Rudy Giuliani used to be known as “America’s Mayor”. Now he’s facing criminal charges for helping Donald Trump in his conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election result in the US state of Georgia.
Last week, Donald Trump and 18 others were indicted in a criminal case by prosecutors in Georgia. One of them was former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Trump and his co-defendants are facing charges under a piece of state legislation called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The allegation is that the group worked together in an attempt to commit election fraud in 2020.
As it became clear that he was losing to Joe Biden, Donald Trump and his allies tried to persuade Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” more than ten thousand votes. Georgia was also one of the states where Trump and his cronies drew up a list of fake electors, who would be tasked with sending false results to Congress.
Giuliani is a former Time magazine “person of the year” and a once respected lawyer. Later, he became President Trump’s attorney and spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, falsely claiming that it was “stolen”. He’s facing 13 counts including racketeering, making false statements and conspiracy to commit forgery.
For Giuliani, the charges are yet another blow to his reputation
In his final year as New York mayor, the city he had served for nearly eight years was attacked. On September 11th 2001 terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Centre killing more than two thousand people. Rudy Giuliani emerged as the public face of New York’s defiant response. To many Americans, he was a hero.
But in the past fifteen years, Rudy Giuliani has sullied his own reputation with a failed presidential campaign that left him $3.6 million in the red – and then a disastrous association with Trump.
Giuliani has been a staunch supporter ever since he announced that he’d be running for the presidency; he was a loyal aide throughout Trump’s time in the White House. Then when Trump lost the 2020 election, it was Giuliani who urged him to declare victory on election night.
He made some dangerous remarks after the election too: in a speech at the Trump rally in Washington DC on the day of the January 6th Capitol riot, he appeared to egg people on, claiming that there would be criminal evidence that the election had been “stolen” by the Democrats and calling for a “trial by combat”.
Today’s episode was written and mixed by Ella Hill.