The FBI covertly spied on the Apple iCloud account of Rudy Giuliani in late 2019 when the former New York City mayor was representing President Donald Trump during House impeachment proceedings, Giuliani said.
Giuliani, in an interview on the “Rita Cosby Show” on WABC radio in New York, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan informed his attorney, Robert Costello, on Thursday that the secret wiretapping took place.
“He asked [the prosecutor] to repeat it because he couldn’t believe it was true,” Giuliani said. “To me they just trashed the president of the United States.”
The operation was carried out under then-Attorney General William Barr's Department of Justice via the U.S. Southern District of New York.
Giuliani said that after he learned of the FBI's operation, he notified two Trump attorneys.
“I let them know his rights once again have been trashed by what now has to be described as the department of injustice,” Giuliani said. “If they can do this to us they can do this to anyone they want to do it to.”
Said host Rita Cosby, “The iCloud stuff is stunning. It is so stunning.”
Giuliani said an assistant U.S. attorney made the disclosure because the FBI's spying operation will have to be detailed in court.
On Wednesday, FBI agents stormed Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment and law office and seized several electronic devices. According to the search warrant, Giuliani is suspected of violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by allegedly representing a Ukrainian official in dealings with the U.S. government and not filing as an agent. Giuliani said he never acted as an agent with any of his Ukrainian contacts as he investigated Biden family corruption.
Giuliani said he was defending the president against Democrats' “phony impeachment. Meanwhile, the Justice Department, while I’m defending him on that with others, invaded my iCloud.”
“I can’t fathom that would be done to an ordinary citizen,” Giuliani said in the WABC interview. “The president doesn’t have any more rights than anybody else, but he doesn’t have any less. To me, they just trashed the president of the United States like he has no constitutional rights.”
Giuliani said he conducted many conversations with Trump that presumably could be retrieved off of iCloud — a backup cyber storage system for just about anything contained on personal devices such as cellphones and computers.
“Unless these people have no ethics or any sense of what it means to be a lawyer, what you do when you do that, people who listen to this now say how can I trust talking to my lawyer,” Giuliani said. “The government may come in and start listening to it or might try to see text of memoranda.”
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