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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who also served as one of Donald Trump’s top lawyers, responded to the Justice Department’s unsealing of the affidavit used to authorize the FBI’s raid on the former president’s Mar-A-Lago estate earlier this month.
Giuliani was interviewed by Rita Cosby on Newsmax and he said that although the heavily redacted affidavit showed little to the public, he thinks it reveals everything about how the raid and subsequent seizure of documents and items were illegal.
This is a completely illegal warrant, for numerous reasons, that the least of which is it really isn’t a search warrant,” Giuliani told “Saturday Report.”
He went on to point out that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was delighted to protect Americans from overly broad, invasive searches.
“This is a general search warrant. Search warrants are supposed to be for a specific thing,” he said.
Giuliani was raided by the FBI in late April of 2021. Agents seized “computers and cellphones in a major escalation of the Justice Department’s investigation into the business dealings” of the former NYC mayor, The Associated Press reported at the time.
“The affidavit they had for my search warrant — although discovered nothing illegal; thank God, everything got sent back to me — but at least it was narrow to electronics,” Giuliani said. “This, I mean, they took his passport. Everything here should be suppressed. In other words, I actually believe this could never be used in a criminal case.”
“This is about as illegal search as you’re going to get,” he continued.
He added that the Justice Department took its time to seek the raid though officials claimed that the situation at Trump’s house was urgent.
“A warrant is supposed to be exigent circumstances — emergency — 11 days for an emergency?” Giuliani told Cosby. “And then the FBI took three days off to execute it, and this is important?
“Don’t we do things that are important, fast? Right? Don’t we do things that are unimportant, slow?” he asked.
He also suggested that the portions of the affidavit that were redacted, which is almost all of the document, are not damning to Trump. He thinks if they were, those sections would not have been hidden.
“The more that’s there, the worse it is, the more general it will be,” he said.
“It’s act four of five of the whole plot they started when they tried to say he was in collusion with the Russians,” he said.
He predicted that the raid would be more politically damaging to the Biden administration than to Trump.
“Every time they have a bombshell, it turned out almost [to] be favorable to us,” Giuliani said. “This may turn out to be favorable in the long run.”
Giuliani accused the Biden DOJ of a “corrupt double standard,” adding that the department was “running rough shod over the constitutional rights of anyone involved in, or legally defending, former President Donald J. Trump.”
Giuliani said the raid on Trump’s estate was a sad night for America and that he is ashamed of the FBI and the Department of Justice.
