Rudy Giuliani’s Home Raided By Federal Authorities

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The man who ran New York City and the elite U.S. Southern District of New York attorney’s office dropped over the edge of common sense somewhere along the way. His former wife, who divorced him during the Donald Trump reign, said that Rudy Giuliani had changed. After that and for some unknown reason, he flew into the ex-president’s circle and has badly burned himself.

Giuliani is currently under investigation for breaking lobbying laws when he served as Trump’s personal attorney. Prosecutors have obtained a search warrant, which kicks off the next phase of their investigation, The Law & Order publication wrote.

Federal investigators with a search warrant in hand went to his Upper East Side apartment and his Park Avenue office. They were looking for incriminating information about the former mayor’s excursions into Ukraine, according to three people close to the matter The New York Times reported.

The warrant gave them permission to seize Trump’s former attorney’s electronic devices. The SDNY in Manhattan and the FBI had been trying to get a search warrant to tap Giuliani’s phones for months.

Rarely do prosecutors take out a search warrant against an attorney, especially not one for the ex-president’s attorney.

The fed’s primary interest has been Giuliani’s lobbying for Trump “on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs” in 2019. These individuals had been assisting Trump’s attorney seek dirt on the then-president’s political opponents. They were especially interested in President Joe Biden, who was his opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

During 45’s presidency, his Department of Justice (DOJ) blocked such a warrant. But as Trump’s presidency wound down, the investigation picked up speed. Then, after President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was confirmed, the DOJ stopped blocking the Giuliani probe altogether.

This has been described as an aggressive stage of the investigation. The investigators could not get a warrant without convincing a judge they had “sufficient reason to believe that a crime was committed.”

The query began when two Soviet-born men helped Giuliani try to find damaging data about President Biden and his surviving son, Hunter. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman helped the former mayor in his search for evidence of wrongdoing. Biden’s son had held a highly-paid position as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were charged with unrelated crimes in 2019. Their trial has been set for October.

Prosecutors have looked into Giuliani’s business operations while he was still working for Trump. It seems, the attorney was also working to get the then-president to “oust the American ambassador to Ukraine,” Marie Yovanovitch, according to the New York Times:

‘Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, it is a federal crime to try to influence or lobby the United States government at the request or direction of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department.’

The probe also investigated Giuliani’s interactions with Yurly Lursenko. He was one of the Ukrainian officials who also assisted Trump’s attorney in digging for dirt and working to get Yovanovitch removed. Giuliani was in discussions with Lutsenko about consulting on his own behalf, too. The agreement would have brought the ex-mayor “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Giuliani claimed he refused the deal. Part of his agreement would have been helping the Ukrainian government recover money it claimed was “stolen and stashed overseas.”

Spokesmen for the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

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