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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As you may have heard, FBI agents yesterday executed a search warrant in Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan apartment and office, seizing cell phones and computers. Giuliani, the former mayor, obviously, as well as lawyer for Trump and former US Attorney, has been the focus of an investigation for the past two years regarding his activities in Ukraine. Also in question, whether he conducted illegal lobbying for Ukrainian officials while he pushed for an investigation into Joe Biden when Biden was running for president.

Joining me now to break down the latest, including why it's such a big deal to search any lawyer in the first place no less this one, are Andrea Bernstein, WNYC Senior Editor and the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and The Marriage of Money and Power, and Ilya Marritz, WNYC Senior Reporter. Many of you know they were the co-hosts of the WNYC ProPublica podcast Trump, Inc, about Trump's business empire. Hey, Andrea. Hey, Ilya, welcome back to the show.

Andrea Bernstein: Hey, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Andrea, give people more background on why Giuliani is being investigated by the FBI in the first place?

Andrea Bernstein: Yes. This stems from a series of business relationships that emerged around the time of Trump's first impeachment. Trump, while he was going around Ukraine, speaking to corrupt former prosecutors there about digging up dirt on the Biden family was also possibly taking money from wealthy Ukrainians, Ukrainian oligarchs, possibly to lobby US officials on behalf of those clients.

Now, we don't know that he did that, and that is what the Justice Department is now looking at, but we do know that his two former business associates were charged in 2019, the fall of 2019, with a number of crimes, including, essentially, acting secretly on behalf of foreign nationals thus violating US laws.

Their association with Giuliani has long raised questions. It's been clear for some time, the Justice Department has been looking at this, whether he violated lobbying laws or other laws. We know from some really good reporting by the New York Times that the Justice Department, the Bill Barr Justice Department would not allow the federal prosecutors in Manhattan to pursue this.

It was only now that we have a new Attorney General and a new Deputy Attorney General, that the southern district was given the okay to execute this early morning raid. You can only imagine, here's Giuliani, somebody that ordered exactly this type of raid when he was US Attorney, getting a 6:00 AM knock on the door, there is the FBI at his apartment on the Upper East Side, to seize his computers and other electronic equipment.

Brian Lehrer: Ilya, even though he's being investigated, we can't conclude at this point that he's going to be indicted on anything, but the fact that they did conduct such a raid would indicate the seriousness of the investigation. As far as you can tell, what are they looking for on the cell phones and computers of Giuliani that he would even still have on them all this time after he knew he was being investigated?

Ilya Marritz: Yes, it is an interesting question, what is still there, or does he even still have the devices that he had in the relevant time period? When authorities go to a judge for a warrant, they have to say the crime that they're investigating, and we know that one potential crime is a violation of the Foreign Agent's Registration Act, sometimes known as FARA.

Basically, what it says is that anybody who's lobbying for a foreign principal, which can mean a bunch of different things, has to register with the Department of Justice. They have to make their contract public, they have to do regular quarterly reporting. Just looking at the fact that we were able to uncover at Trump, Inc, certainly seems like Rudy Giuliani had a lot of foreign clients, not only in Ukraine but in places like Bahrain and Romania, and possibly Turkey, and to my knowledge, he has never registered under FARA.

Now, it's interesting because defense lawyers representing people who have been accused of failing to register as foreign agents like to say that it used to be a seldom enforced law, they like to describe it almost as a overlooking paperwork thing. It's not a felony, it's a misdemeanor. That's all true, but let's remember the origins of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. It was created to basically put a halt to secret Nazi propaganda coming into the United States in the 1930s.

Really, the idea is that the American people should know who is trying to influence the US government on behalf of foreign parties. That is the thing that Rudy Giuliani perhaps did not do here. I feel like he's really a poster child for why that's so dangerous because, at the time that he was representing these foreign parties, and we may not even know who they all were, he also was representing the President of the United States for free in the very high-profile Robert Moeller investigation. If that's not an ethically fraught situation, I don't know what it is.

Brian Lehrer: You type some notes for us to prepare for this segment that included the line, "Giuliani has been compared to a fog machine, and that's apt." What's a fog machine in this context?

Ilya Marritz: I think he's really like a sweet generous lawyer. There's nobody quite like him. So many reporters have been butt-dialed by him at some point or have like a weird butt dial voice now left by him. He's gone on TV many times and had to walk back things that he said because they directly contradicted what the President had been saying.

He appears incompetent a lot of the time and yet, in his way, he's very effective. He is a pugnacious representative of the President. Nobody fights for him on TV like Rudy Giuliani, and the cumulative effect I think is to sow doubt about everything. Even at the moments when it really looks like he's being a bad lawyer, I'm not sure he's being such a-- Look, he was very involved in the fact patterns that caused two impeachments to President Trump, and yet he is able to muddy the waters about what had happened and I think that that can be helpful.

