Rudy Giuliani’s problems keep piling up.

His responsibilities are shrinking as Donald Trump’s TV-friendly personal attorney. His efforts to dig up dirt on the president’s political opponents have landed his highest-profile client in a congressional impeachment investigation. And two of his foreign-born business associates are headed to trial on charges that are part of a broader effort by federal prosecutors eyeing Giuliani himself.


The scrutiny isn’t coming just from the previously known probes by FBI agents and the U.S. attorney’s office based out of Manhattan, according to two people familiar with the investigation. The criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington has taken an interest in the former New York mayor, too, meaning an expansion of resources that indicates the politically sensitive probe into the president’s personal attorney is both broader and moving at a faster pace than previously understood.

Adding DOJ’s criminal division to the Giuliani probe is sure to place additional scrutiny on William Barr, who as attorney general has final say over all department business. Already, Barr’s reputation has taken hits over his handling of the public rollout on Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with Democrats complaining he spun the special counsel’s findings earlier this year to give them a pro-Trump flavor.

Giuliani’s troubles aren’t just his alone. He has turned members of the Trump team he’s worked with over the past 18 months into potential witnesses for federal prosecutors, who are trying to unravel the tangled relationships he brought to the mix in advising the president while still juggling an international consulting business that promised proximity to the White House.

“He appears to be a subject, if not a target of an active investigation. So to have him be a part of the legal team would be troublesome to say the least,” said Greg Brower, who served as the FBI’s top liaison to Congress until 2018. “At best, it’s a messy situation and more likely it’s just completely dysfunctional.”


Notably, Giuliani was not at the White House earlier this week when his fellow Trump lawyers met with the president for a brief impeachment strategy session. Heeding concerns long vocalized by many of the president’s aides and outside allies that his media interviews were hurting the president, Giuliani has made no prime-time television network appearances over the past two weeks.

Giuliani’s only public comment in recent days was a cryptic Wednesday evening tweet, in which he said, “everything I did was to discover evidence to defend my client against false charges.”

The pullback comes as Democratic impeachment investigators circle Giuliani. They’ve collected testimony for several weeks from witnesses who put the president’s lawyer at the center of a campaign to leverage U.S. military and diplomatic might in exchange for foreign assistance from Ukraine that could help Trump win a second term.

Lawmakers’ hyperfocus on Giuliani prompted a decision by Trump’s legal team to sideline its most famous member from handling any Ukraine matters as part of the president’s defense should Democrats advance a specific article of impeachment addressing the subject, according to a person familiar with the lawyers’ strategy.


Giuliani did not respond to questions for this story. But in a series of text messages earlier this month, he downplayed his Ukraine work and insisted he could continue in his role as a Trump lawyer amid all of the scrutiny.

“I was never in Ukraine at all and my investigatory work was done when it was still possible Mueller would charge Russian collusion. Almost all of it was published in the Hill, so [Trump] and everyone else was aware of it," Giuliani said in an Oct. 18 message. "Hardly anything not public.”

"Since the public record is more extensive than what I did, he and all of you probably think I did more than I really did," Giuliani added then.

A few days earlier, on Oct. 12, Giuliani argued that his role on the Trump legal team shouldn’t be disrupted just because he’s resisting a Democratic-approved subpoena for documents.

“You can't get a lawyer replaced by sending them a questionable request not for testimony but documents some or all of which are clearly covered by attorney client privilege,” Giuliani wrote. “At most it could be raised as a bar to participating in that proceeding but not general representation.”

“Finally the only reason they are doing this is to target me, as I knew they would, because I am making pay a very heavy price for this process devoid of even a fig leaf of due process. Supreme Court decision have held that due process applies even to Congressional hearings,” he added.

DOJ officials have declined comment for weeks about any specific investigation into the president’s lawyer, who during the Reagan administration served first as the nation’s No. 3 law enforcement official and then as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

But they’ve sent plenty of signals that Giuliani may want to lawyer up himself — a back-channel effort has been underway for more than a week to help find him an attorney — as speculation swirls that he could face charges on everything from violating federal statutes dealing with bribery, foreign lobbying registration and disclosure to making false statements to government officials.


Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving member of the Trump legal team, rejected the idea that Giuliani was in any kind of legal jeopardy. He also dismissed questions that Giuliani had put the rest of the president’s outside lawyers into any kind of bind.

