PHOENIX — Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney turned lawyer for Donald Trump, has not been served with notice of his indictment by an Arizona grand jury last month related to his alleged attempts to thwart the former president’s 2020 loss in the state, according to state prosecutors.
It’s not for a lack of trying.
A team of prosecutors and investigators for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) has made multiple attempts to serve Giuliani a summons — essentially a formal notice that he has been criminally charged here and must appear before a judge May 21, said Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the office.
A person close to Giuliani said Tuesday that he keeps a busy schedule and that the April 24 indictment hasn’t slowed him down. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Giuliani’s activities.
The day after a grand jury handed down the indictment, Taylor said two agents for the state attorney general traveled to New York City, where they hoped to hand-deliver the summons to Giuliani. The agents determined that Giuliani was in his New York apartment because he had recently video streamed from his residence, he said. The agents matched the setting of the video stream with pictures of the interior of his residence from an old real estate listing that is still online.
A person at the building’s front desk told the agents that they were not allowed to receive service of documents. The person did not dispute that Giuliani lived there, Taylor said.
“We were not granted access,” Taylor said.
The attorney general’s office has also made multiple attempts to try to contact Giuliani by calling various phone numbers for him, “and none of them were successful,” Taylor said.
A state grand jury indicted Giuliani and 17 others nearly three weeks ago in connection with an unsuccessful effort to award the state’s 11 presidential electoral votes to Trump instead of Joe Biden, who won the election. All of the other defendants have been legally served, either directly or through their attorneys based in Arizona and elsewhere.
Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and 11 Republicans who signed official-looking paperwork purporting that Trump was the rightful winner of the state. Trump lost the state by a narrow 10,457 votes.
After Trump’s election loss, Giuliani traveled to battleground states in a quest to overturn the defeat. In Arizona, he baselessly claimed to lawmakers that large numbers of ballots had been cast in the names of deceased voters and undocumented immigrants. He also allegedly communicated with other Republicans about the strategy to try to deny Biden the electors from Arizona. Giuliani is also charged in Georgia in connection with his post-election actions.
Giuliani could face a more painful process if he does not appear for his initial court appearance in Maricopa County Superior Court, said Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney appointed by President George W. Bush.
“You can think of a summons to appear as a courtesy by the prosecutors — it is an invitation to appear,” Charlton said. “You can be held in contempt if you are served and fail to appear. But the alternative for prosecutors is to issue an arrest warrant, and that is, of course, a much more compelling vehicle.”
Generally speaking, he said, defendants who seek to avoid service for summons to appear before a judge should consider “the reality that the next step the prosecutors take won’t be quite as gentle.”
Giuliani has hardly been in hiding. Just minutes after the Arizona indictments were issued last month, the former New York mayor went live from a raucous Staten Island Italian restaurant where he was streaming his weeknight social media show, “America’s Mayor Live.” He drank wine, ate pizza and played footage of his drive-by visit earlier that day to the protests at Columbia University, where he mocked protesters from the passenger window of his SUV.
At one point, he waved around a cannoli and ordered an aide to play a clip from “The Godfather.”
“I have the cannoli. I don’t have the gun!” Giuliani declared, mangling one of the film’s most famous lines. The former Trump lawyer made no mention of his latest legal troubles. Off air, his spokesman Ted Goodman, who sat across from Giuliani, emailed reporters a statement decrying the Arizona charges and the “continued weaponization of our justice system.”
More recently, Giuliani has regularly posted photos on social media that provide clues to his whereabouts, including visits to a cigar bar in Miami. On his live stream show Monday, he mentioned seeing Trump the day before, suggesting that he had been at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club in Palm Beach.
Despite his legal peril, Giuliani has continued to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen on his social media show and on a near-daily show that broadcast on New York’s WABC radio. But last Friday, Giuliani’s WABC show was abruptly canceled, and the former mayor taken off air after the station’s owner, Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis, claimed that Giuliani violated an order to stop talking about 2020 election, including claims of fraud and “personal lawsuits relating to those allegations.”
Giuliani has denied that he received any warnings and has described his firing as a violation of his free speech. WABC had been one of Giuliani’s few sources of income, according to documents filed in his ongoing personal bankruptcy case, filed last fall after two Georgia election workers won a $148 million defamation claim against him after he falsely accused them of fraud. On Monday afternoon, Giuliani appeared online from his Palm Beach, Fla., condo, where he announced he would now host a weekday live stream in addition to his nightly show. He railed against WABC and suggested his firing was linked to a conspiracy against him led by President Biden and his allies, who Giuliani claimed are trying to “destroy” him.
While Giuliani did not directly address the criminal charges pending against him in Georgia or Arizona, he again falsely claimed those elections had been stolen from Trump. At one point, he referred to Bobb, his Arizona co-defendant who works at the Republican National Committee. “She’ll tell you it was fixed in Arizona,” Giuliani declared. Giuliani appeared to criticize Trump allies and lawyers whom he suggested have been forced into silence about the 2020 election by gag orders and other public pressure.
“They seem like little sheep who have gone to the slaughter pretty easily,” Giuliani said. “I’m not a little sheep that goes to the slaughter at all. Not for you, not for anybody else.”
Bailey reported from Atlanta.
