Former White House official: Why use Giuliani instead of actual election lawyers?

Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Wednesday that he was worried about the central role Rudy Giuliani is playing as lead on the Trump campaign legal team arguing court cases alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential election, citing his strange behavior in a Pennsylvania courtroom on Tuesday.

“I’m still a little concerned with the use of Rudy Giuliani,” Mulvaney told Fox Business. “This is a specialty. This is not a television program, this is the real thing, and I was struck by a couple things that Rudy said in court yesterday.”

“I wish that it was being prosecuted a little more efficiently,” Mulvaney added.

Mulvaney served as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget from 2017 to 2020 and was acting White House chief of staff from January 2019 to March of this year. He is currently the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland.

Giuliani has been serving as Trump’s personal attorney since 2018. In that capacity he has made frequent appearances on television over the last few years to offer up conspiracy theories in his client’s defense.

Giuliani’s insistence on pushing Ukraine to investigate and dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in 2019 helped lead to Trump being impeached.

Despite – or perhaps because of — Giuliani’s past actions, Trump has put him in charge of his quixotic legal quest to reverse his election loss to Joe Biden.

During his appearance before the court in Williamsport, Giuliani forgot which judge he was speaking to, messed with his Twitter account, and brought up completely fabricated conspiracy theories about the election.

In one instance, Giuliani told the judge the campaign wanted to throw out 680,000 ballots cast in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia over claims that Republican observers had not watched the vote count.

But U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann explained to Giuliani that lawyers had deleted the poll-watching claims from their suit a few days earlier and said, “They’re now not before this court, so why should I consider them now?”

From the Nov. 18 edition of Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria”:

MICK MULVANEY: There is time to do this, I think it’s the right thing to do.

 

I’m still a little concerned about the use of Rudy Giuliani. It strikes me that this is the most important lawsuit in the history of the country, and they don’t — they’re not using the most well-noted election lawyers.

 

There are folks who use — who do this all of the time. This is a specialty. This is not a television program, this is the real thing, and I was struck by a couple things that Rudy said in court yesterday. So on one hand it needs to go forward, it absolutely does, I wish that it was being prosecuted a little more efficiently.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.