Rudy Giuliani’s high-dollar foreign clients could present legal problems: Experts.
President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, now at the center of a congressional impeachment inquiry targeting the president, once dreamed of securing the top spot at the State Department, only to voluntarily remove himself from the shortlist just after his name started started coming up.
Most of Giuliani's past foreign work appears to have amounted to consulting for his foreign clients, not necessarily lobbying, according to a review of his work based on publicly available documents and media reports by ABC News, which means that he hasn’t had to register as a foreign agent under the Justice Department.
"Whether Mr. Guiliani has a legal obligation to register under FARA depends on a full examination of all the relevant facts, but based on published reports there are certainly sufficient grounds for the Justice Department to take appropriate investigative steps to obtain those facts," said David Laufman, who oversaw the Justice Department's FARA enforcement unit until last year. Laufman is now in private practice, as a partner at law firm Wiggin and Dana.
In the past, Giuliani has argued that his foreign work falls outside the net of rules regulated by FARA. Last year, he told The Washington Post,"I don’t represent foreign government in front of the U.S. government. I’ve never registered to lobby." Klitschko told The Washington Post earlier this month that he never paid Giuliani for his consultations, but the two appear to remain close. Giuliani recently tweeted his support of Klitschko:"The former champion is very much admired and respected in the US."
"He was [a] sponsor of a preliminary study that my firm did of security and emergency management in Kharkiv and some on advice on a planned Holocaust Memorial," Giuliani told the magazine. "I understand from some public reports that Mr Fuks hired Giuliani with the expectation that Giuliani would represent his interests in the U.S.," Rosenstein told ABC News."If that’s the case, and he served as a political consultant, for example, then FARA might be implicated."
In early 2017, Giuliani had repeatedly pushed for the Trump administration to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, a political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan living in voluntary exile in the United States, two former senior level administration officials with direct knowledge confirmed to ABC News.
"That work -- even if for a non-governmental foreign client -- is political activity as defined by FARA, and I am hard pressed to see an applicable exemption," Rosentstein told ABC News."Working for a foreign client, in the interests of a foreign government, in seeking some action from the U.S. government, is FARA-registrable."
In some cases of foreign work, Giuliani has said he's exempt from registering because he's been acting as his client's attorney. Petalas acknowledged the exception in FARA registration in cases of lawyers providing legal advice, but added that the exception applies only if the legal services are provided in connection with a judicial or agency proceeding.""The lawyer’s exemption isn’t as broad as [Giuliani] wants to make it out to be," Rosenstein said.
Guest added that Giuliani’s letter puzzled Romanian officials, too. Giuliani did not say on whose behalf he wrote the letter, and told The Washington Post that he"should have put in the letter that [he’s] not representing the president." But he later told Politico that he had been paid by The Freeh Group, a consulting shop run by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to send it.
In May 2018, for example, Giuliani coordinated an effort for the New York Police Department to train and provide"technical support" Honduran national police, according to his website. In the Dominican Republic, he met with law enforcement officials and made suggestions for how to lower crime rates, and in Brazil, Giuliani met with a mayor in Brazil’s Amazon to develop a plan to reduce crime in the region, according to his company.
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