Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani blasts investigators as federal probe heats up
- President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, lashed out against federal prosecutors investigating him.
- Giuliani suggested they are acting as "secret police" and serving the political interests of President-elect Joe Biden.
- Giuliani is being investigated by prosecutors in the office of the U.S. attorney for Manhattan. He once held that same top post.
President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on Tuesday lashed out against federal prosecutors investigating him, suggesting they are acting as "secret police" and serving the political interests of President-elect Joe Biden.
Giuliani's Twitter rant against the Department of Justice came a day after NBC News reported that federal prosecutors in New York are requesting approval from top DOJ officials to seek a search warrant from a judge for Giuliani's electronic communications.
It came on the same day that judges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan formally appointed Audrey Strauss as the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, effective Jan. 16.
Strauss, who is overseeing the probe of Giuliani, has been serving as acting U.S. attorney for the SDNY since last summer, when her predecessor, Geoffrey Berman, was forced out.
Sources told NBC that the SDNY's investigation of Giuliani is "very active."
"I'm proud to be number one on Biden Vindictive government list," Giuliani wrote in a tweet.
"Sounds like the DOJ anti-Trumpers can't wait for Biden to make DOJ the GOVERNMENT Secret Police like they were under Obama," he added.
"They want to seize my emails. No reason. No wrongdoing. Attorney-Client privilege.?"
A representative for Biden didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
It is not known exactly why SDNY prosecutors are investigating Giuliani, who currently is leading Trump's extremely long-shot efforts to reverse Biden's Electoral College victory.
A former New York City mayor, Giuliani previously was the U.S. attorney for the SDNY, and also had served as a top DOJ official.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that SDNY prosecutors had reviewed Giuliani's bank records in connection with a probe of his dealings in Ukraine.
Two of Giuliani's former associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were involved in his dealings in Ukraine, in October 2019 were arrested on campaign finance fraud charges filed by the SDNY.
Giuliani, as Trump's lawyer, since at least last year has tried to dig up damaging information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in connection with Hunter Biden's business activities in Ukraine.
Giuliani's efforts were widely seen as an effort to harm Biden's then-candidacy for president in early 2019.
But those efforts spectacularly backfired in the summer of 2019, when Trump personally pressured Ukraine's president to announce an investigation of the Bidens.
At the time, Trump was withholding congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine, which has been locked in a dispute over territory with its neighbor Russia.
Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for his actions. The Senate later acquitted him after a trial early this year.
Trump and his company are under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office, which is a state entity.
The DA's office has a warrant empowering it to obtain Trump's tax records and other financial documents from his longtime accounting firm.
The president has asked the U.S. Supreme Court, for a second time, to block that subpoena.
The high court ruled earlier this year that Trump did not have an unqualified right as president to avoid having his financial records subpoenaed by a state prosecutor's office.