Rudy Giuliani reportedly brought his locked iPhone to an Apple store after being named Trump's cybersecurity adviser

(Image credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

last updated 1 November 2019

Rudy Giuliani has apparently never known how to use his iPhone.

After President Trump's personal lawyer butt dialed an NBC News reporter last week, a handful of reporters shared their stories of the accidental interviews they'd gotten from Giuliani over the years. And it turns out Giuliani's technological incompetence is nothing new, seeing as two Apple store employees remember him coming in with a hopelessly locked iPhone he'd forgotten the passcode to, NBC News reports.

Giuliani's woes begin in February 2017, just after Trump named the former New York City mayor one of his cybersecurity advisers. Giuliani came into an Apple Store in San Francisco after entering the wrong passcode at least 10 times, two people familiar with the matter tell NBC News. A photo taken that day of an internal memo of Giuliani's visit showed employees restored his phone and then set it up again from an iCloud backup.

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One former employee working that day called Giuliani's move "very sloppy," saying "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." Cybersecurity experts agreed. "There's no way he should be going to a commercial location to ask for that assistance," former cybercrime FBI agent E.J. Hilbert told NBC News. And while Giuliani may argue that he was just looking for help with his personal phone, "I've never had a case where an individual says 'this is my personal device' and we didn't find work stuff on it," Hilbert said.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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