Rudy Giuliani said he was “surprised” to receive a pardon from President Trump in the alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election results — and said The Post was vindicated for its exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
“President Trump ended a long nightmare for innocent people,” the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer told The Post Monday, a day after Trump’s Department of Justice granted pardons to 77 people tied to the alleged plot, including Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro.
“The president has made the justice system fair again,” he added. “This pardon decision shows there were two justice systems.”
Giuliani claimed he hadn’t talked to the president about a potential pardon in recent years.
“I was surprised. No one can say President Trump can’t keep a secret,” he quipped.
The Republican once called America’s mayor said the prosecutions were “the worst distortions of the American justice system in our history.”
“This period will also go down as the darkest chapter in our court system,” Giuliani said. “A lot of these electors who were indicted were regular people.”
In his decision, US Pardon Attorney Edward Martin Jr. said the New York Post was also victimized by orchestrated partisan censorship involving the FBI under President Joe Biden.
“This covert operation caused the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the de-platforming of the New York Post on Twitter for two weeks in late October 2020, directly orchestrated by FBI officials,” Martin said.
Giuliani said, “It sets up a lawsuit for the New York Post. It was a violation of the New York Post’s constitutional rights.
“I was vindicated. The New York Post was vindicated,” he said.
The Post’s bombshell reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned “laptop from hell” contained evidence of influence-peddling, drug use and other lurid activity. The laptop was first reported on in 2020 ahead of Trump’s unsuccessful re-election bid against Democrat Joe Biden.
The contents were initially dismissed by critics and some media members as part of a Russian disinformation campaign and stories on the laptop’s contents got The Post temporarily suspended from social media.
The contents of the laptop showed Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained from the laptop.
Giuliani noted that it was he who was the source who provided the laptop to The Post, not Russian spies as allies of former President Biden claimed.
“The laptop came from a guy in Delaware — not Russia,” he said, referencing a man who had come into possession of the laptop when Hunter Biden brought it to a computer repair shop and never picked it up. “Hunter Biden was a drug addict at the time who didn’t know what he was doing.”
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In the aftermath of the election, Giuliani was one of Trump’s team who questioned the results and railed against alleged voting fraud in places like Georgia and Arizona they claimed called Joe Biden’s victory over Trump into question.
For Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor who led the Big Apple as mayor during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the price paid for being indicted was severe.
He lost his law practice and security business after being raided by the FBI, and was indicted for allegedly working to overthrow the election. His law license was pulled in New York and D.C.
“There were lawyers who wouldn’t represent me,” he said.
“My bank accounts were frozen. I was bankrupt.”
He said he spent countless hours on the phone trying to lawyer up other defendants because reluctant attorneys feared repercussions from Democratic-leaning judges.
His fortunes changed when Trump returned to office after the 2024 elections.
The pardon ruling said the state prosecutors overstepped their authority, and Giuliani believes the defendants — himself included — have a strong case to sue state authorities in states such as Georgia and Arizona for violating their constitutional rights.
“The states violated our rights,” he claimed. “These prosecutions represent one of the worst and dangerous violations of the First Amendment rights in the history of the United States.”
Giuliani, who now resides in Palm Beach, Fla., said he would celebrate his exoneration on Monday by attending an event with military veterans in observance of Veterans Day.
The former mayor, who was involved in a car accident in August in New Hampshire and broke a vertebra, said he’s feeling better. He no longer wears a back brace and can walk again.
He can’t play golf yet, but hopes to and said he’s digging himself out of a financial hole, deriving income from his podcast and paid speeches.
“My financial situation is better. I’m no longer bankrupt,” he said
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