A day after federal agents raided his home and office, Rudy Giuliani on Thursday night hoped to discredit the FBI’s criminal investigation of whether he acted as an unregistered foreign agent. To do so, Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and claimed the search warrant for his cellphone and other electronic devices was illegal because the materials were “from the iCloud.”
“There was no justification for that warrant,” Giuliani exclaimed, pointing the sky in reference to his iCloud. “It is an illegal, unconstitutional warrant.”
It was one of several bizarre claims made by Giuliani as federal authorities investigate his interactions with Ukrainian figures while he was Trump’s attorney, in which he sought information that might prove politically damaging to then-candidate Joe Biden and lobbied for the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
As reported by The Washington Post, the FBI warned Giuliani in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage Biden politically ahead of last year’s election. The FBI also gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, investigated Biden’s dealings with Ukraine while he was vice president.
Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Costello, in a statement earlier this week, said the Justice Department does not have a viable case against Giuliani. The former New York mayor has insisted that all of his activities in Ukraine were conducted on behalf of then-President Donald Trump.
Earlier on Thursday, Giuliani on his radio show slammed the Southern District of New York, the office he led as U.S. attorney in the 1980s that is now investigating him.
“You’re not going to stop me,” he said on his WABC radio show, adding that federal investigators are “jealous” of him. “And you’re not going to convict me of some phony crime.”
That bluster continued on Carlson’s prime-time show Thursday night, where an animated Giuliani spent most of the 10-minute interview attacking the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and his work in Ukraine. Republican senators suspected that the younger Biden’s position with a Ukrainian firm posed a conflict of interest to his father’s role shaping U.S. policy toward Ukraine, but later concluded in a report that Hunter Biden’s “problematic” position did not influence his father’s work or Obama administration policy.
Giuliani recounted on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the “bang, bang, bang” he heard on his door at 6 a.m. Wednesday. He called the search unnecessary, claiming he had offered to hand over his electronic devices to federal authorities for two years and “talk it over with them.” Even though the Giuliani episode in Ukraine played a significant role in Trump’s first impeachment, Justice Department leaders had resisted approving a search warrant late in his administration.
“They won’t explain to me what they’re looking into for two years,” he said to Carlson.
Giuliani emphasized he was not worried about the content on his electronic devices, claiming the materials from his phone and other electronics will help prove that he and Trump “and all of us are innocent.”
Without providing details, Giuliani said federal prosecutors told Costello, his attorney, that they had accessed his iCloud as early as 2019.
“In the middle of the impeachment defense, they invaded, without telling me, my iCloud,” Giuliani claimed. He concluded the segment by again denying that he ever “represented a Ukrainian national or official before the United States government.”
President Joe Biden on Friday morning said he did not know ahead of time that Giuliani’s home and office would be searched. He told the “Today” show that he is not asking to be briefed on the case and criticized the Trump administration for having “politicized the Justice Department.”
“That’s the Justice Department’s independent judgment,” he said. “The Justice Department is the people’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer.”
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The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Tom Hamburger contributed to this report.
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