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.
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