Tag: giuliani investigation
Giuliani May Face Prosecution For Overseeing Fake Elector Scheme

Giuliani May Face Prosecution For Overseeing Fake Elector Scheme

Disgraced ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in ‘significant trouble’ for his role in orchestrating a plot to send fake Electoral College electors to Washington, DC to steal the 2020 election for former President Donald Trump, ex-prosecutors explained to The Guardian on Monday.

Giuliani served as Trump’s pro-bono personal lawyer throughout his single term.

The scheme involved individuals who claimed to be the “real” electors from seven states that Trump lost to President-Elect Joe Biden. Their objective – which was predicated on Trump’s lie that the presidential contest was rigged against him – was to have their votes counted in lieu of the legitimate electors that were chosen by voters. Or, at the very least, the imposters sought to sow doubt about which electors were legitimate. It was a last-ditch effort to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election in favor of Trump, which he did not. That, in turn, led to Trump inciting the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Experts believe that Giuliani and those who participated are facing serious legal repercussions for attempting to subvert an American election.

“The threats to Giuliani come from multiple directions,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general at the Department of Justice, told The Guardian. “Evidence is growing that he was at the center of a series of schemes to change the election results – by fraud and by force. As the investigations focus more closely on the people Giuliani recruited to change the election results on January 6 and before, his criminal exposure grows as the number of witnesses against him multiplies.”

Michael Zeldin, a Harvard University Institute of Politics fellow and former federal prosecutor, said if the evidence shows that “Giuliani improperly influenced or attempted to improperly influence the election, potentially, he could be charged with state and federal crimes including: falsifying voting documents, fraud, false statements, mail/wire fraud or even conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Others noted that Giuliani’s proximity to Trump put him in a uniquely influential position that tied him to multiple efforts to thwart democracy.

“Giuliani was the cog of Trump’s flywheel to overturn the election, getting other Trump allies to act and leaving his imprint for investigators to find,” said former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut. “He’s reportedly key in the bogus slate scheme. That’s dangerous for Giuliani, because forgeries disprove innocent intent. In a conspiracy, which DOJ could charge as to the fake electors, a conviction doesn’t require that he solicited, or even knew about the forgeries, but only that he participated in a conspiratorial plot involving fake electors to help overturn the election.”

Giuliani is also facing a possible subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol if he refuses to cooperate.

“Giuliani’s information about various schemes that Trump promoted to block Biden’s win could potentially be very helpful to the House inquiry,” Zeldin said. “If Rudy provides significant cooperation (which is unlikely) he could help the panel unravel some of the major ways that Trump tried to thwart Biden’s election victory including, most significantly, whether there was any coordination or pre-planning between Trump and those who stormed the US Capitol.”

Lawmakers on the bipartisan congressional panel maintain that Giuliani’s testimony is critical to their probe and that they “fully expect that, in accordance with the law, we’ll hear from Rudy,” Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of only two Republicans serving on the Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month.

Michael Moore, a former United States attorney from Georgia, said that Giuliani’s plan failed in part because of how haphazardly and amateurishly the entire tactic was assembled.

“For Giuliani and his crew to have legal trouble, you don’t have to get much more into the facts than to understand that he was orchestrating fake slates of electors, based on fake reports of fraud, using faked documents, to fake the outcome of the election, and then submitting those fake documents to government officials,” said Moore.

“That is a conspiracy that a kindergartener could unravel,” he added. “The submission of the pro-Trump fake elector certificates to the National Archives was about as smart as taking the note that you used to rob the bank to the frame shop.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

#EndorseThis: CNN Mocks Giuliani, ‘The Guy You Hire If You Want To Be Impeached’

#EndorseThis: CNN Mocks Giuliani, ‘The Guy You Hire If You Want To Be Impeached’

Former President Trump's personal attorney is in a mess of trouble, after the FBI raided his home for further evidence in the eternally unfolding Ukraine scandal.

