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Rudy Giuliani’s apartment searched as part of Ukraine investigation
Federal investigators have executed a search warrant at a New York office and private apartment belonging to Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of the city and personal lawyer to Donald Trump.Federal authorities have been examining whether Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who at the same time were helping him search for dirt on Trump’s political rivals.Investigators had seized some of Giuliani’s electronic devices from the Upper East Side residence, and from his law office on Park Avenue, early on Wednesday, the New York Times reported.Giuliani’s own lawyer, Robert Costello, condemned the raids as “legal thuggery,” claiming his client had cooperated with prosecutors and offered to answer questions not involving his “privileged” communications with Trump.“What they did today was legal thuggery. Why would you do this to anyone, let alone someone who was the associate attorney general, United States attorney, the mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer to the 45th president of the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.Giuliani posted, then deleted, a tweet saying he would be giving a live statement about the raids during his afternoon radio show on WABC radio. When the show started at 3pm, Giuliani was missing and a guest host, Dominic Carter, was presenting.Giuliani was considered a heroic figure in New York politics for his role as a top mafia prosecutor and then as mayor during the 9/11 terror attacks. But his reputation nosedived during the Trump era as he became embroiled in numerous scandals involving the administration and his role as one of Trump’s most fervent cheerleaders and attack dogs.In the infamous “quid pro quo” episode, officials in Ukraine were alleged to be simultaneously attempting to “dig up dirt” on Trump’s political rivals, including Joe Biden, who was shortly to become the Democratic party’s presidential nominee.Biden’s son, Hunter, had business dealings in Ukraine when his father was Barack Obama’s vice-president earlier in the decade, including a seat on the board of Burisma, one of the country’s largest energy companies.The Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) makes it a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the US government at the request of a foreign official without informing the justice department.Giuliani was back at the heart of the news cycle after the 2020 presidential election last November. He was a leading proponent of “the big lie”, Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him by “widespread fraud” in the voting process.Giuliani became something of a laughing stock when he represented Trump in numerous failed legal challenges to the election result and made inept appearances in court and at press conferences.But the anti-democratic campaign ultimately led to the 6 January insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol, during which five people lost their lives.According to the New York Times, the US attorney’s office in Manhattan and the FBI have been seeking a search warrant for Giuliani’s phones for months, which officials in Trump’s justice department continually sought to block.Following Trump’s departure from office in January, and confirmation in March by the US Senate of Biden’s pick Merrick Garland as attorney general, the justice department dropped its opposition.The Times noted that while the warrant is not an explicit accusation of wrongdoing against Giuliani, it showed the investigation was entering “an aggressive new phase”. The newspaper contacted the FBI and US attorney’s office, both of which, it said, declined to comment.In a tweet on Wednesday, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney who was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance fraud and lying to Congress, and who has since become a Trump critic, said simply: “Here we go folks!!!”The New York Times further reported that the FBI also served a search warrant Wednesday on the Washington DC home of attorney Victoria Toensing, an associate of Giuliani and reported contact of Ukraine officials who were looking into the Bidens. Toensing, the newspaper said, has previously represented Dimitry Fitash, a Ukrainian energy billionaire with alleged mob contacts who is under indictment in the US for bribery.The Wall Street Journal said Costello told its reporters that authorities arrived at Giuliani’s apartment at 6am and seized his devices.He said the search warrant described the investigation as a probe into a possible violation of foreign lobbying rules and “sought communications between Mr Giuliani and individuals including John Solomon, a columnist who was corresponding with Mr Giuliani about his effort to push for investigations of Joe Biden in Ukraine”.Solomon, a conservative political operative and Giuliani ally, has been accused of using his columns in the Hill to help spread disinformation about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine, his writing earning praise from Trump and his acolytes, who called them worthy of a Pulitzer.The Hill, meanwhile, decided in 2018 to classify Solomon’s future contributions as “opinion.”Costello added that in recent years he had offered to answer investigators’ questions as long as they agreed to say what area they were looking at ahead of time. He said they declined the offer. “It’s like I’m talking to a wall,” Costello said.Prosecutors began looking into Giuliani after building an unrelated case against Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born American citizens alleged to have aided his efforts in Ukraine and later charged with crimes including conspiracy and campaign finance violations.The Times said the investigators were looking into Giuliani’s push to remove the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump considered disloyal and obstructive, and whom he removed in May 2019.The Ukraine scandal, and Trump’s dark prediction during his notorious July 2019 call with the country’s prime minister Volodymyr Zelensky that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things,” was the subject of Trump’s first impeachment trial. More
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Trump and Giuliani sued by Democratic congressman over Capitol riot
