“America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani is in deep trouble with the feds. He has been under investigation since February by the prosecutors of Southern District of New York where he was the US Attorney way back when. The SDNY attorneys remained quiet during the election, but now the election is finished. Things got hotter last night when news broke that prosecutors are looking to subpoena his e-mail.
Prosecutors for the Southern District of New York have been in communication with Justice Department officials in Washington about gaining access to Giuliani’s emails, the two sources said. The Southern District needs Washington’s approval before its prosecutors can ask a judge to sign a search warrant for materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege, according to department policy. It is not known whether Washington has been granted that approval.
The scope of the current investigation is unclear, but in October 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors from the Southern District were reviewing Giuliani’s bank records as part of an investigation into his dealings in Ukraine. Two of his former associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested that month on charges of campaign finance fraud and have since been charged with additional crimes related to wire fraud conspiracy. Parnas and Fruman have pleaded not guilty.
In February, The Washington Post reported that prosecutors were contacting witnesses and seeking to collect additional documents as part of their investigation into Giuliani.
Since then, little had been known about the status of the investigation and whether Giuliani was still under scrutiny for his efforts to convince Ukraine to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings in the country.
The two sources familiar, however, say the investigation into Giuliani is ongoing, with one saying it is “very active.”
Last night when this news broke, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow wondered just what the prosecutors were looking for
It’s hard to narrow it down. There is a veritable cornucopia of possibilities in terms of what exactly Mr. Giuliani may be under investigation for, and which of those many investigations might have been the trigger for trying to get a warrant. I mean take your pick. [..]
It could be all of them.
“It’s really complicated,” said NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley, “because not only is Giuliani an attorney, but he’s the president’s attorney. So when you talk about getting information, getting communications that are protected under attorney-client privilege, you have to go through main Justice and a lot of times they set up a filter team. These are people who have the very tedious task of reviewing communications, deciding what is protected, and then they are the ones who decide what to hand over to prosecutors so the prosecutors don’t see anything that could be protected under attorney-client privilege.”
But much of that evidence would likely be permissible for prosecutors to review, because Giuliani serves many roles for the president.
“He wears many hats, so some of the communications very well could not be protected by attorney-client privilege,” Ainsley said. “But then you have the added layer he’s the president’s attorney, and that could be a reason why some of this investigation was at least, it kind of went quiet for a while. You can’t take overt actions that’s as closely tied to a candidate, and at that time, the president was a candidate, and the lead-up to the elections. That’s why we may have not heard as much about this investigation.”
I’ll bet it’s all of them and the Squatter pardons him before it goes to indictments.
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