While Rudy Giuliani has given late night hosts and political satirists plenty of material over the years, the latest bombshell even has CNN piling on.

“Giuliani is the guy you go to if you want to get impeached, right?" CNN host John Berman joked. "If you're a president, [you] need to get impeached, hire Giuliani, and you get there pretty quickly." Legal analyst and ex-prosecutor Elie Honig provides a thoroughly amusing answer.

Click and cackle!

Rudy Giuliani's incompetence mocked: 'The guy you hire if you want to get impeached'youtu.be


Rudy Giuliani

Expert: Rudy Lied About The Search Warrants Executed On Him

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

On Wednesday, April 28, the New York City home and office of Republican Rudy Giuliani — former New York City mayor and a personal attorney for former President Donald Trump — were searched by FBI agents. Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and former assistant U.S. attorney, offers some legal analysis of the raid in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on April 30.

Wehle explains, "FBI agents executed a search warrant at Giuliani's home and office on Wednesday, seizing material that included phones and computers, and at the Washington, D.C.-area home of lawyer Victoria Toensing. Toensing is a former federal prosecutor and Giuliani affiliate who, along with her husband Joseph diGenova, was reportedly involved in collecting information about Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine from back when he served as vice president."

The law professor and Never Trump conservative notes that in October 2019, major media reported that the U.S. Department of Justice was "criminally investigating" Giuliani. Back then, Trump was still president, and loyalist William Barr was his attorney general. But in April 2021, Joe Biden is now president, with Attorney General Merrick Garland serving in the position once held by Barr. And while senior officials in the Trump-era DOJ, according to the New York Times, were able to block search warrants aimed at Giuliani, the environment at the DOJ is much different under President Biden.

"Of course, this is bad news for Giuliani and for Donald Trump, who is now a private citizen and no longer protected by DOJ's internal ban on criminal actions against sitting presidents," Wehle observes. "The attorney general is not fooling around."

When Trump was president, he typically described any investigation of either himself or his allies as a "witch hunt" — and similarly, Giuliani's attorneys have denounced the April 28 FBI raid as "legal thuggery." But Wehle stresses that "given Giuliani's attorney status and connection to a former president, the decision to pursue such a warrant was no doubt vetted at the highest levels of DOJ."

"The Giuliani probe arose out of the Southern District of New York in connection with the arrests of Lev Parnas and Igor Furman, two former business partners of Giuliani who were indicted on four counts of conspiracy relating to foreign donations in elections and falsifying information to the Federal Election Commission," Wehle notes. "Their trial is scheduled for October 2021."

Trump is the only president in U.S. history who was impeached twice. The first impeachment occurred in 2019 as a result of Trump trying to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Pursuing opposition research on a political rival is hardly unusual in U.S. politics, but as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff emphasized during Trump's first impeachment trial, requesting such an investigation from a foreign leader seriously crossed the line.

Giuliani, in 2019, was among the Trump allies who was pursuing dirt on the Bidens.

Wehle notes, "Giuliani is reportedly under investigation for potential crimes under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which makes it illegal to act as an 'agent of a foreign principal' without registering with DOJ. As the DOJ explains on its website, the purpose of FARA is 'to identify foreign influence in the United States and address threats to national security' by promoting 'transparency' and 'ensuring that the United States government and the public know the source of certain information from foreign agents intended to influence American public opinion, policy, and laws.'"

Giuliani: ‘Crooked’ Feds Raided His Home Because They’re ‘Jealous’

Giuliani: ‘Crooked’ Feds Raided His Home Because They’re ‘Jealous’

NEW YORK — Beleaguered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed Thursday that federal investigators only raided his Manhattan apartment and office this week because they’re “jealous” of his erstwhile career as a prosecutor and cooked up a “garbage” case against him to smear his name. Giuliani, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, unloaded on the feds in an appearance on his namesake radio show, his first public comments since FBI agents stormed his Upper East Side home and Midtown law firm at dawn Wednesday. “I’ve done your job longer and ...

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