DOJ Finds No Evidence Rudy Giuliani Was Tipped Off to Hillary Clinton Email Investigation

The Department of Justice's inspector general said Thursday that no evidence was found of FBI agents sharing inside information with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's former lawyer, about the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

During an Oct. 26, 2016 television appearance, Giuliani said that then-candidate Trump had "some pretty big surprises" in the coming days. Two days later, James Comey, the FBI director at the time, announced the Clinton email investigation would be reopened after new emails were discovered.

Due to the timing of Giuliani's statement regarding "surprises", the question of whether Giuliani had been leaked information from someone about the investigation arose.

Guiliani denied any prior knowledge of the investigation, and the inspector general's office reported it found no evidence that Giuliani had been alerted to the FBI's plans.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.

The inspector general looked into whether anyone had improperly tipped off Giuliani, and more broadly examined contacts between FBI officials and reporters during the course of the investigation into whether Clinton had mishandled classified information on her personal email server.

According to a report issued Thursday, Giuliani told the watchdog office that he had not received any information about the Clinton investigation and that Comey's comments reopening the probe were a "shock to me. I had no foreknowledge of them." He said he hadn't been in contact with any current FBI agents during that month, and that the former officials he communicated with did not have information about FBI investigations.

As part of the investigation, the inspector general's office asked the FBI to determine which agents may have been in touch with Giuliani. The FBI identified four employees, but each employee told the watchdog office during interviews they had not had any contact with Giuliani.

The FBI said the four employees had used their FBI devices to call telephone numbers associated with Giuliani, but the inspector general's office said that information was either outdated or meaningless.

Two of the phone numbers were for the general line of the New York office of the law firm where Giuliani had worked, and the other two were for businesses "at which Giuliani had not been affiliated since at least 2007," the inspector general's office said.

"The telephone numbers attributed by the FBI to Giuliani were not, therefore, specific to Giuliani," the report said. "Accordingly, the purported investigative leads provided by the FBI based on alleged FBI employee contacts with Giuliani were inaccurate."