“We have no concerns about any of that,” Sekulow told POLITICO. “He’s a member in good standing of the president’s legal team.”

Jay Sekulow. | Steve Helber/AP Photo

There’s also the question of a $500,000 payment Giuliani has publicly acknowledged receiving for work he did on behalf of a company owned by his two businessmen associates who are now facing federal campaign finance charges.

That case surfaced publicly earlier this month when the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan charged the two men — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — with orchestrating an alleged scheme to buy political influence on behalf of a Ukrainian government official and a Russian businessman. Both men pleaded not guilty during an arraignment Wednesday in New York where one of the topics of discussion among the lawyers and presiding judge centered around the defendants’ work for Giuliani and possible assertions of attorney-client and executive privilege.

Rebekah Donaleski, an assistant U.S. attorney from SDNY prosecuting the Parnas-Fruman case, said at the court hearing that the government’s “investigation is ongoing.” Later, she raised the specter that Giuliani’s communications might have been picked up by the FBI during the probe by noting investigators had obtained information related to at least a dozen telephone numbers, as well as email and social media accounts.

Giuliani has traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad with Parnas over the past year, according to interviews and a series of photographs Parnas posted to his Instagram account that were made public earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. One picture from late March taken at the Trump International Hotel in Washington included a caption Parnas wrote saying he was at a “celebration dinner” with Giuliani and other members of the Trump legal team, including Sekulow, Martin Raskin and Jane Raskin. It was posted a day after Barr released a controversial four-page memo summarizing Mueller’s Russia investigation that the special counsel would go on to criticize as failing to “fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work.

Sekulow said he didn’t speak with Parnas at the event and downplayed the significance of the photograph posted from the March dinner at the Trump hotel. “He could have been at the dinner. I have no idea,” Sekulow said. “There were a lot of people at the event.”

Lev Parnas makes a statement to the media following his arraignment. | Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

DOJ’s interest in Giuliani has only grown over the past year, and the two people familiar with the investigation say it now includes additional resources and attention in Washington. Initially, federal prosecutors from SDNY and the FBI started examining the former New York mayor as the Mueller probe was nearing its end and as the Trump lawyer started publicly calling for Ukraine’s leaders to launch an investigation into the president’s political opponents.


Barr got his first briefing on the investigation of Fruman and Parnas after his February swearing-in, and another heads-up came before the two men were indicted earlier this month.

Additional attention to these issues has come from DOJ headquarters, which in August was tasked with examining Trump’s phone call asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on the American leader’s political rivals. A statement released by DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec in late September said the department’s criminal division reviewed the official record of the call “and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted.”

“All relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the department has concluded the matter,” Kupec said at the time.

A senior Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Kupec’s Sept. 25 statement was limited to the campaign finance issue raised by a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General and was not intended to rule in or out the possibility of Justice officials examining any other legal issues related to the Trump-Zelensky call, if warranted.

DOJ’s criminal division gave a public statement on Sunday through department spokesman Peter Carr that appeared to signal additional scrutiny for Giuliani, however. At issue was a meeting this summer with Giuliani that the head of the division, Brian Benczkowski, had taken alongside other DOJ lawyers about a different bribery case involving another client of the former New York mayor. Peter Carr told The New York Times that the DOJ officials who met with Giuliani “were not aware of any investigation of Mr. Giuliani’s associates in the Southern District of New York and would not have met with him had they known.”

According to a person close to the investigation, DOJ’s criminal division and SDNY have been pressed to more proactively work together in light of public confusion surrounding the department’s past statements on the campaign finance noncharging decision and the Giuliani meeting. This “happens all the time at DOJ, just usually not in such a high-profile case,” the person said. “It will lead to a natural decision to bring the resources together and to make sure they act at least in parallel and probably in coordination and not antagonistic to each other.”

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment when asked about SDNY and the criminal division working in tandem.

A move to bring department headquarters — “Main Justice” as its widely known — deeper into the Giuliani probe is causing heartburn at SDNY, which is widely known for its autonomy and reputation as the “Sovereign District of New York.”


“You lose a certain amount of nimbleness and a certain amount of independence because now you are answering to someone above you,” explained a former senior SDNY official who said there’s “no way that Main Justice is not involved.”

“Is it something that people want? No,” this person said. “But in this environment it also gives you cover. You want Main Justice to be involved because it is politically sensitive.”

Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein and Caitlin Oprysko contributed to this report.