Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says in court papers he had no hand in drafting executive orders from the Trump administration banning travel from Muslim-majority countries.
The New York Law Journal reported Tuesday the assertion was submitted in response to questions from a federal judge presiding over a criminal case in which the former mayor is part of the legal team.
The declaration refutes comments he made Jan. 28 when he told Fox News' Jeanine Pirro that President Donald Trump approached him about his campaign-trail Muslim ban proposal – and asked him how he could legally pull it off.
"He called me up and said, 'Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally,'" Giuliani told Pirro.
The Daily Caller reported District Judge Victoria Roberts of the Eastern District of Michigan ordered the administration earlier this month to produce Giuliani's memo and all documents and communications relevant to the order exchanged between Giuliani, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, White House strategist Steve Bannon, and Trump aide Stephen Miller.
Giuliani now says no such memo exists, and he did not participate in drafting the executive orders.
"Neither I, nor my firm, has represented the Trump administration," he wrote in his affidavit, The Daily Caller reported. "In particular, I have not served on any Trump administration commission 'relating to the so-called Muslim ban executive orders.'"
"For clarity, I have not participated in writing any of the executive orders on that subject issued by the Trump administration," he added.
The statements have come back to haunt the administration; at oral arguments in February, a judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit mentioned the former mayor by name when questioning a Justice Department lawyer about whether the underlying intent of the ban was to discriminate against Muslims.
After Trump's first executive order was halted by the courts, the administration released a revised order in March.
But addressing the second ban, a federal judge in Maryland also cited Giuliani's comments to Pirro as evidence the policy was intended "to approximate a Muslim ban without calling it one."
Challenges to the refugee order are currently pending before the 4th and 9th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, The Daily Caller reported.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.