Thursday April 29, 2021
“I don’t know what to look for”
Trump railed over FBI raid on Giuliani
The Ukraine affair haunts the elected US president into his retirement: A raid on the apartment of his longtime lawyer Giuliani calls Trump on the scene. “It’s very, very unfair.” The FBI had unsuccessfully requested the search under the old government.
Former US President Donald Trump has described the search of his ex-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s apartment as “very, very unfair”. “Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot,” said Trump on the conservative television channel Fox Business. “He loves this country and they are searching his apartment.” The judiciary and the investigators would measure “with two standards”. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, I don’t know what you’re doing.”
Investigators from the US Federal Police FBI searched Giuliani’s apartment and office in New York on Wednesday. Cell phones and computers were also confiscated. The background to the investigation is the Ukraine activities of the former New York mayor, who was hired by Trump in 2018 as a private lawyer. The 76-year-old is suspected of having engaged in illegal lobbying for Ukrainian customers in the United States. He denies the allegations.
Giuliani was also a central figure in Trump’s campaign to get campaign assistance from Ukraine. In recent years, the lawyer has been looking for incriminating material against Trump’s rival Joe Biden, whose son Hunter had worked for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, in the Eastern European country. Trump urged the Ukrainian head of state Volodymyr Selenskyj in a phone call in 2019 to initiate an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma. The phone call led to the first impeachment proceedings against Trump in December 2019, which ultimately failed.
No approval for raid under Trump
Giuliani made headlines again after Trump’s electoral defeat by Biden in the presidential election on November 3rd. The lawyer and former prosecutor led the campaign of the elected president against the election result. Giuliani, who was highly regarded during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 during his time as New York City Mayor, repeatedly caused a stir with bizarre appearances and unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud. Most recently, Giuliani stopped working for Trump.
The FBI and the New York City Attorney’s Office reportedly tried to get search warrants on Giuliani’s phones last year. However, they did not receive approval for this until the end of Trump’s term on January 20. Under the new US Attorney General Merrick Garland, the search requests have now apparently been granted. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department wanted to comment on the searches.
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