What Did Rudy Giuliani Know? FBI Grilled Donald Trump’s Lawyer About Anti-Clinton Leaks During 2016 Election

On October 26, 2016, just two weeks before the presidential election, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — an outspoken booster of Donald Trump — told Fox news that Trump had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days,” as The Washington Post reported. “I’m talking about some pretty big surprise.”

Two days later, FBI Director James Comey sent his now-infamous letter to Congress announcing that the FBI was re-opening its investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. This was a decision by Comey some experts, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, say likely cost Clinton the election and resulted in the Trump victory.

Did Giuliani somehow know in advance about Comey’s decision and the cache of Clinton emails found on a computer belonging to the disgraced former member of Congress Anthony Weiner? That’s what the FBI wanted to know earlier this year, when they interviewed Giuliani about his “surprise” prediction, according to an explosive new report published by The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

Giuliani told HuffPost that the FBI questioned him as he was staying at the Trump International Hotel in February. Two months later, on April 20, Trump hired the 74-year-old Giuliani as his personal lawyer to defend him against the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as CNN reported.

Giuliani, interviewed on the day that Comey sent his letter, admitted that he did, in fact, have advance knowledge, according to a CNN report at that time. How? He said that “former” FBI agents had leaked it to him.

“Did I hear about it? Darn right I heard about it,” Giuliani told Fox News. “I can’t even repeat the language I heard from the former FBI agents.”

But earlier that same day, The Inquisitr has reported, Giuliani gave another interview in which he said that he was receiving information from active agents. That would mean that the agents working for the FBI were actively engaged in a clandestine effort to undermine the Clinton campaign.

“There’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face of the FBI’s integrity,” Giuliani said on the conservative Lars Larson radio show, referring to Comey’s decision to close the Clinton case in July.

“I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents who, obviously, don’t want to identify themselves,” Giuliani continued.

Last week’s Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s conduct during the Clinton email investigation identified a fear of leaks from inside the FBI was one of the factors that motivated Comey to send the fateful October 28 letter to Congress.

The apparent leaks to Giuliani from inside the FBI — specifically the Bureau’s New York field office — caused a storm of outrage in the late stages of the 2016 campaign, with top Democrats in Congress calling for an investigation into the leaks just days before the country voted on its choice for the next president, according to The New York Daily News.

Giuliani named former FBI New York bureau head James Kallstrom as one retired agent who spoke to him, according to U.S. News and World Report, but he never revealed any other names.

But Giuliani was not the only recipient of anti-Clinton leaks from within the FBI’s New York office, leaks that most likely pushed Comey to send the letter that may have turned the election in Trump’s favor. Last week, the strongly pro-Trump California congressional representative Devin Nunes admitted that he received leaks about the emails on Weiner’s laptop as early as September of 2016, according to what Nunes told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in an interview.

Why would agents in the FBI’s New York office risk their jobs to leak information that ended up damaging Clinton’s campaign, perhaps fatally? According to the IG report, many agents in that office harbored a “deep and visceral hatred” for Clinton, and as the news site Talking Points Memo reported on Tuesday, before the results of the Clinton investigation were announced in July, some FBI employees had made such statements to Comey about Clinton as, “You guys are finally going to get that b****.”