A federal judge on Friday rejected Rudy Giuliani’s request to block prosecutors from reviewing materials seized from his home and office through a search warrant last month, allowing the Justice Department to inspect electronic devices and files as well as other materials seized from the former President Trump’s personal attorney.
In his ruling, District Judge J. Paul Oetken rejected Giuliani’s efforts to mount a legal challenge to the search warrant and ordered the former mayor and the Justice Department to confer and come up with recommendations for the court-appointed special master to review the materials, according to The Hill.
“Giuliani requests that the Court unseal the affidavits submitted in support of the 2019 and 2021 warrants so he can challenge their legality,” the judge wrote in a seven-page decision. “But he is not entitled to a preview of the Government’s evidence in an ongoing investigation before he has been charged with a crime.”
The judge said a special master would help alleviate concerns that prosecutors might interfere with the attorney-client privileges of Giuliani and Toensing.
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“The Court agrees that the appointment of a special master is warranted here to ensure the perception of fairness,” Oetken wrote. “The special master will expeditiously conduct a filter review of the April 2021 warrant materials for potentially privileged documents, and that review can be informed by Giuliani’s and Toensing’s parallel review of the same materials.”
As noted by The Hill, “the ruling echoes the early stages of the federal investigation into Michael Cohen, another former attorney for Trump, that ultimately led to a three-year prison sentence on various fraud charges” and that few of the seized documents, in that case, were protected under attorney-client privilege.