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, the former president’s personal lawyer, have been accused of conspiring to incite the violent riot at the US Capitol, in a legal action filed under a historic law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.The lawsuit was brought on Tuesday by Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and the eminent civil rights organisation the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).It comes three days after Trump was acquitted by the US Senate on a charge of inciting the 6 January insurrection, only for the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit, to point out that presidents are “not immune” to being held accountable by criminal or civil litigation.The suit alleges that Trump, Giuliani and the extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers conspired to incite the attack on the Capitol with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election.It argues that they therefore violated a law often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed in 1871 in response to Klan violence and intimidation preventing members of Congress in the Reconstruction south from carrying out their constitutional duties. The NAACP, founded in 1909, says the statute was designed to protect against conspiracies.Joseph Sellers, a lawyer with the NAACP who filed the lawsuit on Thompson’s behalf, told the Associated Press: “Fortunately, this hasn’t been used very much. But what we see here is so unprecedented that it’s really reminiscent of what gave rise to the enactment of this legislation right after the civil war.”Thompson, who chairs the House homeland security committee, was among members of Congress who donned gas masks and were rushed to shelter in an office building during the mayhem of 6 January, in which five people died. Members of he Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been charged with taking part in the riot.Thompson said in a statement that Trump’s “gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger. It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier.“While the majority of Republicans in the Senate abdicated their responsibility to hold the president accountable, we must hold him accountable for the insurrection that he so blatantly planned. Failure to do so will only invite this type of authoritarianism for the anti-democratic forces on the far right that are so intent on destroying our country.”Filed on Tuesday in federal district court in Washington, the suit charts an expansive effort by Trump and Giuliani to undermine the election result despite state officials and courts rejecting their false allegations of fraud. The two men portrayed the election as stolen while Trump “endorsed rather than discouraged” threats of violence from his supporters leading up to the attack on the Capitol, the suit says.“The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence,” it continues. “It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the electoral college.”Presidents are typically shielded from the courts for actions carried out in office but this one focuses on Trump in his personal rather than official capacity. Seeking unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, it alleges that none of the conduct at issue is related to Trump’s responsibilities as president.[embedded content]Sellers explained: “Inciting a riot, or attempting to interfere with the congressional efforts to ratify the results of the election that are commended by the constitution, could not conceivably be within the scope of ordinary responsibilities of the president. In this respect, because of his conduct, he is just like any other private citizen.”Trump faces a potential slew of lawsuits now he has lost the legal protections of office. Additional actions could be brought by other members of Congress or police officers injured in the riot, a prospect acknowledged by the White House on Tuesday.Jen Psaki, the press secretary, told reporters Biden “certainly supports the rights of individuals, members of Congress and otherwise, to take steps through the judicial process but I don’t think we have a further comment on it than that”.She added: “I am not going to speculate on criminal prosecution from the White House podium. The president has committed to having an independent justice department that will make their own decision about the path forward.”Trump defence lawyers are expected to argue that his speech was protected by the first amendment to the constitution and point out that, in a speech on 6 January, he told supporters to behave “peacefully”.Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, said in a statement Trump did not organise the rally that preceded the riot and “did not incite or conspire to incite any violence at the Capitol on 6 January”. More
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Sounds about right: why podcasting works for Pence, Bannon and Giuliani
What do Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Mike Pence and Anthony Scaramucci all have in common?
They worked for Donald Trump, obviously, and several have been implicated in alleged crimes connected to the former president, but as of this month, each of these one-time high-profile Trump acolytes also has his own podcast.
Pence became the most recent to announce his own show this week, with the announcement that the oft-derided former vice-president will launch a podcast to “continue to attract new hearts and minds to the conservative cause”.
Like his one-time associates, Pence will enjoy the benefits of a regulation-free platform to share his thoughts on any topic of his choosing, and similarly to Bannon et al, Pence will also be able to keep himself in the public sphere – although the dry, mild-mannered Pence is likely to differ in tone from the Bannons and Giulianis of the podcast world.
On his War Room podcast, Bannon has called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci – something Pence is unlikely to do – while Giuliani’s Common Sense podcast has been used to further often unhinged claims of political fraud, which Pence might leave alone.
Cohen and Scaramucci’s podcasts, which are critical of Trump, may not fit in with the Trump worshippers’ efforts, but the fact that five of Trump’s most prominent acolytes chose this format for propagating their views – over television, radio or the written word – is pretty remarkable.
So, why podcasts? One major factor is one of the oldest in politics: money.
“I think in part it’s because it’s an easier medium to get into than something like radio or television. The overhead costs are much much lower. If you have an avid base, and the Trump base tends to be an avid base, you can make a ton of money doing this,” Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, said.
“So there’s a real revenue opportunity for them.”
Bannon et al will get paid through advertising, the amount varying depending on how many downloads they get.
