The first co-conspirator, described as “an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not,” appears to be Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who later became one of Trump’s attorneys, became a central figure in Trump’s post-election challenges, each of which failed to gain any traction in court.

The indictment discusses Giuliani’s actions at length, alleging he pressured lawmakers in multiple states to overturn the election results based on false claims of fraud.

The day of the protest, Rudy Giuliani was also outside the building with a microphone. Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and failed mayoral candidate in 1989, declared, “The reason the morale of the police department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!” The crowd roared.

“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the police department is so low,” Giuliani said. “He blames it on me. He blames it on you. Bullshit!” Giuliani then attacked an anti-corruption commission impaneled by Dinkins, which he said was created “to protect David Dinkins’s political ass.” More cheers rose from the crowd.

(snip)

This was the beginning of an outburst of violence that, for various reasons, has been all but scrubbed from New York’s historical memory. It not only involved Mayor Dinkins but was a formative experience for two future mayors and the city’s likely next mayor — who back then was a 32-year-old transit-police officer. “It’s almost equivalent to what we saw at the Capitol,” Eric Adams told me recently, referring to the Trump-inspired insurrection on January 6.

(snip)

But as the days passed, the atmosphere changed. Caruso, the PBA president, was defiant. Giuliani, far from fearing the riot’s impact on his political future, was ecstatically happy about his participation in it.

“One of the reasons those police officers might have lost control is that we have a mayor who invites riots,” Giuliani told reporters a few days later. He said he felt empathy for the police officers, not the people frightened by them. “I had four uncles who were cops,” he said. “So maybe I was more emotional than I usually am.”

At a press conference with Giuliani and then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at Manhattan’s Pier 92 on Sept. 24, 2001, the former mayor reportedly asked for a private meeting with Pataki where he “dropped a bomb” by asking the governor to extend his term limit, which was set to expire that year.

Pataki initially supported the idea of repealing term limits so Giuliani could remain in office but then decided it was a “bad idea both as a matter of principle and politically.”

“Are you really, right now, after a terror attack on our state, our city, asking me to just cancel the entire election? I am a conservative. We respect the law. For God’s sake, you’re a prosecutor! You know the law,” Pataki thought to himself.

However, Giuliani told the New York Daily News in a phone interview that although “there were people who wanted me to do it,” he “never asked [Pataki] to do it. I never made the decision to do it.”

“So now that the precedent has been set that the Electoral Count Act is not quite so sacrosanct as was previously claimed, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations,” Eastman wrote in the email presented during the hearing by the committee.