The New Yorker:

Toward the end of the 2016 Presidential election, Donald Trump was running a beleaguered campaign, trailing in the opinion polls and operating under a cloud of scandal and outrage. Many Republicans had given up hope of him winning. Some, including Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, had explicitly distanced themselves from the candidate. Through it all, though, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, stuck with Trump. In the campaign’s closing days, Giuliani served as Trump’s warmup act at campaign events.

On November 7, 2016, the day before the election, I caught their buddy routine at an evening rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. To get the crowd going, Giuliani focussed some of his remarks on Hillary Clinton, saying, “We have never had a person running for President who is so thoroughly corrupt.” The Trump supporters loved it. “Lock her up! Lock her up!” they chanted.

According to some reports, rabble-rousing wasn’t the only service that Giuliani provided to the Trump campaign. Appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show on Thursday night, James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., said that, under his leadership, the agency had looked into whether Giuliani received advance notice, from sources within the agency, of Comey’s controversial decision in October of 2016 to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. Comey couldn’t say what the outcome of the inquiry was; he was fired before it was completed.

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