self-adulation.”
There’s a popular saying on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that ‘everything Trump touches dies’. And Giuliani, as Trump’s former personal lawyer, has seen such a spectacular flameout it must be some kind of record. Who can forget the hair dye dripping down his face while promoting election lies, or the press conference at the Four Seasons Landscape storefront, adjacent to an adult boutique. Or the image of him being caught on camera with his hand down his pants from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm. In the film, a day-drinking Giuliani appears in a compromised position with an actress who is playing an underage girl. Giuliani did not know he was in a “Borat” film. He thought he was being interviewed.
It’s extra creepy in light of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s statements in a new book that Giuliani groped her “under my blazer, then my skirt” backstage at the rally that occurred before the January 6 Insurrection. Giuliani gave a speech that day where he encouraged the violent crowd to use “trial by combat”.
None of this becomes a ‘hero’.
As with the subjects of my recent Byline Supplement report The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro, closer scrutiny of Rudy Giuliani’s career reveals more myth than substance.
‘A Drop of 60 Points’
“Look at this — a drop of 60 points over the last 21 years,” CNN data reporter Harry Enten said in his analysis of Giuliani’s plunge.
During a news segment, he showed a graphic which revealed Giuliani’s favorability rating as he left the office of New York City mayor in 2002 (76%) beside his present day rating (16%).
Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett deflates Giuliani’s hero image in his book, The Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. He reported that Giuliani relocated the NYC Office of Emergency Management headquarters to the 23rd floor inside the World Trade Center in 1997, a decision that was widely criticized at the time due to the previous terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in 1993.
In a 2007 New York Times article, World Trade Center firefighters said Giuliani cast himself as “a hero for political gain”.
The myth of ‘America’s Mayor’ was also very lucrative. In a previous investigation into Giuliani, I learned his post-9/11 career included earning millions in speaking fees. He took in $11 million dollars for speeches in 2006 and 2007, operated a security crisis management company, both far more lucrative gigs than his attorney career.
As Trump’s personal attorney — just like Paul Manafort when he was Trump’s campaign manager — Giuliani worked for free. Both Manafort and Giuliani may have used Trump as a loss leader because both did business in Ukraine paid for by associates of Vladimir Putin.
“Giuliani was never a hero,” said Joshua C. Fidel, my co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, an investigative show about disinformation. “The only power these hollow men have is the power of myth — they’ve all been elevated… Trump is a ‘successful businessman’, Rudy is ‘America’s Mayor’, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Silicon Valley ‘will improve the world with their engineering and technological prowess’. It’s all lies. It’s all setups.”
Fidel said that when Giuliani was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York “he made his name off of breaking up the Italian mafia, with information fed to him by the Russian mafia, allowing the Russian mafia to establish a massive stronghold in New York.”
As documented in Craig Unger’s book, American Kompromat, Giuliani took $40,000 from an alleged Russian mob associate for his 1993 and 1997 mayoral campaigns. The spotter agent for the KGB, according to Unger’s sources, also raised millions of dollars for him at fundraising events. Giuliani later appointed the associate to serve on the New York City Economic Development Corporation, according to Unger.
Unger said Giuliani “invented the perp walk, playing the press brilliantly”. But he is not surprised that he is now taking the walk of shame himself.
“In working with Ukraine, Rudy was trying to drum up disinformation that would destroy Joe Biden, and obviously he failed at that,” said Unger. “It’s about time some real prosecutions happen.”
“Rudy’s darkest turn came when he took the job in Ukraine of passing on Russian disinformation to the American people while on the payroll of corrupt oligarchs,” Fidel told Byline Supplement.
And in fanning the Big Lie — promoting the phony narrative that Trump won the 2020 election — Giuliani not only had his law license suspended in both New York and Washington DC, he got his very own mugshot.
‘A Dictator Looking for a Balcony’
He is now one of 19 people facing RICO charges in a 98-page indictment in Georgia. Giuliani has been charged with 13 felony counts of racketeering, making false statements, and writings.
Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio once called him “the antichrist.”
