Giuliani really doesn’t like being treated the same way he treated people for years when he was a prosecutor and mayor. It’s so very predictable:
Lawyers for Rudy Giuliani slammed prosecutors on Monday for secretly obtaining electronic access to the former New York City mayor’s accounts—likening the operation that resulted in the April 28 FBI raid of his home and office to that of a drug cartel takedown.
“Unfortunately for Giuliani, and even more unfortunately for the attorney-client privilege and executive deliberation privilege, and the public’s perception that those privileges are real, the SDNY simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani, and his most well-known client—the former President of the United States,” the letter filed Monday on behalf of Giuliani states.
The letter is the first legal response from Giuliani’s team since the April 28 raid on Donald Trump’s former attorney’s Manhattan home and office. Federal prosecutors have asked the U.S. Southern District of New York to appoint a special master to review the evidence seized during the raid to ensure material that falls under attorney-client privilege isn’t released.
Giuliani’s lawyers, however, claimed Monday that the government’s push for a special master amounts to a “do over” after prosecutors failed to seek one in what they say was a similar search during the Trump administration.
When prosecutors seized contents of Giuliani’s iCloud account with an undisclosed 2019 search warrant, his attorneys claim that they assembled their own “secret taint team” to determine whether the information in the former New York City mayor’s iCloud account benefited from attorney-client privilege rather than asking a judge to appoint an independent special master to make those determinations.
They further allege that “the fruits of that 2019 search were certainly used in some part to secure the 2021 largely duplicative search warrant.” As a result, Giuliani’s attorneys have asked a federal judge to halt the appointment of a special master in the 2021 warrant to provide more time for them to review the circumstances and evidence supporting the 2019 search.
Giuliani’s team also complained about the government’s non-disclosure order issued alongside its fall 2019 iCloud warrant, in which prosecutors claimed that the existence of the warrant must remain secret because of the risk that Giuliani “might destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.” His lawyers called the allegation “false” and “extremely damaging to Giuliani’s reputation” and demanded that the government reveal the evidence it used to back up the assertion.
Giuliani’s attorneys claim that prosecutors intentionally waited until the Biden administration took office and “senior members of the Justice Department had been removed and replaced by Biden appointees” to carry out the raid on their client’s apartment. As evidence, they claim that prosecutors applied for a warrant to search Giuliani’s devices twice before, once in November 2020 and again in January 2021, and were denied.
I’m sure the Trumpers covered for Giuliani. But I also understand that the DOJ or a judge (it’s not clear to me who denied the warrant) might not have been anxious to unleash the hounds on Giuliani in the middle of the post-election circus.
Sadly, Rudy seems to be on his own now:
As previously reported by The Daily Beast, Giuliani’s attempts to get out of legal trouble have prompted the former mayor to unsuccessfully seek help from his former allies—including Trump. The former president, however, has been unwilling to help his embattled friend as the feds ramp up their probe into whether Giuliani’s work with Ukrainian officials during the last administration was illegal.
I’m surprised, actually. I would have thought Trump would be openly supportive in the hopes of making this even more partisan and political than it already is. There’s protection for him in that.
He should be careful. Giuliani can draw this out for a bit but it’s not infinite. If he’s on the hook he’s going to have to decide if he’s willing to go to jail to protect Donald Trump. What are the odds? Trump might feel that he’ll be another Manafort or Stone but he’s in a very different position. No pardon is available to him and Manafort, at least, at bigger problems than going to jail if he flipped. (He owed some powerful Russians a lot of money.) Rudy is an old guy and I doubt he wants to spend his last years in jail to protect Donald Trump.