Rudy Giuliani: Trump will ‘raid every one of Biden’s houses’ if former president wins 2024 election
- Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor and ex-personal lawyer to Donald Trump, said the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was a ‘political act’
- Giuliani said Trump could use the FBI to retaliate against Joe Biden if he were to head back to the Oval Office
Former New York city mayor Rudy Giuliani earlier this week said Donald Trump would “raid” US President Joe Biden’s homes if he were to win the White House in 2024, with Giuliani, former personal lawyer to Trump, arguing that the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was a “political act.”
Giuliani, a long-time Trump loyalist, told The New York Post that Trump could use the FBI to retaliate against Biden if he were to head back to the Oval Office.
“Breaking into the home of a former president is a political act – particularly since you’re breaking precedent. All of a sudden, you’re the first president of the United States who introduced the banana-republic process of prosecuting your predecessor. We’ve avoided it for 240 years. Trump didn’t do it to Hillary. Ford didn’t do it,” he told the newspaper.
“If Trump gets elected, the first thing he’ll do is raid every one of Biden’s houses,” he added.
When he spoke to the newspaper, Giuliani argued at the time that the search had been conducted to aid the House committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
However, Friday’s release of the FBI search warrant and property list revealed that agents were looking for documents connected to potential violations of the Espionage Act, which bars the unauthorised removal of defence-related information that could aid a foreign government.
Trump is also being investigated for potential obstruction of justice violations.
FBI probing Trump under Espionage Act; top secret files found at Mar-a-Lago
As Trump’s former personal lawyer, Giuliani played a pivotal role in the ex-president’s administration – and after Trump left the Oval Office last year.
Giuliani has for years sought to shine a light on the work of the president’s son Hunter Biden, who at one point sat on the board of the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings.
The House in December 2019 voted to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress regarding his alleged efforts to solicit Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. However, he was acquitted by the Senate on both articles of impeachment in February 2020.
Giuliani was especially dogged in seeking information about Hunter Biden’s business dealings from a laptop that reportedly belonged to the lawyer and former member of the Amtrak board of directors.
Republicans are angling to investigate Hunter Biden if they capture one or both of chambers of Congress this autumn, even as the Department of Justice continues its investigation of the presidential son. (He could potentially face charges that include tax violations, per The New York Times.)
Giuliani has also been one of the fiercest proponents of Trump’s challenges to the 2020 presidential election.
In Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, the writer Michael Wolff detailed how Giuliani reportedly wanted Trump to declare victory just after polls closed in much of the country on election night in November 2020.
“We’ve won! We need to declare victory!” Giuliani told a group at the time that included former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien.
“If we don’t say we won, they will steal it from us. Look, we’ve won Michigan!” Giuliani added. (Trump went on to lose Michigan by a three percentage-point margin, coming up short by a little over 150,000 votes.)
