When federal agents executed a pair of search warrants at Rudy Giuliani’s apartment and office last week, it was a major escalation of their investigation into the ex-NYC mayor’s Ukraine dealings and a no good, very bad turn of events for Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara knows it (“Giuliani is in deep trouble,” he said on Wednesday). Ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen knows it (“There’s no doubt that [Rudy is] nervous,” he opined the next day). Attorney (and Trump antagonist) George Conway knows it (“[Giuliani] is in deep shit,” he told the Daily Beast podcast on on Monday). And, in fact, it would appear that even Rudy Giuliani, who’s never been accused of being entirely in touch with reality, knows it as well, based on his latest defense.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday night, Giuliani declared that federal prosecutors “are trying to frame me.” Yes, frame him. À la Richard Kimble in The Fugitive. He added: “They are trying to find something they can make into a crime, some technical violation, some mistake I made. There is no way on earth that they could have anyone telling the truth that I was acting as a foreign agent, nor do they have any evidence that I tried to influence the government on behalf of clients.” (As part of the Giuliani probe, prosecutors reportedly have investigated whether he was working not just for Donald Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired for their own reasons. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, it is a federal crime to attempt to lobby or influence the U.S. government at the request or direction of a foreign official without making it known to the Justice Department. According to The New York Times, prosecutors have scrutinized Giuliani’s relationship with Yuriy Lutsenko, an official who helped aide Giuliani and his associates in their Joe and Hunter Biden dirt-digging mission while also pressing them to get Yovanovitch removed.)
As for evidence, as the Times noted last week, in order to obtain a search warrant, prosecutors would have had to convince a judge they had “sufficient reason” to believe that (1) a crime was committed, and (2) searching the premises would uncover evidence of said crime. Conway similarly told the Daily Beast: “The Justice Department doesn’t like to execute search warrants on lawyers, and the reason why they don’t like that is because they don’t want to get into messy disputes about attorney-client privilege. That tells you a lot here. Because even though there’s a probable cause standard for any search warrant, where you have to show that there was probable cause that a crime was committed and that there’s a basis to believe that the executing the search warrant will provide evidence of that crime, in this case, they had to do much, much more than that.”
Elsewhere in the interview with Sean Hannity, Giuliani claimed that there is no way he could be a “Russian agent” because he’s super anti-communist. (It is in no way clear whether Giuliani knows Russia is no longer a communist country, or that it’s not 1989.)
He also insisted that the Feds raided his home and apartment in an effort to embarrass him due to his association with Trump, rather than the fact that they believe he’s broken some very serious laws. And he trotted out the argument that his son, Andrew, offered up last week, which is that people of his stature should be given a free pass on engaging in alleged criminal activity. “Usually a person who has been a former assistant U.S. attorney, a U.S. attorney, a mayor, the associate attorney general, usually they receive a subpoena—not have their home raided,” he said. “The only lawyers they raid are lawyers for Donald Trump. I can’t think of another lawyer that has been raided other than lawyers for Trump.”
Finally, he claimed that the government is trying to take him down because he has boatloads of evidence that Hunter Biden committed a bunch of crimes in Ukraine, and the Biden administration wants to hurt his credibility, as though the hair dye fiasco, Borat movie, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, cousin f–king, butt-dialing, and general existence over the last decade hadn’t gotten the job done.
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