Former U.S. District Attorney Rudy Giuliani on Friday mocked claims that items sought at former President Donald Trump's Florida estate were of grave national concern, rhetorically asking if the material sought was so important, why did it take nearly three days for the FBI to execute the search warrant.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and Trump's personal attorney, on Newsmax's "Eric Bolling The Balance" ridiculed the FBI for obtaining the warrant on Friday, Aug. 7 at midday, and then taking "the weekend in Palm Beach."
The FBI conducted a raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, located in Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday morning.
"The magistrate who issued this warrant gave them 11 days to return the warrant," Giuliani said. "That's extraordinary if this was a matter of grave concern. And [when] the FBI got it, they were one hour away from Mar-a-Lago. And they took 48 hours to do anything about it.
"Basically, they took the weekend in Palm Beach. So in my experience, as a federal prosecutor, when we had a matter of even moderate urgency, you execute the warrant immediately."
Giuliani served as U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989, and was credited with several successful prosecutions of numerous organized crime members, including a dogged pursuit of John Gotti, who eventually was convicted in 1992. The convictions have been lauded as severely diminishing organized crime's influence in the New York metropolitan area.
"It would be as if, you know, I got a warrant on John Gotti and I spent the weekend hanging around Brooklyn waiting," Giuliani said. "Just 'You know, uh, execute it on Monday. What the heck? [If] he runs away. Who cares?'"
Giuliani's comments followed the release of the warrant earlier Friday and two addendums that briefly described the items seized in the raid. The warrant claimed that the items sought were "presidential records."
A report from The Washington Post early Friday, based on anonymous sources, claimed that the items sought were related to "nuclear documents."
"I think what they're trying to do is to create the impression, so that the out of control idiots they have on CNN and MSNBC, will jump up and down [in] their chairs, [use] words like espionage, treason, just [like] they do with Jan. 6, that this was worse than Pearl Harbor.
"This is just fuel for them. But then if you want to get serious about it, and you look at it from the point of your professional or enforcement officer, I'm sorry, you're just not taking something seriously, when you have an 11-day window on a warrant, and ... also when you get it, don't rush there and execute it but you take the weekend off. That tells me all I need to know about how this is a bunch of, you know, stagecraft and not real law enforcement."
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