In a four-part series from TIME Studios and MSNBC Films, When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story — filmmaker Rebecca Gitlitz told People magazine that before 2001, Giuliani was a polarizing figure:
“He’s always been a deeply racist, deeply misogynistic, deeply opportunist and ego-driven person. Rudy’s journey has always been about opportunity and skirting the law and skirting the system.. My favorite line of the entire documentary is that Rudy ‘is a dictator looking for a balcony’.”
For a while, he had his ‘balcony’, appearing regularly on Fox News and other cable news networks. In 2018, on Meet the Press, he famously said: “Truth isn’t truth.”
It is clear in retrospect that those in Trump’s orbit were actively trying to create a post-truth America. It’s this unreality — this erosion of believing one’s ears and eyes — that grooms people for fascism, according to Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works — The Politics of Us and Them.
When looking at the totality of his downward spiral, the list is staggering, and it’s all important but one thing stands out: his willingness to go to any length to keep Trump in power, even harming the lives of two women. He lied about two election workers, and a federal judge issued a default judgment, ordering Giuliani to pay sanctions of nearly $133,000 in a defamation and civil conspiracy lawsuit.
The women feared for their lives, and $133,000 seem a small price to pay considering the terror they endured.
Among the other memorable lowlights spurring his descent:
Investigations into his longterm Russian ties
An FBI raid for his role in the Ukraine disinformation plot to attempt to destroy Joe Biden
Opportunistic use of the falsely imprisoned Central Park 5 as his mayoral springboard
Leaks that Jack Smith is probing his drinking
Release of audio transcripts as part of a lawsuit brought by a former staffer alleging he forced her to have oral sex and intercourse
The staffer’s lawsuit also alleges Giuliani attempted to sell presidential pardons for $2 million
Like the Cult of the Genius Tech Bro, the myth created around Giuliani is not holding up under scrutiny — there’s a growing awareness that his legacy of being a hero was largely false.
‘The Unraveling’
“The unraveling has been a long time in the making,” Martin Sheil told Byline Supplement. “That Rudy got himself indicted for RICO charges he once made famous became the ultimate irony and led to the current sad state of affairs where he has to now beg for charity to pay for his own legal bills because he cannot even represent himself in court where he has been disbarred. But that ignominy might be the system doing a final favor for him. He won’t have a fool for a client.”
In a report last month, an FBI whistleblower said Giuliani may have been compromised by the Kremlin, and FBI leaders didn’t care. The agent, Jonathan Buma, said his leads tying Giuliani to Russian intelligence were dismissed by his supervisors.
According to Business Insider, the government of Ukraine asked the US to sanction Pavel Fuks, an oligarch who paid Giuliani’s company $300,000 to help improve the public image of Kharkiv. Fuks is the oligarch named by the FBI whistleblower who suspected Giuliani of being compromised by the Kremlin.
The Ukrainian oligarch has close ties to Moscow and according to the letter requesting to sanction him, he is accused of “corrupt economic practices, transnational crime, and adverse foreign influence”. He is now reported to be living in the UK, and has not, at the time of writing, been sanctioned in the US.
Although the US continues to slow-walk justice for foreign and domestic oligarchs, at least in the state of Georgia, there is great interest in seeing Giuliani prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
In Giuliani’s ungainly mugshot, there are no traces of myth, just a brittle resignation — the face of a man who flew too close to the sun.
There is something haunting, disturbing about that image. He looks like Jacob Marley in chains, but this is not a ghost story.
It’s a reminder that we need better heroes.
Byline Times, 7 October 2023
****
Coda: In the three years since that report, Giuliani has been permanently disbarred from practicing law in Washington DC, after his law license was stripped in New York state due to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Today, as we honor the fallen, I am also thinking of election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who Giuliani tormented with false accusations of election fraud, forcing them to endure four years of a “living nightmare.” Both successfully sued Giuliani, and ultimately settled out of court, allowing him to keep his homes and belongings in exchange for “compensation and his promise not to ever defame us.”—hsc
****
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.
I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while being supported by your memberships.
Thank you in advance for considering the following:
Share my reporting with your networks
Buying my ebooks
A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. A No. 1 Amazon best-selling author and award-winning film director, Cuda writes the Hot Type column in Byline Times, an independent UK-newspaper. She executed produced the film Kherson: Human Safari. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism and culture reporting.
🤍
Begin each day with a grateful heart.
🤍
****