Giuliani could get locked up for violating lobbying laws: Former FBI deputy director

On Monday's edition of CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time," former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed a potentially serious source of criminal liability for President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani: Failure to register as a foreign agent.

"Forget about impeachment. Let's say it goes nowhere, doesn't go anywhere," said Cuomo. "If you're running this case, [Southern District of New York], and you're looking for potential criminality, what are the potential crimes involved with what we know about Rudy so far and where questions might lead."

"We don't know," said McCabe. "The Southern District has many, many more facts than we have at this points but from the few facts we have, I think one of the things you would have to consider with respect to Mr. Giuliani is a possible FARA, Foreign Agents Registration Act, that requires any person acting as an agent of a foreign principal to file a very detailed registration for the Department of Justice."

"That means if you're working for somebody outside the country and doing work for them inside the country, you've got to register," said Cuomo. "So Rudy says, I wasn't doing that. I was only working for the president."

"So lots of people who are contacted by DOJ say the same thing," said McCabe. "One possible theory of a FARA problem for Mr. Giuliani here — this is just a theory — is that you look back to Parnas and Fruman, and in their indictment it's alleged that they received money from a Ukrainian political figure, which they then used to donate to a congressional campaign."

"They're Americans those guys," said Cuomo. "Soviet-born but American naturalized. They had their own accusations, but that they were funneling money to elections out west."

"The problem is the Ukrainian political figure that was the source of some of these donations," said McCabe. "That is your — that's your foreign principal for the terms under the FARA statute. So if Mr. Giuliani was participating in that effort to have the ambassador removed, which we know that Parnas and Fruman were doing by their lobbying of then-congressman Sessions, who wrote a letter to the State Department seeking the ambassador's removal, that could provoke a foreign agent registration obligation, which Mr. Giuliani may have not have seen through on."

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