Citation Needed.
For Trumpoltroons, it’s entirely possible to duckspeak the “Hillary wiped the server” talking point without ever understanding that a computer can, in fact, be wiped.
Double plus good duckspeaker.
Perhaps Rudy is so far gone that he believes agent orange can still give him a pardon. Or perhaps he has a secret pardon in his pocket.
Rudy is no mastermind at technology or being covert; didn’t he dial the wrong number and leave a long detailed voice message to the wrong person urging them to stall the electoral count (or something) which went public?
Also, as others have pointed out the prosecution likely already have a lot of evidence against him; they aren’t necessarily hoping to find the one big smoking gun in his apartment. They could already have his phone records from the service provider (as well as testimony from whoever he talked to), and simply be looking for evidence that he did actually wipe his phone clean to cover it up… kind of like searching the suspected murderers’ kitchen and noticing that his butcher knife is missing; the same type that was found in the victim’s chest.
I just read an article about a Capitol rioter. He did a factory reset on his phone and they were still able to get evidence off of it.
Au contraire, Rudy is a cybersecurity expert.
People come up to me, they say, sir, you need Rudy on your team. He has the best cyber - the BEST.
I find it entirely plausible that Rudy — like a disturbingly large fraction of the US population — believes that Trumpenkhamen is still the real president, and that at the proper moment he will reclaim his office. Two weeks later Rudy will receive his pardon.
This isn’t some random fishing expedition. Serving a warrant like this on any attorney, let alone the ex-President’s attorney, is a big deal that certainly had to be signed off on by Garland if not by Biden personally. They will have a huge amount of egg on their faces if this doesn’t lead to a serious indictment, so I assume that even if this raid doesn’t turn up useful evidence, it wouldn’t have happened unless they felt they already have enough evidence to nail him on SOMETHING.
Biden said he did not know about it. He is hands off on the justice department.
Biden has made his choices to the senate, they voted, and the chosen were sworn in. That is all Biden is doing in justice. It is all up to garland at this time.
It is so sad that Don Knotts is not around today to play Rudy in a biopic. He had the bug-eyed look down pat and had experience in playing an incompetent buffoon. Maybe Rudy was a smart lawyer at one point in his life. But today his mental faculties are virtually non-existent. He simply must be one or more of these: suffering from dementia, psychotic, or stupid.
Warrants are not easy to get, and for good reason. Warrants on lawyers are even harder to get. Warrants on lawyers with high political connections are likely the hardest to get of all. They had to convince a judge that there was probable cause. I would be astonished if they cleared the very high bar of judicial review to get the warrant that they would come up empty. I don’t think there’s a chance in a thousand that the feds wind up saying “Yep, we looked and he’s as clean as a hound’s tooth”.
I’m very skeptical about all this.
Firstly, your initial claim that “warrants are not easy to get” is dubious. But your claim about warrants on lawyers with high political connections is even more dubious. And in the case of Giuliani in particular, of late he’s not exactly connected to anyone with any influence anywhere in the DOJ or judiciary. If anything he may have negative influence these days.
That’s the wrong standard to look at. As observed upthread, this is a very complex matter, involving - for example - in whose interests Giuliani was acting in a situation with many actors who had inter-related interests. The key question is not whether the feds conclude that “he’s as clean as a hound’s tooth”, but whether they conclude “we can prove to a jury that he’s guilty”. The chances for that are a lot higher.
[It may be worth a revisit to the Trump-Russia threads, which featured constant chortling over this or that raid or cooperation with the SP, with gleeful speculation that the jig was up and that senior Trump people would be nabbed on collusion-related charges. And in the end, nothing … Which is not to say that Giuliani won’t be indicted. Only that confidence is premature at this point.]
I’m somewhere in between. I don’t think there are any official hurdles to obtaining a warrant on attorneys that are beyond obtaining warrants on laity. That said, if you’re working a case against Giuliani and look for a warrant, you’re basically fishing for shark:
- If you haul him in, you’re gonna feast on this one for the rest of your life.
- If you make a mistake, you’re gonna be the feast.
I suspect that attorneys on this case might, psychologically, feel some extra pressure to make sure they’re doing things right. They probably also feel some psychological pressure to do things.
There is also the famous and easy to convict charges of wire fraud and money laundering. Mind you, I dont know if he did either of those things, but I would not be surprised either.
As previous, I don’t think Giuliani is a shark at this point of his career.
It’s my understanding that the feds have a 90%+ conviction rate because they’re very aggresive about investigating but very cautious about indicting. So they probably raid and don’t indict all the time. I’m unaware of any cases of anyone facing reprecussions because of a raid which did not result in an indictment.