Brian Lehrer: I see, Andrea, that you saw Trump on Fox this morning talking about this. You sent us a quote, "Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things. He just loves this country, and then they raid his apartment. It's so unfair, and such a double standard, like I don't think anybody's ever seen before." Donald Trump on Fox today. That's not a defense. What is the defense from Giuliani at this point? His own actual lawyer, Robert Costello, called the FBI search, legal thuggery.

Andrea Bernstein: Right. Rudy Giuliani has denied wrongdoing. You said this, and it's worth saying again, he has not been charged with anything. He has said that he has offered to cooperate with federal agents. It is worth saying, and there's an interesting fact pattern, a really important fact pattern that we uncovered in 2019 when we were reporting on this for Trump, Inc, and we knew clearly that Giuliani was pushing an outcome.

The firing of the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who we talked about a lot during the impeachment hearings. That he was pushing an outcome that was also sought by big moneyed interests in Ukraine, including a wealthy oligarch who is a US fugitive named Dmitry Firtash.

One of the things that was interesting yesterday is that the FBI also took records from Victoria Toensing who is Dmitry Firtash's lawyer. There is an implication that Rudy Giuliani was at least advancing the business interest of certain people and interests in Ukraine that may have affected US government, tried to affect US government.

I hope that we eventually learn the answers from this, but it is already clear from what is in the public record, that all of these people were working towards the same ends during the whole Ukraine scandal while they were trying to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden. It's an interesting and ironic outcome that it was the feds that went to get the records that Giuliani had when he spent all of those years searching for records on the Biden family.

Brian Lehrer: People may remember the names Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian-born American businessman, who along with a guy named Igor Fruman were associates of Rudy Giuliani and they flipped apparently, right? They've been cooperating with the FBI. A lot of people made fun of them.

They were like, I don't know, the Keystone Cops of international intrigue or whatever. They weren't cops. They weren't law enforcement, but they got a lot of fun poked at them. Could it be, Ilya, in just a short answer, like a 30-second answer, that these tragic-comic figures, Lev and Igor have flipped on Rudy Giuliani and are going to cause him to be charged with a crime?

Ilya Marritz: I don't think it's quite correct to say that they flipped. They're still awaiting trial, and they haven't pleaded to anything, but it is true that one of the two men, Lev Parnas, took this novel strategy of going on Rachel Maddow two nights in a row, giving a lot of interviews, basically completely turning on Rudy Giuliani and basically implicating him in a shakedown scheme to try to get dirt on the Bidens. That created so much noise.

I have like 10 seconds left, I just want to say this, whole thing has been such a headache for the Justice Department, which has been receiving information from Rudy Giuliani about the Biden's and Ukraine, while also investigating Rudy Giuliani, also Giuliani used to work for the US Justice Department. So it is just a whole ball of wax.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly on that, Ilya, you know that the Giuliani and Trump associates will say this is the Biden Justice Department politicizing investigations. Can they prove that it's not?

Ilya Marritz: This is really the effect of four years of Trump, where everything did become so politicized. Once that toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to go back to a system of government that's above those facts. We'll have to see what sticks. What I've read from the reporting that's out today is that the White House did not have advance notice of the search warrant being executed. If that's the case, I think that's a good sign that there perhaps is a proper separation between the Department of Justice and the White House.

Brian Lehrer: Andrea, in our last minute, does any of this rub off legally on Trump who's under investigation for a number of things because he and Rudy Giuliani were so entangled in so many ways?

Andrea Bernstein: We don't have any direct evidence of that. If Giuliani were to be indicted, there might be some more information about what Trump knew about Giuliani's business contacts. However, Trump is in his own hot waters right now and is the subject of a criminal investigation by the other Manhattan prosecutor, the Manhattan DA, which stemmed from an investigation and a raid three years ago this month into his other personal attorney, Michael Cohen. So who knows where this will lead?

Brian Lehrer: Who could forget, I should say, that Fruman was associated with a club in Ukraine called "Mafia Rave", and Parnas even has an easily navigable website, listing himself as co-founder and CEO of "Fraud Guarantee", which is supposed to be a fraud protection company. Yes, you're right. I got misled by those appearances on Rachel Maddow that he had formerly flipped. I see the trial is actually still scheduled to begin on October. Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, raid of Trump, Inc, thank you so much for joining us.

Andrea Bernstein: Great to talk to you, Brian.

Ilya Marritz: Thank you, Brian.

 

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