You don’t call Rudy Giuliani when things are merely awful: His phone rings when the alternative is complete catastrophe.

He first won election as a Republican mayor in overwhelmingly Democratic New York in 1994 after homicides in the city surpassed a record 2,000 in 1990 and remained high. After 9/11, when he was still the face of the city, Giuliani became for many “America’s mayor.”

And even before launching his crackdown on street crime, Giuliani was revered (and sometimes reviled) as a crusading US attorney in New York. He took on mobsters, crooked politicians and dishonest Wall Street bankers in the “Greed is good” days of the 1980s. When he spoke with The Washington Post on Thursday, Giuliani played up his service in the Justice Department and ties to Mueller.