The repercussions (besides embarrassment) are that you have spelled out to the suspect exactly what you are looking for. If the evidence exists and you didn’t find it in the search, the suspect has an opportunity to destroy it or move it where it can’t be found.
Nothing, unless you count all the people convicted for lying under oath in order to conceal their interactions with Russia and its various agents.
Right. In the context of the specific point I was making here, those are “nothing”.
There were a few people convicted of lying, the biggest of them probably Michael Flynn. At the time Flynn was indicted for only lying and nothing else and reported to be cooperating with the SC, there was widespread speculation on and off this MB (possibly including you yourself) that the “sweetheart” plea deal was undoubtedly because he was delivering significant incriminating evidence on senior Trump people, e.g. Kushner or Trump himself. Turned out to not be true. Similarly, nothing bigger came out of Papodopoulos pleading guilty to lying to the SC.
Which again, is not to say that Giuliani won’t get nailed for something as a result of this raid (or otherwise). I don’t know. Only to say that this type of speculation should be viewed with caution, and noting that it has been very wrong in the recent past.
Besides, this stuff with Guiliani is all part of the same damn thing.
Russia is at war with Ukraine. It’s been going on for a long time. Many Ukrainians in the Eastern part of the country are of Russian descent and sympathetic to Russia. It’s a big political dividing line in that part of the world, there are Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs that are aligned with Western (US and Europe) interests in Ukraine, and others that are aligned with Russia and want to minimize Western influence in the region.
Like most wars, it’s not just a military war for territory, both sides are trying to win the “hearts and minds” of the Ukrainian people. As a political consultant, Paul Manafort was ( and according to Mueller investigator Andrew Weissman, still is) deeply aligned with Russian interests in Ukraine and the focus of his work was getting Russian-aligned candidates into power in order to facilitate a Russian takeover of Eastern Ukraine. I might add, his political tactics involved drumming up fake charges against the opposition and having them arrested and jailed.
Because of these factors, his very presence on a US Presidential campaign was cause for concern across US intelligence agencies, as it should have been. His past behavior was so egregious that I feel it would’ve been negligent not to investigate any political campaign he was managing, even in the absence of all the other evidence that the campaign was trying to coordinate with Russian agents.
Rudy Guiliani, while not publicly connected to the same individuals as Manafort, is working with people that have the same political alignment and connections
Believe it or not, the US government actually has policy positions that are based on things other than the mood of the President today. Unsurprisingly, US foreign policy favors politicians and oligarchs that are aligned with Western interest as opposed to Russian interests.
As the state department was was working with Ukraine and Zelensky to advance Western interests, the President’s goon squad began to threaten and intimidate him in order to advance Russian interests. A couple of months ago, Time Magazine ran some previously unreleased Rudy/ Zelensky tapes, one in which he tells Zelensky to be careful and get rid of the people around him that don’t like Trump, or there’ll be trouble.
During this call he basically channeled all the conspiracy theories about Ukraine interfering in the election for Hillary, with a big dose of anti-Soros paranoia - I feel that’s significant because Soros hate is a talking point that started with Putin and it’s an indication that he’s been co-opted by all the Russian propaganda that he’s been fed. It was the kind of call a gang lieutenant makes when he’s pulling a store into his “protection racket”, no overt threats but the message was clear, especially in light of the subsequent events.
It’s worth noticing that Ukraine released this transcript shortly after Trump left office, and also that Zelensky has now publicly spoken about how pissed off he was at being extorted. It happened in an Axios interview, the interviewer asked if he was a little bit angry at Trump. He laughed and said “A little bit?”.
I think we owe it to him, as the leader of a friendly country, to bring the men that tried to strong-arm him to justice.
And I’m sick and tired of the people that believe there’s nothing wrong with this because Rudy didn’t actually pull a gun on anyone or something. Because Trump and Rudy have this gangster plausible deniability bullshit down to a science, ( it is a unique situation because it involves a President and a foreign leader), that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious national security issue, or not a crime.
I think it’s important to remember that the motivation of the Rudy’s Ukrainian/Russian friends is to advance their campaign to annex Eastern Ukraine. Tricking Trump into to withholding military aid would’ve been a huge victory in that campaign.
My opinion is that the “Ukraine hacked the 2016 election” and “Hunter and Joe corrupt” disinformation campaigns were chosen by Russian aligned interests in order to trick Trump and Rudy into helping them. And if it weren’t for some brave whistleblowers, it would’ve worked.