Witnesses told Jack Smith Giuliani consumed 'significant quantities of alcohol' on the job: report
An exclusive Tuesday, August 29 Rolling Stone report highlights United States Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into ex-President Donald Trump attorney Rudy Guiliani's possible "alcohol consumption" while assisting the former president's alleged ploy to overturn the 2020 election.
The former New York mayor was among 18 individuals indicted August 1 along with the 2024 MAGA hopeful by a Fulton County Superior Court grand jury on charges related to their alleged 2020 election interference.
Per Rolling Stone, "Smith's team of federal investigators have asked" witnesses "questions about how seemingly intoxicated Giuliani was during the weeks he was giving Trump advice on how to cling to power, according to a source who’s been in the room with Smith's team, one witness's attorney, and a third person familiar with the matter."
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The publication reports:
Last year, when the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack held public hearings, the panel aired video clips of depositions of Trump brass, which included senior Trump adviser Jason Miller telling congressional investigators: 'I think the mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president' on Election Night.
When these clips went viral, Giuliani angrily responded in a tweet that he 'REFUSED all alcohol that evening,' and that he was 'disgusted and outraged at the out right lie.'
However, the report notes, "None of this stopped claims of his public drunkenness from entering the public record, in the form of another high-stakes, wide-ranging investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump's efforts to cling to power."
Furthermore, sources told Rolling Stone that "Some witnesses told Smith's team that they saw Giuliani consuming significant quantities of alcohol; some told the special counsel’s office that they could clearly smell alcohol on Giuliani's breath, including on election night, and that they noticed distinct changes in his demeanor from hours prior."
An ex-Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Mitchell Epner said, "In order to rely upon an advice of counsel defense, the defendant has to, number one, have made full disclosure of all material facts to the attorney. That requires that the attorney understands what's being told to them. If you know that your attorney is drunk, that does not count as making full disclosure of all material facts."
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Rolling Stone notes:
Federal prosecutors often aren't interested in investigating mere alcohol consumption. But according to lawyers and witnesses who've been in the room with special counsel investigators, Smith and his team are interested in this subject because it could help demonstrate that Trump was implementing the counsel of somebody he knew to be under the influence and perhaps not thinking clearly. If that were the case, it could add to federal prosecutors' argument that Trump behaved with willful recklessness in his attempts nullify the 2020 election — by relying heavily on a lawyer he believed to be working while inebriated, and another who he bashed for spouting 'crazy' conspiracy theories that Trump ran with anyway.
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Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required).
