Trump’s inner circle testified that Rudy Giuliani drunkenly told him to declare victory

At this point, what can you say about former New York City mayor-turned-gaseous attack dog for Donald Trump’s doomed election fraud campaign that hasn’t already been said? That his legal skills are so dubious to the point of disbarment? That he’s an embarrassing mess whose moral compass is about as fixed in place as his notoriously runny hair dye? That his alleged penchant for drunken inanity not only reportedly kept him from an administration job, but also managed to launch some particularly juicy palace intrigue stories?

Well, here’s a new one: According to testimony released Monday by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, Rudy’s apparently lush life may have gone from “personally embarrassing” to “potentially treasonous” when he allegedly recommended that Trump simply lie and say that he’d won the 2020 race on election night — all while apparently hammered out of his gourd.

In a series of taped depositions played by the committee, Jason Miller, the former president’s senior campaign adviser, identified Giuliani has having had “too much to drink,” describing him as “definitely intoxicated” when he recommended that Trump outright lie and declare unambiguous victory during an election night watch party at the White House:

“I think effectively Mayor Giuliani was saying ‘we won it, they’re stealing it from us, where did all the votes come from?’” Miller told investigators. He added that Giuliani went further, arguing that “‘we need to go say that we won’ and essentially that anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak.”

Former White House adviser and first-son-in-law Jared Kushner added at another point in the taped depositions that he’d shared his thoughts on Giuliani with the president, telling him Giuliani’s allegedly drunken ramblings were “not the approach I would take if I were you.”

Giuliani has long denied having a drinking problem (in 2018 he insisted to Politico that “there’s no proof of any kind that I take too much alcohol. That’s ridiculous”). But now, members of the former president’s inner circle have gone on the congressional record to describe him in exactly the same sort of exasperated terms usually reserved for the annoying barfly you just can’t get to leave you alone while you’re trying to have a quiet drink in peace.

This would all be the sort of embarrassing capstone to an ignominious stretch of being a shambolic public wreck that would, in any just and equitable universe, end Giuliani’s career doing ... well, whatever it is he does now. But because we live in this universe, Giuliani’s allegedly drunken antics ended up fueling one of the worst instances of political violence in American history instead. Go figure.