Federal agents on Wednesday executed a search warrant on Rudy Giuliani’s New York home and office, where they seized electronic devices in their investigation into the lawyer’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Robert Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, 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’s son, Andrew, stood outside the lawyer’s apartment building and declared that “any American, whether you are red or blue, should be extremely disturbed” by what he called the “polititization” of the Justice Department, kicking off what would be the right-wing media’s spin on the incident.
Though there is no indication that the DOJ’s probe involves Trump, who hired Giuliani to help him overturn the 2020 presidential election with absurd lawsuits that went nowhere, the ex-president’s top conservative media allies have been scrambling to paint the search warrant as a conspiracy by the Biden administration to suppress political opponents or some sort of coverup for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. And the accusations of Biden politicizing the DOJ follow four years of Trump using the department as his personal law firm to shield his criminal allies, like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.
These narratives ignore the fact that 1) the investigation into Giuliani began while Trump was in office, and 2) Trump’s senior political appointees at the DOJ repeatedly blocked prosecutors from obtaining the warrant, according to the New York Times.
On Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson baselessly claimed that in the eyes of the feds, Giuliani’s “core offense” was “being Trump’s lawyer.”
“That, and having the gall to try to learn more about what exactly Joe Biden and his son were doing in Ukraine several years ago,” he added, referring to Giuliani’s attempt to dig up dirt on the Bidens to sabotage the now-president’s election prospects.
A chryon that read “BIDEN ADMIN SENDS A MESSAGE TO DISSIDENTS” appeared at one point during the segment.
Fellow Fox Trump loyalist Sean Hannity ran with the same narrative on his radio show, ranting that it “didn’t take long for Biden to start using the Justice Department to go after political enemies” and “our justice system has been politicized.”
The Fox host argued that it was “unlikely” that Giuliani had done something wrong “because he is a lawyer and he is smart.”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense to me,” Hannity said.
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who is now a commentator on Fox News, earlier in the day tried to suggest that the search was part of the same deep state conspiracy theory Trumpland has been peddling about Michael Flynn for years.
“I remember the early days of the Trump administration and Michael Flynn, who became a target, it seemed, of FBI agents,” McEnany said.
Fellow Fox News panelist and conservative radio host Larry Elder took the spin even further, saying that “we ought to be very, very skeptical and hold our fire” and throwing in some innuendo about how “interesting” it is that Giuliani got searched after Trump left office.