“If you have audience of just 35,000 people, you can make a profitable podcast,” Hemmer said. “If you have an audience of 100,000 people, now you’re starting to talk real money, and if you’re getting millions of downloads, you can build kind of an empire.”
Everyone likes money, but Bannon, Giuliani and Pence will also be pushing their version of conservative politics.
Meanwhile, the very title of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, sets out his own, different goal – specifically, an earnest attempt to re-enter polite society. The aims of the notoriously self-promoting Scaramucci – his podcast is co-hosted with his wife and is called Scaramucci and the Mrs – probably include keeping himself famous.
Podcasts give their hosts the freedom to push all those agendas to a potentially huge audience.
Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump on the former president’s last day in office, recently claimed that his podcast, Bannon’s War Room, had been streamed 29m times. Bannon is known to lie, but the architect of Trump’s “America first” policies has undoubtedly found an audience, including among those who ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
“It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. It’s going to kick off, it’s going to be very dramatic,” Bannon told his listeners on 5 January. “It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day.”
Bannon’s podcast was banned from YouTube after the insurrection, while Giuliani has also had episodes removed, but the power of podcasting is that there is always somewhere for the series to run – both shows are still available on Apple Podcasts, on Bannon’s and Giuliani’s websites, and elsewhere.
“You have an independence and a freedom if you have a podcast – you’re not going to get de-platformed by social media, you’re not going to get kicked off of Fox News, you’re not going to get kicked off of radio stations,” Hemmer said.
“You have control and independence, which is a big selling point right now on the right.” More - in US Politics
Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden family, new transcript reveals
A new transcript has surfaced of the former Trump lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into the Biden family.The transcript of a 40-minute call between Giuliani and two Ukrainian officials, was obtained by Time magazine, and served as a reminder of Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, even as his second is under way in the Senate.The trigger for the first impeachment was a call Trump made to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which he hinted US military aid might depend on Zelenskiy’s willingness to “do us a favour” and launch an investigation that might cloud the image of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who was on the board of an Ukrainian energy company.In both impeachment trials, Trump is accused of using the power of the presidency in an attempt to secure a second term. The charge against him has escalated from improper pressure on a foreign government to inciting an insurrection, but Republican senators are expected to save him from conviction this time as they did in the first trial a year ago.Giuliani’s call to the Ukrainian officials came three days before Trump’s, on 22 July 2019, to two Zelenskiy aides. One of them, Igor Novikov, sent the transcript to Time earlier this month.“Let these investigations go forward,” Giuliani told them, according to the transcript, which Time said it has verified. “Get someone to investigate this.”The former New York mayor is more restrained in his language than Trump. According to the transcript, he does not make overt threats but repeatedly warned the Ukrainians “to be careful”.“For our country’s sake and your country’s sake, we [need to] get all these facts straight,” Giuliani added. “We fix them and we put it behind us.”The Zelenskiy government resisted the pressure from the Trump administration, and the transcript was supplied to Time as Kyiv seeks to build its relationship with Biden.Novikov has said he will assist a federal investigation of Giuliani reported to be under way in New York, as well as an effort to strip Giuliani of his license to practice law.“That is because I believe Mayor Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine threatened our national security,” Novikov told Time. He left the Zelenskiy administration in August but has retained close ties. “It is our responsibility to make sure that any effort to drag our country into our allies’ domestic politics does not go unpunished.”A lawyer representing Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday morning, and Time reported that Giuliani did not respond its own questions about the transcript.Last week, President Zelenskiy shut down three Ukrainian media networks he accused of spreading Russian propaganda, and which had played a role in the spreading of groundless allegations about the Bidens during the US presidential campaign.“The past is the past,” President Zelenskiy told Time. “I care deeply about the future of our relationship with the United States, so I want to focus on that.” More
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Voting company sues Fox and Trump lawyers for $2.7bn over false claims of election fraud
