ATLANTA — Rudy Giuliani offered a few brief comments Wednesday morning as he arrived to court in Atlanta ahead of his expected testimony before the special grand jury examining the efforts of former President Donald Trump and his allies to subvert the 2020 election results in Georgia.
As he exited his vehicle, he took several questions about the Fulton County probe, largely declining to substantively answer them.
"We will not talk about this until it's over. It's a grand jury, and grand juries as I recall are secret," the former New York City mayor and Trump 2020 attorney said.
Giuliani was also asked, "Do you believe President Trump is the ultimate target of this investigation?"
To that, he responded: "I'm not gonna comment on the grand jury investigation."
He was also asked what he expected to talk about before the grand jury, and he said: "They ask the questions and we'll see."
He continued on up the steps at the Fulton County Courthouse on Pryor Street without answering a final question about whether he would be cooperative with the investigation.
Earlier this week, Giuliani's own lawyers said he was a target of the criminal investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
The focus on Giuliani as a potential target appears to be related to a Georgia Senate hearing held in early December 2020 on election fraud, in which he and several other proponents of fraud narratives spent hours at the Georgia Capitol making the fraud claims to members of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
A court order for Giuliani's testimony highlighted his presentation to the subcommittee of the now-infamous State Farm Arena video, which he purported at that time showed "suitcases" of fraudulent ballots being pulled out from under tables after most election workers, observers and media left on election night due to a misunderstanding about whether counting was done.
It resumed at the urging of state and local officials, and surveillance video from inside the arena of the early-morning hours counting was seized on by election conspiracists in Georgia and became a recurring fixation of Trump's.
Full surveillance video showed the "suitcases" were normal ballot containers, as Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling said at the time and this summer testified to the Jan. 6 Committee, and that the election workers were conducting normal activity.
"There is evidence that (Giuliani’s) appearance and testimony at the hearing was part of a multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere," the court order states.
Giuliani decried the Fulton County probe this week, saying his testimony being compelled was a "desecration of the Sixth Amendment" and that his statements made in Georgia were "either attorney-client privilege, because they were between me and (President Trump), or they were being made on his behalf in order to defend him."
“When you start turning around lawyers into defendants when they’re defending their clients, we’re starting to live in a fascist state. Look, I’ve already had my law office raided. I never thought I’d ever see that happen," Giuliani said.
How Giuliani arrived in Atlanta was unclear - his lawyers had argued for delaying his testimony because a recent surgery won't permit him to travel by air. Judge Robert C. I. McBurney ordered last week for him to find a way to travel to Atlanta and appear in eight days, which he has now done.