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Whatever your political leanings, it is disturbing that federal authorities were spying on e-mails and other private communications between President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani during Trump’s first impeachment.
In November 2019, the US Attorney’s Office the Southern District of New York executed a “covert warrant” on the former mayor’s iCloud account and then decided for themselves which private communications between the president and his lawyer were out of bounds due to attorney-client or executive privilege, according to Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.
Giuliani says the intrusion was driven by “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and has trampled over the president’s constitutional rights.
It was only after the FBI’s dawn raid on Giuliani’s Upper East Side apartment Wednesday that Costello was told about the iCloud warrant. It reportedly is part of an investigation into alleged lobbying activities by Giuliani in Ukraine, where he was investigating why Hunter Biden received $83,000 a month from a corrupt Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice president.
But this is no way to treat the mayor who pulled New York out of its descent into disorder in the 1990s. It’s no way to treat the courageous US attorney for Manhattan who brought down the mob in the 1980s. And it’s no way to treat the former personal lawyer to a president.
What the hell is going on ?
“In banana republics, in . . . many parts of the world, when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday. “That’s happening in America now. They’re going after Rudy Giuliani.”
To make matters worse, someone is leaking inaccurate information about the investigation.
The New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News all ran anonymously sourced stories last week claiming that Giuliani had received a formal “defensive briefing” from the FBI warning him that he was the target of Russian disinformation over his Ukraine inquiries.
Problem is, it wasn’t true. All three news operations had to issue corrections Saturday.
At least they had the integrity to admit they got it wrong.
But you would think, after the journalistic failure of the Russia collusion hoax, that they might be wary of sinister interests in Washington who peddle misinformation about Trump and his associates under cover of anonymity.
The fact is, if Giuliani were planning to destroy evidence, which is the most plausible reason for a high-profile raid of his home and office, he could have done so any time in the past 18 months.
Costello first contacted prosecutors Nov. 22, 2019, when leaks about the investigation first started circulating, and offered in a formal letter for Giuliani to meet with investigators and answer any questions if they would let him know the subject of their inquiries.
Costello made at least two more offers, including in a letter March 2 this year, but all were rebuffed.
“Why not do this the easy way?” asks Costello.
Why didn’t the US Attorney’s Office just issue a subpoena in the usual way it deals with attorneys in possession of privileged information, instead of sending seven agents to bang on Giuliani’s door in jackets emblazoned with the FBI logo?
It was overkill. On the surface, at least, it looks to be a continuation of the witch hunt conducted by the FBI against Trump and his associates even before he took office, hobbling his presidency and emboldening his political adversaries.
What makes it even more perplexing is that the attorney’s office for the Southern District has so prided itself on its independence from political interference, that it has been dubbed the “Sovereign District of New York.”
It is where Giuliani successfully prosecuted the five families of the New York Mafia and survived a mob contract on his life. It is where he brought down Wall Street untouchables such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. The office was Giuliani and Giuliani was the office.
No doubt he hasn’t won friends at his old workplace by saying they are jealous of him.
But that doesn’t explain such an ostentatious show of force over what reportedly are allegations of technical violations of an 80-year-old statute, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, that rarely was enforced until the advent of Trump. It was used against Trump’s former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and his former national security adviser, Gen. Mike Flynn, and now it seems it is being deployed against Giuliani.
Considering the evidence of multiple alleged FARA violations on the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop in 2019 — which has been in the hands of the FBI for more than a year — it’s no wonder Costello points to a “corrupt double standard.” No dawn raids on any Biden family homes.
Trump’s enemies have no doubt that the ultimate target is Trump. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, currently under house arrest after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations, is rubbing his hands with glee.
On MSNBC, Sunday morning, Cohen predicted that Giuliani, 76, will end up betraying Trump.
“Giuliani has a vault full of [compromising material] on Trump he’s going to unleash to save himself,” Cohen chortled. “Good luck, pal, you’re going to need it.”
But anyone who thinks so doesn’t know Giuliani.
It is a sad irony that at a time when crime is spiraling out of control, the hero who saved New York is being demonized and hounded in the city which owes him so much.
Unmask the president!
Christian rubes and white Republicans are being demonized for supposedly refusing to take the coronavirus vaccine.
“It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant,’ ” wrote a USA Today columnist, pointing the finger at “half-witted … evangelicals and Republicans.”.
The attacks are based on old polls. But if you look at the demographic data of who actually has been vaccinated, you can see that it’s more likely to be Democrats who are hesitant to get the shots.
For example, Democrats make up 76 percent of voters in the District of Columbia, and yet just 26.8 percent of DC had been fully vaccinated by Saturday. South Dakota, a den of white Republicans, by contrast has 35.8 percent of its population fully vaccinated, even though, arguably, rural people are not at as great a risk as those in dense cities.
The majority of blacks are Democrat voters, and the majority of whites vote Republican. Yet whites are lining up for anti- COVID-19 shots at a far higher rate than any other racial group, with CDC figures showing 67.2 percent of white non-Hispanics fully vaccinated, while comprising 61.2 percent of the population. Only 8.5 percent of black non-Hispanics are vaccinated while comprising 12.5 percent of the population.
None of this analysis is useful. But nor is falsely blaming Republicans going to get more shots into arms.
What would help is if President Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci and other high-profile Democrats who have been fully vaccinated would simply follow CDC advice and dispense with masks outdoors and when they are with other vaccinated people.
Instead, they still wear masks everywhere and Biden flies into a panic every time he mislays his face covering. They are sending a message at odds with the vaccination imperative.
The prospect of resuming a normal life is the only incentive to get vaccinated. So stop playing politics.
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