It’s Christmas Eve and President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani promised more investigative surprises, touting his personal Facebook page as he did so. That Facebook page, reporters, Devin Nunes’ cow and others immediately noticed, identified Giuliani as a government official and a former Attorney General of the United States, a position Giuliani has never held.
Giuliani is widely known for being the former mayor of New York City and a former U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, the office that is now investigating him.
Giuliani’s New York City mayor bio, which is still available for online viewing, makes clear the difference between being an “Attorney General of the United States” (i.e. the nation’s top law enforcement officer) and being Associate Attorney General:
In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General, the third highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised all of the US Attorney Offices’ Federal law enforcement agencies, the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the US Marshals.
Giuliani served in that position during then-President Ronald Reagan’s presidency. From the New York Times archives on Giuliani’s time in that role (William French Smith was the AG at the time):
GIULIANI’S IMPACT CAN ALSO BE TRACED TO strong connections in the Reagan Administration, where he was Associate Attorney General under Attorney General William French Smith from 1981 to 1983. In many ways, he is a prosecutor for these times, the prototype of what the Reagan Administration feels a United States Attorney should be. In the Reagan Justice Department, Giuliani played a key role in remaking the crime-fighting priorities for the President. Under President Carter, the Justice Department had allocated extra resources to white-collar and business-fraud cases. Giuliani helped lead a Reagan initiative to shift many of those resources to narcotics enforcement, an area he felt Carter had badly neglected.
For service to the Reagan Administration, Giuliani has been rewarded in his New York position with extra resources and titles. Prior to 1984, the United States Attorneys’ offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn jointly directed the region’s organized-crime and drug-enforcement task force. Shortly after Giuliani arrived, the Justice Department switched control to him alone.
The “about” section of Giuliani’s Facebook profile has been changed to read as follows: “Former Associate Attorney General of the United States. Mayor of New York City 1994-2001. President’s Personal Attorney.”
[Image via YouTube screengrab]
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