Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference about lawsuits related to the presidential election results, at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Thursday Nov. 19, 2020.
Sarah Silbiger | The Washington Post | Getty Images
President Donald Trump is sweating over his campaign lawyers’ dismal and often outlandish efforts to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s projected electoral victory.
Trump is worried that his campaign’s legal team, which is being led by his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is comprised of “fools that are making him look bad,” NBC News reported Monday.
That crew, which has unironically called itself an “elite strike force team,” to date has failed to win any legal victories that would invalidate votes for Biden, the former Democratic vice president, even as the legal eagles tout wildly broad claims of fraud for which they have offered no convincing evidence.
On Sunday, one of the strike force’s members, the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, was effectively fired after suggesting — again without any actual proof — that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia were part of a plot to rig the election for Biden.
Powell’s ouster came days after she made similarly over-the-top claims at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.
Trump has complained to White House aides and outside allies about how Giuliani and Powell conducted themselves at that event, NBC reported.
Before Powell got the axe Sunday, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a close Trump ally and former top federal prosecutor, called the president’s legal team a “national embarrassment.”
But when asked why Trump doesn’t fire the former New York City mayor Giuliani and other attorneys who remain on the team, a person familiar with the president’s thinking gave a profane, shoulder shrug of an answer.
“Who the f–k knows?” that source told NBC News.
For now, Giuliani has kept his job as the president’s point man on the election challenge, even after a week in which he gave a widely derided argument in Pennsylvania federal court, only to see a judge on Saturday issue a scathing dismissal of the campaign’s vote challenge lawsuit.
Giuliani, who himself is a former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also presided over the press conference at RNC headquarters where he stood and watched Powell promote the campaign’s most far-fetched vote fraud allegations to date.
At that event, Giuliani perspired so heavily that sweat apparently blackened from hair dye conspicuously dripped down his cheeks as he made baseless allegations of electoral skullduggery.
Trump, who is obsessed with television and the personal appearances of people on it, was not happy with Giuliani’s look at the press conference, a person familiar with the president’s reaction told NBC News.
Also still on the Trump campaign team is senior legal advisor Jenna Ellis.
Within hours of the Trump campaign suffering its major defeat in the Pennsylvania election case Saturday night, Ellis tweeted that respected Republican pollster Frank Luntz had “MicroPenis Syndrome.”
Luntz’s sin was linking to a tweet from Ellis last week that suggested Giuliani was getting on swimmingly with the judge in the case.
“Best parody account on Twitter,” Luntz had japed.
“You media morons are all laughing at @RudyGiuliani, but he appears to have already established a great rapport with the judge, who is currently offering recommendations on martini bars for Team Trump in open court,” Ellis had written.
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign had no immediate comment on NBC News’ reporting.
