Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, has been proffering quarter-baked legal claims for too long.

His argument for resisting the subpoena is feeble. His real choice is whether to litigate — advancing the Democrats’ argument that Trump and his allies are obstructing their probe — or capitulate — and hand over important evidence that could help support an article of impeachment.

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Any executive privilege claim is off the table. No court ever has extended the doctrine to communications with private non-government actors such as Giuliani. Moreover, Giuliani undisputedly represents Trump in his personal capacity, not his official capacity, which further invalidates any claim of executive privilege.

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Instead, Giuliani has suggested that his prospective testimony would be shielded by the attorney-client privilege. So for example, he told Fox News when asked about his prospective testimony “there’s something called attorney-client privilege.”

As frequently with Giuliani, it’s not clear if he is misinformed or is being mendacious. But what is clear is that he has no tenable claim to defend the subpoena on that basis.

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The attorney-client privilege exists, as the Supreme Court has made clear, to encourage clients to make full disclosures to their lawyers. Accordingly, the privilege covers confidential communications between lawyer and client and other privileged persons for the purpose of obtaining legal advice. (And it’s the client — here Trump — who must invoke it.)

First problem for Giuliani: He has disclaimed even acting as Trump’s lawyer in his work in the Ukraine. He rather saw himself as a sort of free-wheeling private ambassador. As he put it, “I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government.”

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But assuming the court were nevertheless to decide that he was acting as a lawyer, Giuliani next runs into an immediate buzzsaw. None of the communication between Team Giuliani and the Ukraine government was for the purpose of providing legal advice to Trump.

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Giuliani clearly had a political mission of getting Ukraine to provide dirt on former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter; no amount of tortured reasoning could convert that effort into confidential communications made for the purpose of providing legal advice to Trump.

Even the direct communications between Trump and Giuliani don’t appear to have been made for the purpose of providing legal advice. To the extent they consisted of Trump’s orders dispatching Giuliani to do his bidding in Ukraine, no privilege attaches.

There’s more. The attorney-client privilege is subject to an exception — the “crime fraud exception” — for communications related to the commission of a crime. Here Giuliani’s conduct, as directed by Trump, arguably relates to a course of possible criminal conduct such as extortion or a campaign finance violation.

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Finally, Congress has long asserted that attorney-client privilege may not legally shield compelled congressional testimony. If Giuliani — or rather, Trump — were to advance even a legally sound attorney-client claim, Congress could and likely would hold him in contempt, thus moving the matter into the court.

Giuliani might nevertheless figure he can stonewall Congress, like other big-shot gunslingers such as Attorney General William P. Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. But he would be playing a more dangerous game, for himself and Trump. As a non-government official lacking even the semblance of an executive-privilege argument, Giuliani is liable to face a dressing down by the court when his spurious claim is litigated. And that, in turn, would provide fodder for Congress’s prospective second count of impeachment, which centers around obstruction of Congress’s inquiry, including by invoking meritless claims to eat up time.

Don’t expect Giuliani to develop humility anytime soon. But he may figure out that in his current straits he needs to listen to saner voices — like that of his own lawyer, Jon Sale, a respected former Watergate prosecutor. He may even conclude he should comply with the dictates of the law.