Alan Dershowitz is hoping that former President Trump will come to Rudy Giuliani’s defense in court after federal prosecutors seized electronic devices from the former New York City mayor’s home and office last week in their investigation into the lawyer’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Dershowitz, who served on then-President Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial last year, is acting in an advisory capacity to Giuliani.
Dershowitz told CNN on Monday that Giuliani will likely file a court challenge and wants his former clients to come to his rescue by preventing prosecutors from examining the seized material that federal prosecutors acquired during the raid at the former Trump lawyer’s New York home and office last week.
“Hope the people whose information is privileged, like Donald Trump, would join the lawsuit and say look you can’t see my stuff,” Dershowitz told CNN.
In response to federal authorities seizing Giuliani’s electronic devices last week, Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani, said that the search warrant executed on his client’s New York properties are “replete with the material covered by the attorney-client privilege and other constitutional privileges.”
Costello also told the Wall Street Journal that the warrant cited potential violations of foreign lobbying laws and that it targeted Giuliani’s communications with columnist John Solomon, a key figure in ex-President Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo scheme.
Giuliani himself posted a rambling statement through his lawyer last week, which characterizes the search warrants executed on former New York City mayor’s home and apartment a “disturbing example of complete disregard for the attorney-client privilege protected by the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution.”
Giuliani’s statement — which contains misspellings and curious capitalization choices — claimed that the Justice Department was “running roughshod over the constitutional rights” of anyone who represented Trump.
“It is outrageous that the Trump Derangement Syndrome has gone so far that hatred has driven this unjustified and unethical attack on the United States Attorney and Mayor who did more to reduce crime than virtually any other in American history,” the statement said.
Trump weakly came to the defense of Giuliani after learning that FBI agents executed search warrants at Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment and office.
“Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment,” Trump told Fox Business in an interview. “It’s, like, so unfair and such a double — it’s like a double standard like I don’t think anybody’s ever seen before.”
Although Giuliani’s key role in efforts to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into then-candidate Biden and his family ahead of the 2020 election played a crucial role in Trump’s first impeachment trial, the former president claimed that he had no idea what investigators might be searching for.
“I don’t know what they’re looking for, what they’re doing. They say it had to do with filings of various papers, lobbying filings,” Trump told Fox Business, before pushing debunked claims about illegal foreign lobbying by President Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump griped that Giuliani found himself in a “very, very unfair situation.”
“You have to understand Rudy. Rudy loves this country so much. It is so terrible when you see things that are going on in our country, with the corruption and the problems. And then they go after Rudy Giuliani. It’s very sad, actually,” Trump told Fox Business.
