Rudy Giuliani in FBI Crosshairs

 This article first appeared in New English Review.

This week, the FBI and the Biden Justice Department carried out searches of Rudy Giuliani's home and office in New York City. Though no charges have been filed against Giuliani at this point, the allegation going out through the news media is that he is under investigation for his activities and relationships with Ukraine during the Trump presidency. Did Giuliani have business interests with Ukraine that crossed the line, and did he use his position as Trump's legal counsel to benefit himself or improperly benefit Trump politically using the Ukrainians?

Something like that.

I don't know the answer to those questions, and if Mr Giuliani violated the law in some manner, shame on him. It is my firm belief that the law is the law, and we should not make exceptions or turn a blind eye based on the political side the individual is on.

I also want to say that Rudy Giuliani has been a great public servant during his long career. I have never met him, but I did become familiar with who he was when I was a DEA agent, and he was the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York. I was never stationed in New York, but did have several occasions to go there on cases, testify, and work with that particular US Attorney's Office. As US Attorney, Mr Giuliani played a key role in prosecuting the Mafia for their involvement in heroin trafficking based on the work of  DEA and the FBI. Later, he became mayor of New York and did a fabulous job, in my view.

Say what you will about Giuliani's more recent political role with President Trump. Much of it comes down to which side of the fence you are on.

But I do find it ironic and curious that Giuliani is in the cross-hairs with the "new" FBI and the "new" DOJ, especially since it is over Ukraine. It doesn't require a great memory to recall the days of the Obama administration, when Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was hired by a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to sit on their board of directors and pull in some $50,000 a month though he had no expertise in energy or Ukraine. When the chief Ukrainian prosecutor launched a probe into Burisma and wanted to learn more about Hunter Biden's relationship with that firm, there was Vice President Joe Biden sitting in the office of the Ukrainian president, demanding that the prosecutor be fired if Ukraine wanted to get a billion dollars in aid from the US. Lo and behold, Old Joe's wish was granted within hours. How do we know all this? We have Old Joe bragging about it on tape in a 2018 speech. Of course, he left out all the parts about his prodigal son, Hunter.

So here we are. Ukraine shut down the Burisma investigation, Biden is now president, Hunter is giving a scholarly presentation to Tulane University on "fake news", while the FBI goes after Giuliani for his dealings-whatever they were- with Ukraine.

Apparently, one aspect of the Giuliani investigation is whether he improperly used his position to try and get dirt on Joe and/or Hunter Biden from a foreign country (Ukraine) for the 2020 campaign. I don't know the answer to that question either, but it reminds me of the 2016 campaign when Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and the DNC paid for a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, to use his Russian contacts, real or imagined, to dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump, Russian hookers and all that stuff. The FBI and DOJ used Steele's "dossier" as the basis for a FISA warrant against a low-level Trump campaign operative-even though they knew the information was unverified and the source (Steele) suspect. Has anybody gone to jail for all that? 

As I said before, nobody should be above the law, and I don't know whether Giuliani broke any laws or not. What I fear, however, is that we are weaponizing our criminal justice system to go after political enemies. If that is truly the intent of all this, we are on our way to becoming a banana republic.