RUDY GIULIANI, RESPECTER OF RULES

As you may already know, Donald Trump's campaign is crying "Voter fraud!," but a judge in Nevada isn't having it:

A state judge in Clark County, Nevada, rejected a Trump campaign lawsuit in a fiery hearing on Tuesday morning.

The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in state court on Monday, asking for ballots and voting machines to be “set aside, sequestered, and impounded” from four early-voting locations. The campaign alleged that people at those locations were allowed to get in line and vote after the time for voting had concluded on Friday, Nov. 4.

A little before noon, local time, on Tuesday, Judge Gloria J. Sturman denied the request, after a hearing.

Judge Sturman had a lot of reasons for rebuffing Trump, but here's the most obvious one:

Under state law, “if at the hour of closing the polls there are any registered voters waiting to vote ... voting must continue until those voters have voted.” So polling officials are not permitted to prevent voters who arrived at the polling place before closing time from voting.

Nevertheless, Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani is deeply suspicious:

“Democrats call it paranoia and Republicans call it reasonable suspicion,” Giuliani said on MSNBC. “How about you play by the rules? If you close at 9:00, you close at 9:00.”

Giuliani says, “How about you play by the rules?" That would be the same Rudy Giuliani about whom this was written in late September 2001:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is scheduled to leave office when his term ends on Dec. 31, acknowledged today that he would like to stay on as mayor and help the city administration through a smooth transition process after the terrorist attacks in New York City....

"It's very hard for me to walk away from," Mr. Giuliani said in a taped satellite interview, which aired this afternoon on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." "My whole life I've always found it hard walking away from anything. I feel like there's a lot of expertise and a lot of confidence that I've built up and other things I could use for the betterment of the city."

A couple of weeks later, there was this:

Now that the Democratic mayoral primary runoff is over, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is making it clear that he meant what he said about wanting to stay.

A few weeks ago, he summoned the mayoral candidates to his command center and told them that he wanted a three-month term extension, and that if they did not agree, he might try to go around the city's term limit laws and run again.

He hadn't run in any of the primaries, but he said he might run on the Conservative Party line -- even though he wasn't allowed to run at all.

The candidates who won the Democratic and Republican primaries actually agreed to let him stay on -- but the state legislature, which had the final say, never agreed to it.

Giuliani left office at the end of his term; New York City survived. And now he's Mr. Rulebook.