Looks like Rudy Giuliani’s sidekick Bernard Kerik may be cooperating with Jack Smith
We still don’t know a ton about Rudy Giuliani’s proffer interview with Jack Smith and the DOJ last month. One news outlet subsequently reported that Giuliani was still going to be criminally charged even after his proffer, but very little else has surfaced. Has Giuliani gone on to cut a cooperation deal or not?
Either way, one of the side effects of someone like Giuliani doing a proffer interview is that if he really was looking for leniency, he had to have given up a number of the people around him. This kind of thing then puts pressure on everyone else to consider cooperating as well, for fear that Giuliani’s testimony may have been enough to do them in.
So it’s interesting to say the least that Giuliani’s longtime New York City sidekick Bernard Kerik is now gearing up to testify to Jack Smith’s grand jury, according to news buried several paragraphs into a new Washington Post article.
To be clear, criminal targets are generally not put in front of the grand jury, because they can’t be forced to testify against themselves. Yet here at the last minute, Bernard Kerik is suddenly being slotted to testify to the grand jury. It raises the possibility that he may indeed have some kind of cooperation deal in place.
It’s enough to make you wonder if Kerik flipped for fear that Giuliani would flip, or if Giuliani did his proffer session because Kerik had flipped, or if Giuliani and Kerik jointly decided that they would both cooperate against Trump, or what. There’s no way to know, based on this limited information, how these pieces fit together.
Nor is it clear why Jack Smith and his team are slotting Kerik to testify to the grand jury after they already sent a target letter to Donald Trump, suggesting in the process that the indictment was basically a done deal. It’s possible that Trump is being indicted without Kerik’s testimony, and that Kerik is testifying against someone else who will be indicted later. We’ll see. But something is afoot.
