Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani Saturday told Newsmax that he has a "great deal of respect" for prosecutors in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for their announcement that there are no charges planned against him in connection with a probe into his interactions with Ukrainian figures.
"Given the political climate we live in and the entirely corrupt attorney general that we have, the pressure on them to do something is enormous," Giuliani, who was also an attorney for former President Donald Trump, told Newsmax's "Saturday Report." "They could just have let it float."
Many times, the conclusion of a grand jury investigation isn't announced, he added, "so it took guts to do that, but it went against the grain of what the Justice Department is doing right now: to persecute anybody connected with Donald Trump."
Giuliani, who at one time headed the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District, said he knew the officials finished their investigation three months ago, but said the New York office "is not like some of the other prosecutors' offices."
"They may have kind of gotten overzealous in one of one or two circumstances back during the Trump impeachment and stuff like that, but it's still maybe the only thing we have left," said Giuliani. "It's still a sound prosecutor's office."
The decision against filing charges on Giuliani came after a review of evidence from raids on his home and law office in April 2021 in part of an investigation into whether his dealings with Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election required him to be registered as a foreign agent.
"I know I'm innocent and I know that the pursuit of me was unshared, but they didn't know that until they looked at the evidence," said Giuliani.
He also noted that he and Donald Trump Jr. were dropped from the Jan. 6 investigation by an Obama-appointed judge "who has written some very scathing language" about the events of that day but was able to "look at the evidence like a warrior" and say there was no evidence showing he or the president's son did anything to incite violence.
Giuliani also on Saturday spoke out about Attorney General Merrick Garland's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Trump, calling accusations against him "make-believe crimes."
"This is a dispute over records in which already they've taken it down from the hysterical exaggeration that originally existed: that there were nuclear secrets," he said. "There's nothing nuclear about them."
There is an argument also about whether Trump had the right to send presidential records to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Giuliani said, but he pointed out that former President Barack Obama "still has all kinds of records" that have not yet been digitized.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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