Yesterday must’ve been unpleasant for Rudy Giuliani. After months in which Republicans at the Justice Department reportedly ran interference on his behalf, the former New York City mayor was greeted yesterday morning with federal investigators who were executing a search warrant to enter his apartment and seize electronic devices.
As the New York Times noted, “To obtain a search warrant, investigators need to persuade a judge they have sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed and that the search would turn up evidence of the crime.”
It stood to reason that Giuliani and his lawyers would deny that he’d done anything wrong. What was unexpected, however was the truly bizarre written statement issued yesterday afternoon by Robert Costello, in his capacity as Giuliani’s attorney. Consider the first sentence:
The Biden department of justice has completely ignored clear evidence (which the FBI has had for over a year) in texts and emails on Hunter Biden’s hard drive of failing to register numerous times as a foreign agent, child pornography, money laundering, and 30 years of the Biden Crime family taking millions and millions in bribes to sell his public offices.
Oh. So, as federal investigators moved forward with their investigation into Giuliani, the first thing we heard from Giuliani’s lawyer was a series of unsubstantiated allegations against Hunter Biden. How is the president’s son relevant to the allegations surrounding the former mayor? Your guess is as good as mine.
But the written statement — filled with odd grammatical errors and an idiosyncratic approach to capitalization — kept going, making six references to Hunter Biden, alongside references to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the “compliant media.”
Conservative media voices, not surprisingly, also rallied to Giuliani’s defense, claiming that the Justice Department is pursuing a partisan political vendetta because of the Republican’s connection to Donald Trump. A Fox News host told viewers, for example, that it “didn’t take long for Biden to start using the Justice Department to go after political enemies” and “our justice system has been politicized.”
Among the many problems with this is the fact that federal investigators were interested in Giuliani’s possible criminal wrongdoing many months before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
And then, of course, there’s Giuliani’s client at Mar-a-Lago, who told Fox Business this morning, “Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment. It’s, like, so unfair.” To the extent that reality matters, Giuliani spent a considerable amount of time partnering with an active Russian agent as part of a campaign against the U.S. political system, and then spent the post-election period losing an almost comical number of lawsuits while trying to undermine the results of his own country’s democracy. On Jan. 6, Giuliani also appeared at a pre-riot rally in which he talked up the idea of “trial by combat” to a group of riled up radicals — only to keep his anti-election efforts going after the attack on the U.S. Capitol subsided. He’s also currently facing a criminal investigation for possibly having acted as an unregistered foreign agent. A variety of words come to mind. “Patriot” isn’t one of them.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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