Jack Smith puts the screws to Rudy Giuliani

Jack Smith’s team met with Bernard Kerik for five hours today and answered questions that were mostly about Rudy Giuliani’s role in trying to overthrow the election. We know this because Kerik’s own lawyer informed the media about it.

Kerik’s lawyer is publicly spinning this as Kerik having gone in to defend Giuliani’s election-related antics. But that’s not how these things usually play out. It feels more likely that Kerik met with prosecutors in the hope of saving himself by throwing Giuliani under the bus, but we’ll see.

In any case, the nature of this Kerik interview makes clear that Jack Smith is indeed targeting Giuliani for indictment. Giuliani is identified (but not named) as “Co-conspirator 1” in the January 6th criminal indictment of Donald Trump, along with five other co-conspirators. None of these people have been indicted yet. But it’s becoming very clear that they soon will be.

What’s Smith doing? He’s presumably trying to make Giuliani and the other five co-conspirators realize that he has them nailed, and thus pressure them into cutting deals. The Feds always try to flip people upwards against the biggest fish in exchange for leniency. Even if co-conspirators don’t want to flip on Trump, they’re still going to be pressured into cutting a simple guilty plea deal without cooperation for less leniency.

So what we’re watching is Jack Smith putting the screws to Rudy Giuliani and the other co-conspirators, trying to get them to flip, and setting them up to be indicted if they don’t. Smith made a point of indicting Donald Trump first, in order to start the clock toward getting to his trial. Now Smith is seeking to flip these other people against Trump so they can testify against Trump at trial. Failing that, they’ll simply go down with him.