William Barr: 'Unguided missile' Rudy Giuliani completely to blame for first Trump impeachment

William Barr feared that Rudy Giuliani would get Donald Trump impeached, and that's what eventually happened.

The former attorney general wrote in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, which is out Tuesday in paperback and excerpted by Newsweek, that he loathed the former New York City mayor and warned Trump that he was trouble, but the former president continued to work closely with Giuliani on the Ukraine extortion scheme that led to his first impeachment and kept him on as attorney afterward.

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"President Trump's impeachment was a self-inflicted wound," Barr wrote. "Much of the blame for getting the president impeached, in my view, must be laid at the feet of Rudy Giuliani."

Barr had urged Trump to release a transcript of his call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to get out ahead of allegations that he had extorted the nation's leader, but he said Trump waited nearly a month -- which he said provided then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi an opening to launch impeachment proceedings.

"The whole scheme was bound to backfire," Barr wrote. "And Giuliani's public grandstanding, and the unsavory figures he got involved with, ended up seriously undermining his credibility — not to mention tainting the president."

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"Rudy Giuliani saved New York City after 9/11 and should go down as probably the most consequential mayor of a big city in American history," he added. "But he will also go down as the man who helped President Trump get himself impeached — not once but, as it turned out, twice."

Trump made reference to the former attorney general in his Sept. 25, 2019, release of the transcript, which Barr complained caused an "avalanche of questions" about his involvement in the scheme, but he emphatically laid the blame on Giuliani.

"From the beginning of my tenure, I'd worried that Giuliani was an unguided missile, and Ukraine, a morass of misinformation," he wrote. "I was determined to steer the department clear of them as best I could and, if we had to deal with them at all, do so with the utmost caution."