A voting technology company is suing Fox News, three of its top hosts and two former lawyers for Donald Trump – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – for $2.7bn.The lawsuit charges that the defendants conspired to spread false claims that the company helped “steal” the US presidential election, which was in fact fairly won by Joe Biden.The 285-page complaint filed on Thursday in New York state court by Florida-based Smartmatic USA is one of the largest libel suits ever undertaken.On 25 January, a rival election-technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, which was also ensnared in Trump’s baseless effort to overturn the election, sued Guiliani and Powell for $1.3bn.Unlike Dominion, whose technology was used in 24 states, Smartmatic’s participation in the 2020 election was restricted to Los Angeles county, which votes heavily Democratic.Smartmatic’s limited role notwithstanding, Fox aired at least 13 reports falsely stating or implying the company had stolen the 2020 vote in cahoots with Venezuela’s socialist government, according to the complaint.This alleged “disinformation campaign” continued even after the then attorney general, William Barr, said the Department of Justice could find no evidence of widespread voter fraud.For instance, a 10 December segment by Lou Dobbs accused Smartmatic and its CEO, Antonio Mugica, of working to flip votes through a non-existent backdoor in its voting software to carry out a “massive cyber Pearl Harbor”, the complaint alleged.“Defendants’ story was a lie,” the complaint stated. “But, it was a story that sold.”The complaint alleges that the Fox hosts Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro also directly benefitted from their involvement in the conspiracy.The lawsuit alleges that Fox went along with the “well-orchestrated dance” due to pressure from newcomer outlets such as Newsmax and One America News, which were stealing away conservative, pro-Trump viewers.Fox, Giuliani and Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.For Smartmatic, the effects of the negative publicity were swift and devastating, the complaint alleges.Death threats, including against an executive’s 14-year-old son, poured in as internet searches for the company surged, Smartmatic claims.With several client contracts in jeopardy, the company estimates that it will lose as much as $690m in profits over the next five years.It also expects it will have to boost spending by $4.7m to fend off what it called a “meteoric rise” in cyberattacks.“For us, this is an existential crisis,” Mugica said in an interview. He said the false statements against Smartmatic had already led one foreign bank to close its accounts and deterred Taiwan, a prospective client, from adopting e-voting technology.Like many conspiracy theories, the alleged campaign against Smartmatic was built on a grain of truth.Mugica is Venezuelan and Smartmatic’s initial success is partly attributable to major contracts from Hugo Chavez’s government, an early devotee of electronic voting.No evidence has emerged that the company rigged votes in favor of Chavez, and for a while the Carter Center and other observers held out Venezuela as a model of electronic voting.Meanwhile, the company has expanded globally. Smartmatic is represented by J Erik Connolly, who previously won what is believed to be the largest settlement in American media defamation, at least $177m, for a report on ABC News describing a company’s beef product as “pink slime”.“Very rarely do you see news organization go day after day after day the same targets,” Connolly said in an interview.“We couldn’t possibly have rigged this election because we just weren’t even in the contested states to do the rigging.” More
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Giuliani attacks 'censorship' but made threat to sue paper over unflattering story
On Monday, Rudy Giuliani called a $1.3bn lawsuit brought against him by Dominion Voting Systems “another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech”. But Giuliani has himself previously threatened to censor the exercise of free speech with legal action.
The former New York mayor turned Trump attorney was invoking current rightwing complaints against so-called “cancel culture”, in which freedom of speech is supposedly curtailed.
But in June 2001, the New York Post ran a story about an extra-marital affair. Giuliani told reporters: “I will consider suing them for libel – defamation. What the New York Post did is scurrilous, I believe it’s malicious and I’m prepared to prove that in court if I have to.”
First amendment protection of freedom of the press makes it difficult for US public officials to mount libel lawsuits, even if reports are proved to be wrong. Giuliani did not take the Post to court.
On Monday, Dominion sued Giuliani in federal court in Washington, over his claims about supposed electoral fraud, made as part of Donald Trump’s baseless attempts to overturn defeat by Joe Biden, efforts which culminated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
“Dominion brings this action to set the record straight,” the complaint said, “to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, and to stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process.”
Dominion’s lawyer, Thomas Clare, told the New York Times the company could sue others, including Trump.
“We’re not ruling anybody out,” he said. “Obviously, this lawsuit against the president’s lawyer moves one step closer to the former president and understanding what his role was and wasn’t.”
Some experts said Dominion might itself count as a public figure, and thus have a hard time winning its case.
Giuliani said he might counter-sue Dominion.
“The amount being asked for is, quite obviously, intended to frighten people of faint heart. It is another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously. As such, we will investigate a countersuit against them for violating these constitutional rights,” he said.
It remains to be seen if Giuliani will follow through. Nearly 20 years ago, he did not.
Giuliani threatened to sue the Post over its story about how, as the New York Daily News described it, the mayor and his “girlfriend Judith Nathan [were] using the posh St Regis Hotel as a ‘secret love nest’”.
Negotiations between Giuliani and the Post followed but nearly six weeks later, on 18 July, the Daily News reported that Giuliani had not made good on his threat.
“When I’m ready to decide, you’ll be the first to know,” he said. “But I don’t get rushed into anything.” More - in Elections
Dominion Voting Systems sues Giuliani for $1.3bn over baseless election claims
Complaint accuses ex-mayor of having ‘manufactured and disseminated’ conspiracy theory related to voting machinesUS politics – live updatesDominion Voting Systems, the voting equipment manufacturer at the centre of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his allies, has sued the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit. Related: Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate Continue reading… More
