President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani asked employees at an Apple store in San Francisco to help him unlock his phone less than a month after being named Trump’s cybersecurity adviser, NBC News reported.
Giuliani reportedly locked himself out of his iPhone after forgetting the password and entering the incorrect code at least 10 times. He turned to Apple for help in February 2017, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
{mosads}“Very sloppy,” one of those people, a former Apple employee, said. “Trump had just named him as an informal adviser on cybersecurity and here, he couldn’t even master the fundamentals of securing your own device.”
NBC News also received a photo of the service ticket used for Giuliani’s request that listed the customer as “Rudolph Giuliani.”
“Customer came in with an iPhone that had a forgotten passcode and the phone had been disabled,” the ticket, dated Feb. 7, 2017, reads.
Giuliani had been named the cybersecurity adviser, an informal position outside of the government, in January 2017.
Michael Anaya, a former FBI supervisory special agent, called the fact that Giuliani gave an unknown person his phone “crazy.” He added that the White House should have procedures to address these kinds of tech issues in-house rather than turning to public, commercial solutions.
“You’re trusting that person in the store not to look at other information that is beyond what you’re there to get assistance for,” Anaya told NBC News. “That’s a lot of trust you’re putting into an individual that you don’t know.”
Giuliani did not return The Hill’s request for comment.
Reports that Giuliani had accidentally called an NBC News reporter, leaving messages with him discussing needing a “few hundred thousand dollars,” surfaced last week. Giuliani had also accidentally called a reporter in September, leaving another voicemail in which he insisted he was the target of attacks because he was making public accusations about former vice president Joe Biden.
The president’s attorney has also taken center stage in the impeachment inquiry, as some former and current Trump officials testified he ran a pressure campaign for Ukraine to investigate Biden.