Rudy Giuliani has claimed that he has been ‘persecuted’ by the media since uncovering a hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
The former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer told Fox News’ Hannity program on Monday that the media has been trying to ‘destroy his credibility’ since he handed material from the laptop to the New York Post ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Giuliani is under investigation for allegedly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). He denies this.
Last week, his Manhattan home and office were raided and his electronic equipment seized, as part of the investigation into whether the 76-year-old acted as an unregistered federal agent and lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs.
Rudy Giuliani (left) has claimed that he has been ‘persecuted’ by the media since passing a hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to the New York Post. The former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer told Fox News Sean Hannity (right) on Monday that the media has been trying to ‘destroy his credibility’ since he released the material ahead of the 2020 presidential election
Federal agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office in New York City last week as part of their investigation into his dealings with Ukraine
The investigation was prompted by a case against two Soviet-born men who assisted Giuliani in attempts to dig up incriminating information in Ukraine against Hunter Biden, who was on the board of an energy company there.
During the late stages of campaigning in the 2020 election, photos that appeared to show Hunter Biden with drug paraphernalia, along with documents and emails, were released to The New York Post by Giuliani.
The authenticity of the information and how Giuliani came to obtain it were immediately called into question and he claimed that the media has been targeting him ever since.
‘This is totally done because they want to destroy my credibility because I have that entire hard drive,’ he said.
Giuliani has claimed that he is of interest to the FBI because was the personal lawyer for Donald Trump
‘I put it out to the New York Post and since then they have been persecuting me. They’ve been threatening me, they’ve done everything they can to destroy every business relationship I have. They have put out all kinds of false stories,’ he told Hannity.
‘If they’re lying about that, isn’t it obvious they’re lying about everything else?’
Among these ‘lies’, according to Giuliani, is what he described as attempts by the media over years to falsely connect him with Russia.
This week, The Washington Post and New York Times corrected a key claim in their coverage of Giuliani, which asserted that he had received an FBI briefing warning him he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign.
During the interview, Giuliani also claimed that the FBI had Trump in their sights, saying the body had obtained a covert warrant to search his iCloud from May 1, 2018 to November 4, 2019
Both papers had claimed the former New York City Mayor was briefed by FBI agents that he was being used by Russia to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in the lead up to the 2020 Presidential election.
‘I’m probably the biggest anti-Communist you’ve ever met,’ he told Fox. ‘There’s no way that I’m a Russian agent or anybody else’s agent.
‘I was a lawyer who was representing a client who was innocent. The biggest burden a lawyer can have is to represent an innocent man and I did it damn well,’ Giuliani said, referring to his role as former President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
During the interview, Giuliani also claimed that the FBI had Trump in their sights, saying the body had obtained a covert warrant to search his iCloud from May 1, 2018 to November 4, 2019.
May 1 was the date Giuliani began representing Trump in an investigation into potential collusion with Russia.
‘You can’t say that their main interest wasn’t Donald Trump,’ Giuliani told Fox.
The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election and were charged with violating the ban on political donations by foreign nationals in October 2019
‘The day that I begin representing him is the day they go invade my iCloud. So try telling somebody that it wasn’t to get the material on Donald Trump.’
The Giuliani investigation grew out of a federal investigation of his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked on gathering information about the Bidens during the election.
The two Soviet-born men were charged with federal campaign finance violations.
The two, who pleaded not guilty, were arrested at an airport outside Washington carrying one-way tickets to Europe. That investigation is on-going and faced some delays due to the COVID pandemic.
Trump has said he doesn’t know the two men or the work they did.
Investigators are also looking into Giuliani’s role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial. Current and former U.S. officials testified at that inquiry that Giuliani carried out a shadow foreign policy in Ukraine.
Investigators are also looking into Giuliani’s role in the ousting of US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was a prominent witness in Trump’s first impeachment trial
As Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation of the Bidens, he pushed to have Yovanovitch removed, seeing her as an obstacle to his efforts to produce a probe that would benefit Trump politically.
At Giuliani’s urging, Trump had her recalled.
Prosecutors are examining whether Giuliani was working not only for Trump, but also for Ukrainian officials or businesses who wanted Yovanovitch dismissed for their own reasons, The New York Times reported.
Giuliani later bragged about having her removed, saying he ‘forced’ her out as she was making his push for the Ukrainians to investigate the Bidens ‘difficult.’
Trump was impeached on two counts in his first trial after reports of a July 25, 2019, phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden and also a discredited conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election.
Trump was acquitted by the Senate.