Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani Monday accused federal investigators of “trying to frame” him because of their “hatred” of former President Donald Trump and called last week’s raid on his apartment “out of control.”
“At about 6 a.m., there was a banging on my door — a very loud banging, and outside there was a group of an endless number of FBI agents,” Giuliani told Fox News Monday. “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.”
Several electronic devices were seized from the apartment while federal investigators were executing a search warrant issued through a probe into whether Giuliani broke federal law by lobbying former President Donald Trump’s administration on behalf of officials from Ukraine in 2019.
The former mayor has also served as Trump’s personal attorney on several high-profile matters, including in the lawsuits in several states concerning the 2020 election.
Giuliani said the federal investigators are only targeting people associated with Trump with raids like the one that happened at his New York apartment.
“The only lawyers they raid are lawyers for Donald Trump,” said Giuliani. “I can’t think of another lawyer that has been raided other than lawyers for Trump. (He) is in a special category because he doesn’t have constitutional rights.”
He further blamed the raid on the Justice Department’s “hatred” of Trump.
“They are beyond the ability to control their rational thinking or their decency, and they have a serious, serious ethical issue, driven by Trump derangement syndrome,” Giuliani said. “They are trying to frame me. They are trying to find something they can make into a crime, some technical violation, some mistake I made. They’ll take anything.”
Giuliani said that during the raid, the investigator used a warrant “that sought the electronics in my apartment and purported to be about an alleged violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA, for failure to file as a foreign agent on behalf of an unnamed Ukrainian official.”
He denied the claims and said he was “shocked” the raid happened, as he had already been offering to discuss the claims with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
“I am a lawyer for 51 years, I formerly ran that office,” Giuliani, the district’s former U.S. Attorney, told Fox News. “I know the criminal law and I do not violate it. (I am) very aware of FARA.”
Further, he said he complied with the law “completely.”
“My contracts have clauses that I will not act as a foreign agent, and I wanted to show these things to the government so that they would stop their consistent illegal leaking of an investigation,” Giuliani told Fox News.
Under FARA, individuals must notify the State Department if they are acting as a foreign agent.
Giuliani said that as recently as March 4, he and his lawyer contacted SGNY officials to turn over documents after he read allegations about himself.
“I said, ‘If you have a concern, give me an opportunity to show you it is not true,'” Giuliani explained. “They never agreed and they never stopped leaking.”
He also insisted that 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.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani said that because of his work as Trump’s attorney, he believed that “the safest thing to do” was to refer any Ukrainian clients to Victoria Toensing, who was also visited by the FBI.
A source in the situation said that she turned over a phone to the FBI, but her home was not searched and she was told that she is not the “target of the investigation.”
Giuliani said he was being represented by attorney Robert Costello, who also has been consulting with Alan Dershowitz.
Giuliani has not yet been charged with a crime, but his associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are charged with including campaign finance violations, for allegedly funneling foreign money to various U.S. campaigns to gain influence over candidates.
Source: Newmax
