Appearing on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight for his first television interview since the dramatic FBI raid of his home and office, Rudy Giuliani claimed on Thursday that the search warrant to seize his electronic devices was “completely illegal” because everything was already “on the iCloud.”
That was hardly the only eyebrow-raising remark the former Trump attorney made in the off-the-wall conversation with host Tucker Carlson.
Despite the New York Times reporting that one of the warrants served by feds sought evidence related to Giuliani’s role in the ouster of former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, the ex-New York City mayor downplayed any potential criminal exposure he now finds himself in.
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Instead, he wondered aloud why the FBI agents didn’t share his obsession with President Joe Biden’s son. (Notably, Giuliani’s Ukraine dirt-digging on the Bidens resulted in Trump’s first impeachment and his current legal peril.)
“I said, ‘Well, don’t you want these?’ And they said, ‘What are they?’ I said, ‘Those are Hunter Biden’s hard drives,’” an animated Giuliani exclaimed. “And they said, ‘No, no, no.’”
“I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want them?’ The warrant required them to take it,” the ex-mayor continued. “And they said, ‘No, no, no.’ One last time, I said, ‘Don’t you think you should take it?’ And they said, no. Hunter Biden’s hard drives fall within the scope of the subpoena. The subpoena required them to take all electronics. They decided to leave that behind!”
Giuliani then said that he wasn’t worried about what’s on his phones and laptops because the “evidence is exculpatory” and it proves that “the president and I and all of us are innocent.” In fact, according to Giuliani, “it’s like projection” because it’s the Justice Department that’s “committing the crimes.”
“I think it is literally projection,” Carlson agreed, claiming Hunter Biden was actually the one who was guilty of lobbying on behalf of foreign nationals without registering with the U.S. government.
It only went downhill from there.
After ranting a few more minutes about Hunter Biden, Giuliani complained that the federal agents serving the warrant “smash[ed] on my door in a frightening way” before reassuring Carlson that “luckily, I do not get frightened very easily.” He then proceeded to claim that the warrant was “completely illegal.”
“The only way you can get a search warrant is if you can show that there is some evidence that the person is going to destroy the evidence,” he confidently declared. “Or is going to run away with the evidence. Well, I’ve had it for two years and haven’t destroyed it.”
Giuliani, while pointing his finger to the sky, bizarrely added: “And they also got it from the iCloud. So, there was no—there was no justification for that warrant!”
After repeatedly professing his innocence and insisting that he “never represented a Ukrainian national or official before the United States government,” Giuliani compared the investigation into him to the Stasi of East Germany.
“The Justice Department spied on me, and if that is not taken seriously, if that doesn’t result in their being sanctioned and the case being dismissed, and it’s stopping, this is no longer a free country—we might as well be in, you know, East Berlin before the wall fell,” a rambling Giuliani sputtered.
“This is tactics only known in a dictatorship, where you seize a lawyer’s records right in the middle of his representation of his client,” Giuliani concluded. “You should be prosecuted and disbarred for that. You should not be prosecuting somebody else.”
Carlson, meanwhile, came across deeply impressed by the one-time Trump hatchetman.
“I agree with that. Uncritically,” the Fox star replied.
