Alan Dershowitz, a legal adviser to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said he hopes former President Donald Trump will get involved in the legal fight over materials seized in a pair of FBI raids last week.
The Harvard law professor emeritus insisted that federal investigators obtaining a search warrant was the wrong tactic, considering that much of the information seized could be subject to attorney-client privilege. A New York City office and apartment belonging to Giuliani were raided on Wednesday. The business dealings of Giuliani, who is the former personal lawyer to Trump, is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, the same office he led in the 1980s.
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“Hope the people whose information is privileged, like Donald Trump, would join the lawsuit and say look you can’t see my stuff,” Dershowitz told CNN in a report published Monday.
Trump has defended Giuliani, saying last week that the raids by federal investigators were “unfair.” He also called Giuliani a “great patriot” during an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
Giuliani is reportedly under federal investigation over whether he illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian individuals who were assisting him to dig up dirt on the former president’s political rivals, including President Joe Biden. He has denied ever representing a foreign national and claims the materials seized by the FBI are “exculpatory” evidence.
“They showed me a warrant that sought the electronics in my apartment and purported to be about an alleged violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA, for failure to file as a foreign agent on behalf of an unnamed Ukrainian official,” he told Fox News on Monday.
Dershowitz, who was a member of Trump’s defense team during the Ukraine-focused impeachment trial, argued over the weekend that the raids last week were unconstitutional.
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“A search warrant on a lawyer or a doctor or a priest? You don’t use search warrants,” Dershowitz said in an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis. “You don’t use search warrants when people have privileged information on their cellphones and in their computers. You use a subpoena. The difference between a subpoena and a search warrant is like night and day. … It’s just not constitutional.”
