On Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was indicted in Georgia. Prosecutors say he made false statements in connection with President Trump’s conspiracy to undermine the 2020 election.
New Yorkers, of course, have been following Giuliani’s career for decades: from his time here as a federal prosecutor to his two terms as mayor, to his ascension to the national stage of the Republican Party.
But how did he get here? How did he go from being known by some as “America’s Mayor,” to an alleged co-conspirator in a national scandal?
““He was just governed by his greed and by this almost primal need for relevance,” said journalist Andrew Kirtzman, who has written two books about Mayor Giuliani, including Giuliani, The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.
Kirtzman also covered Giuliani during his tenure as mayor, including during the September 11th attacks. He spoke to “All Things Considered” host Sean Carlson about Giuliani’s rise and fall, and the pivotal moments that shaped his trajectory. Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Sean Carlson: Much of the recent controversy about Mayor Giuliani comes from his relationship to President Trump. How has their relationship evolved over time?
Andrew Kirtzman: Giuliani’s mayoral papers were available in the city archives, and what we found was a trove of communications between Giuliani and Trump and Giuliani’s aides and Trump. There was this terrific story in which Trump has decided to build the largest residential tower in the world, right next to the United Nations General Assembly building.
And there’s an agreement with the city, signed long ago, in which there can be no development higher than the General Assembly. Well, Trump, of course, wasn’t deterred. And there was this major kind of push to prevail upon Giuliani to reject this. Walter Cronkite, who was a resident of the area, protested. So did Walter Wriston, who was the president of Citibank at the time.
And Giuliani was not even…
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