Giuliani to join Trump legal team
NEW YORK (Reuters) — Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a one-time federal prosecutor, is joining US President Donald Trump’s personal legal team, Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow said in a statement on Thursday.
“Rudy is great,” Sekulow quoted Trump as saying. “He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.”
JoAnn Zafonte, a representative for Giuliani, did not respond to a request for comment.
Giuliani was one of three attorneys Sekulow said were being added to the president’s legal team dealing with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Russia has denied meddling in the election. Trump has said there was no collusion and has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt.”
Sekulow also announced south Florida husband-and-wife white-collar defense lawyers Martin and Jane Raskin were joining the president’s legal team.
The addition of Giuliani and the Raskins represents a major boost to Trump’s legal firepower. The president has previously struggled to retain a topflight criminal lawyer to represent him in the Mueller probe. Washington lawyer John Dowd, the most recent head of his team, resigned last month.
Harry Sandick, a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and former federal prosecutor, said it was not clear how Giuliani would quickly resolve the Mueller probe, given the number of people who have pleaded guilty and have become cooperating witnesses.
But Sandick said Giuliani’s personal relationship with Trump could make the former mayor’s job as the president’s attorney “a little easier.”
Giuliani had a storied career as a federal prosecutor before becoming mayor of New York in 1994 and achieved wide respect for his leadership when the city was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. But his often hard-bitten remarks in recent years, some made in support of Trump’s candidacy, have drawn criticism.
During the 2016 campaign, he claimed there had not been “any successful radical Islamic attacks in the United States” in the eight years before former president Barack Obama took office, seeming to forget the 2001 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people died.
Trump’s legal worries have recently expanded beyond the Mueller probe to include a criminal investigation in New York of the president’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, whose home and offices were raided by the FBI on April 9.