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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who served as one of Donald Trump’s top lawyers, has responded to the Justice Department’s unsealing of the affidavit used to authorize the FBI’s raid on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month.
In an interview with Newsmax TV’s Rita Cosby, Giuliani, who is also a former federal prosecutor, said that although the heavily redacted affidavit showed little to the public, he believes it revealed everything about how the raid and subsequent seizure of documents and items were illegal.
“This is a completely illegal warrant, for numerous reasons, that the least of which is it really isn’t a search warrant,” Giuliani told “Saturday Report,” going on to point out that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect Americans from overly broad, invasive searches.
“This is a general search warrant. Search warrants are supposed to be for a specific thing,” he said.
Giuliani himself was raided by the FBI in late April 2021, with agents “seizing computers and cellphones in a major escalation of the Justice Department’s investigation into the business dealings” of the former NYC mayor, The Associated Press reported at the time.
“The affidavit they had for my search warrant — although discovered nothing illegal; thank God, everything got sent back to me — but at least it was narrow to electronics,” Giuliani said. “This, I mean, they took his passport. Everything here should be suppressed. In other words, I actually believe this could never be used in a criminal case.
“This is about as illegal search as you’re going to get,” he continued, adding that the Justice Department took its time to seek the raid though officials claimed that the situation at the former president’s estate was urgent.
“A warrant is supposed to be exigent circumstances — emergency — 11 days for an emergency?” Giuliani told Cosby. “And then the FBI took three days off to execute it, and this is important?
“Don’t we do things that are important, fast? Right? Don’t we do things that are unimportant, slow?” he asked.
Giuliani also suggested that the portions of the affidavit that are redacted — which was most of the released document — are not damning to Trump; otherwise, those sections would not have been hidden.
“The more that’s there, the worse it is, the more general it will be,” he said before mocking the government’s insinuations that the former president had illegally taken presidential documents from the White House.
“He did the packing? That sounds stupid; did they really think he did the packing?” Giuliani asked.
“It’s act four of five of the whole plot they started when they tried to say he was in collusion with the Russians,” he said, going on to predict that the raid will be more politically damaging to the Biden administration than to Trump.
“Every time they have a bombshell, it turned out almost [to] be favorable to us,” Giuliani said. “This may turn out to be favorable in the long run.”
Following the FBI’s raid last year on his office and Manhattan apartment, Giuliani accused the Biden DOJ of a “corrupt double standard,” adding that the department was “running rough shod over the constitutional rights of anyone involved in, or legally defending, former President Donald J. Trump.”
“Mr. Giuliani respects the law, and he can demonstrate that his conduct as a lawyer and a citizen was absolutely legal and ethical,” the statement added, according to the AP.
Earlier this month, in an appearance on Cosby’s WABC talk radio program, Giuliani said the raid was “a sad night” for the country, blasting it as “phony” and saying it “goes way beyond politics,” according to the New York Post.
“It’s a very, very sad night for America, and for me personally, who has spent many years of my life in the Justice Department at the lowest and the highest levels and worked very closely with the FBI to put some of the worst criminals of the 20th century in jail,” Giuliani said.
“I am ashamed of the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice, ashamed of two great institutions. They will go down in history as probably the two worst attorney general and FBI directors,” he added.
