Earlier this year, Donald Trump found it difficult to find good lawyers willing to represent him in the investigation into the Russia scandal. Eventually, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that he’d agreed to join the president’s legal defense team, and he had high hopes about what he’d be able to achieve.
In fact, Giuliani said at the time that he hoped to bring the entire investigation to an end “maybe in a couple of weeks.”
That was in April.
As it turns out, it wasn’t the only prediction he’s flubbed. Giuliani told The Atlantic, for example, that the “counter-report” to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s still-unpublished findings isn’t progressing well. The Atlantic reported that the former mayor has found it difficult in recent months to devote time to the document he claimed to be drafting over the summer.
That’s where New York‘s Jon Chait picked up the thread:
On August 30, the Daily Beast had a much more extensive update on the counter-report. It was “quite voluminous,” Giuliani boasted. “The first half of it is 58 pages, and second half isn’t done yet … It needs an executive summary if it goes over a hundred.” Giuliani said the first draft would be “in pretty good shape by next week,” though a more cautious source told the Daily Beast that “those involved expect the counter-report to be ready to go in the next two to three weeks.”
A profile of Giuliani in The New Yorker, published September 10, included another counter-report update: “Giuliani said that this ‘counter-report’ is already forty-five pages and will likely grow, adding, ‘It needs a five-page summary — for me.’” Note that just a couple weeks before, the first half alone had stretched to 58 pages, but now the entire thing was just 45 pages. This was perhaps a sign that the report was not proceeding quite as fast as promised.
And now that report, which Giuliani boasted was “quite voluminous,” doesn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon.
It’s almost as if Trump World’s rhetoric is utterly meaningless, especially in regards to the Russia scandal, and their claims should never be accepted at face value.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."