In a series of public rants, the former law-and-order mayor and prosecutor has launched broadsides at the criminal-justice system he once served.
Over the years, there have been few more vocal or aggressive advocates for law enforcement than Rudolph W. Giuliani. A former top official at the Justice Department, a onetime prosecutor with a tough, crusading style, and a police-embracing mayor who ran New York on a law-and-order platform, Mr. Giuliani — both in office and as a private citizen — has spent the better part of his career stridently defending the country’s crime-fighting class and fiercely lashing out at those who attack it.
But in his latest role as a lawyer for President Trump,Mr. Giuliani (who, like his client, is volatile by nature) appears to have made an abrupt change of course. In the past few days, he has launched a series of rants in the media, assailing his former colleagues in law enforcement — and the work that they have done — as Nazis, frauds and garbage.
While the path from prosecutor to defense lawyer is a common one that often requires a sharp shift in perspective, several former law-enforcement officials said they found it curious that Mr. Giuliani had so quickly and belligerently turned his back on a world he had worked in for nearly 30 years. Even some who expressed support for him said that his assaults on everyone and everything from the Russia investigation to James B. Comey, the former director of the F. B. I., to the bureau’s New York office, seemed to be out of character.
“It’s astonishing, especially from someone who has been so supportive of law enforcement for as long as he has,” said Asha Rangappa, a former F. B. I. agent who now works as a TV analyst and a senior lecturer at Yale University. “I can’t believe that anyone believes that he really believes what he’s been saying. But it’s a standard defense counsel playbook. When you don’t have the facts on your side, you attack the investigators.”
Mr. Giuliani’s verbal strikes began on Wednesday night when he appeared with Sean Hannity on Fox News and declared that the F. B. I.’s office in New York — with which he worked closely during his time as United States attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like “storm-troopers” in conducting raids on the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. In the same interview, he called Mr. Comey “a disgraceful liar” and said he should be prosecuted. He also had strong words for the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he dismissed as “tainted” and “totally garbage.”
On Thursday morning, after Mr. Comey shot back on his Twitter account, saying that the New York F. B. I. was “devoted to the rule of law and the truth,” Mr. Giuliani assailed Mr. Comey, his onetime colleague in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, as a “sensitive little baby.” By Thursday afternoon, he had tossed another bomb, calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “step in” on the Cohen case and put the people behind it “under investigation.”
In all of this, Mr. Giuliani was following the lead of Mr. Trump, who in both the Cohen and Russia matters has adopted a strategy of attacking agents, prosecutors and the larger institutions of the Justice Department and the F. B. I. While some former law-enforcement officials said that those attacks had eroded trust in the criminal-justice establishment, others said that the figures singled out by the president and his lawyer were deserving of their ire.
“Rudy is not anti-law enforcement, but he is upset, like me, at a small cadre of people who have lost their way,” said James K. Kallstrom, who once ran the New York office of the F. B. I. and has emerged more recently as a vigorous supporter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. “We’ve had long talks about it and what we can do to rebuild the bureau.”
Though Mr. Kallstrom acknowledged that Mr. Giuliani, in his television appearances, could have opted “for a better choice of words,” he also said there was ample reason to be wary of some recent decisions by law-enforcement officers. He criticized, for instance, the way that F. B. I. agents, acting on a search warrant last year, broke into the home of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager. Echoing comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, he also blasted the more recent raids on Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room, saying that they may have violated the attorney-client privilege.
“In my entire career,” Mr. Kallstrom said, “I don’t recall my office ever being involved in such a thing. Say what you want about Donald Trump, but that’s not the issue.”
It is not the normal course for a former top criminal-justice official to savage the institutions that gave birth to him. But the inquiries into Mr. Trump and his associates are so riven by questions of legal ethics and partisan politics that they seemed to have polarized and stirred up passions in law-enforcement circles.
Trying to take the middle course, Nancy Savage, the executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the F. B. I., said that Mr. Giuliani “has a long history of supporting the F. B. I. and of supporting law enforcement.” But Ms. Savage also noted, “There are numerous, serious investigations that are ongoing and they need to be respected moving forward.”
Tom O’Connor, the president of a similar group, the F. B. I. Agents Association, said of Mr. Giuliani, “It is disappointing when former officials who have historically supported F. B. I. special agents and the investigative process now demean agents for performing our jobs.”
A former United States attorney in Manhattan, John S. Martin Jr., had an even blunter view of Mr. Giuliani, saying that he had more or less betrayed his erstwhile colleagues.
“He’s dancing to Trump’s tune,” said Mr. Martin, who has been critical of Mr. Giuliani in the past. “He’s playing the political game. He’s saying what Trump wants him to say. He turned his back on law enforcement to make Trump happy.”
