Rudy Giuliani's late-career taste for wealth led him to lucrative foreign consulting work, and those business ties apparently prevented him from becoming secretary of state after he helped get his old friend Donald Trump elected president in 2016, The Washington Post and The New York Times recount. But Giuliani joined the president as an unpaid personal attorney in 2018, the Times adds, and since then, "step by step, he has escorted President Trump to the brink of impeachment."

Without Giuliani's "push for money and frank yearning for relevance, the Trump Ukrainian initiative might never have amounted to much more than presidential tweetstorms," and Trump wouldn't be weeks from impeachment, the Times reports. Yet Giuliani was back in Ukraine last week, still publicly digging for (or trying to will into being) dirt on Democrats. Trump seems on board, but his staunchest allies aren't sure what to make of it.

"It's weird that he's over there," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told ABC News This Week on Sunday. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) suggested on CNN that Giuliani "is the president's personal attorney, but I don't know that he's over there on the president's direction. In fact, I would suggest that he's not." Several times "in recent months", Attorney General William Barr "has counseled Trump in general terms that Giuliani has become a liability and a problem for the administration," the Post reports, and at least once he personally "warned the president that he was not being well-served by his lawyer."

In fact, the Post continues, Giuliani's actions have long "caused persistent alarm among Trump's advisers, who worry that it is often not clear who Giuliani is representing — the president, his private clients, or his own foreign policy views — in his meetings at the White House and in foreign cities." Giuliani's "uniquely powerful position" as "unpaid personal counsel to the president and for-profit peddler of access and advice" has led not only to the Ukraine scandal, the Times reports, but also to a wide-ranging criminal investigation by the Manhattan federal prosecutor's office Giuliani used to lead.

The Justice Department, White House, and Giuliani did not respond to the Post's request for comment. Peter Weber