Treasure Trove Of Giuliani Communications Given To Feds

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More than 3,000 communications housed on electronic devices that federal authorities seized from longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani last year have been turned over to prosecutors, who are investigating the former New York City mayor over his overseas dealings. The investigation includes the question of whether Giuliani essentially worked as an illegally unregistered lobbyist in the United States on behalf of foreign interests. Retired federal Judge Barbara S. Jones, who was appointed to oversee the review of materials from Giuliani’s devices to deal with anything that should be considered privileged, opted to agree to Giuliani’s claims of a privileged or personal status on 40 out of 96 particular items with such claims raised over them. Giuliani’s side dropped privilege claims for 19, while Jones rejected the claims on 37 items.

Giuliani did not make claims of privilege for thousands of other messages. Notably, after a raid on former longtime Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen, Jones “was also appointed to review Cohen’s materials before his guilty pleas to charges involving tax evasion, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress about a Trump real estate deal in Russia,” as The Washington Post explains. Meanwhile, as previously reported on this site, Giuliani may have been covertly ferrying the wishes of Ukrainian interests to then-President Donald Trump when advocating for the firing of Marie Yovanovitch from her job as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. More broadly, it’s been revealed in The Daily Beast that investigators “homed in on Giuliani Security & Safety, a consulting firm that has done business with various governments and organizations around the world” as the probe rolled on.

Notably, Giuliani isn’t the only one who saw a trove of his records released this week. The U.S. Supreme Court also cleared the way for the House committee investigating the Capitol riot to get hundreds of pages of records from the Trump administration, against the former president’s wishes. The panel has now received these materials. The Court observed, among other things, that “[because] the court of appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former president necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision.”