Well, well, well, it looks like Rudy Giuliani is in a bit of a scrape.
NBC News reports that federal prosecutors have been in talks about requesting his electronic communications as part of an ongoing investigation that is very much still active. The news arrives as Giuliani tries to distance himself from the QAnon-loving lawyer Sidney Powell who’s taken the lead on Trump’s attempts to contest the 2020 election, and, lest we forget, as he recovers from coronavirus. Hard to catch a break when you’re an evil man made of wax!
Hm, OK, but what investigation is this? you may be wondering, straining to remember the last thing Giuliani did that didn’t seem legally dubious. Federal prosecutors launched the probe in 2019, after two of his associates were arrested for violating campaign finance laws. Their indictment implicated Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, as more details emerged about the pressure campaign Giuliani led against Ukraine. And of course all of this traces back to an event that seems like it happened a million years ago, which is Trump’s impeachment trial.
The last we heard anything about the investigation was when Trump was acquitted in February; at the time, the Washington Post reported that federal prosecutors had begun contacting witnesses and attempting to secure documents to build their case against Giuliani. According to NBC, it’s likely we’ll start hearing more about it again, since sources signaled to the outlet that the investigation will soon be “ramping up.”
Former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Chuck Rosenberg told NBC that it seems likely federal investigators waited until the election was over and long settled to escalate the probe more publicly.
“It’s sensible to perhaps treat a search warrant as an overt investigative step,” Rosenberg told the outlet. “Search warrants for a subject’s personal belongings are not terribly discreet and the recipient of the warrant can talk about it. That could be a legitimate concern before an election but the equation changes after an election, when you no longer need to abstain from overt investigative steps.”
So...there’s more where that came from!