After the attorney for a Rudy Giuliani associate accidentally revealed an apparently wider scope of the former mayor’s criminal investigation, a Manhattan federal judge moved to put the whole thing under wraps.
U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken for the Southern District of New York ordered the court filing with botched redactions sealed, after CNN first reported that the document revealed a lawyer saying that prosecutors had seized the email accounts of two Ukrainians and the electronic devices of a third.
Joseph Bondy, an attorney for Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, made the improper redactions in a filing asking for access to information gathered by prosecutors in the course of their investigation into the former NYC mayor.
Bondy said in the filing that prosecutors had seized the email accounts of former prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko and former fiscal service chief Roman Nasirov. They also said that they seized the electronic devices of Alexander Levin, a private businessman.
The filing had black bars displayed over the redacted areas, but copying and pasting the underlying text into a new word document revealed what was meant to be sealed.