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Federal agents conducted an early morning raid on Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan apartment and offices on Wednesday, looking for dirt on his possibly shady dealings with Ukraine.

Naturally, the right is livid. They think this is a politically motivated witch hunt perpetrated by the left to do further damage to an ex-president who most Americans no longer think about.

But they're missing the bigger picture.

This could be just the golden goose the right needs to bring new life to their faltering campaign to expose Hunter Biden as the lying, cheating, loafer of a son they insist that he is, and to take his doting dad — the president — down with him.

Of course, that's not what the FBI is looking for in Giuliani's potential treasure trove of goodies. They are seeking evidence that he acted as a double agent in 2019, while serving as Donald Trump's personal attorney and lobbying the administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs.

In a classic case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours," the Ukrainians would gather dirt on the Bidens and help Trump win re-election and Giuliani would use his connections to the president to get them what they wanted, including the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

Leave it to Giuliani to figure out a way to make everyone happy, while enjoying the international clout he has craved since his time as mayor of America's biggest city and a chance to prove that he's still got it as a political operative. No one can be sure that he also didn't fill his pockets while doing so.

If investigators find what they need to charge Giuliani, he might end up being a sacrificial lamb for the GOP. Trump loyalists would consider that an excellent trade-off if the FBI happened to stumble upon some useful Hunter Biden information in the process.

Tucked away deep inside Giuliani's computer hard drives, electronic devices and other correspondence seized by the FBI could be juicy details of everything Giuliani and his Ukrainian operatives uncovered regarding Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.

It's a long shot, but if it happens, Giuliani would be able to prove that he — and by default, Trump — were right all along. Hunter Biden was up to no good in Ukraine and his powerful dad, who was vice president at the time, covered it up.

You might have thought that the right had forgotten about Hunter Biden's troubles in Ukraine and moved on to fresher issues, such as his alleged financial dealings with China and lying on his gun application.

But the biggest prize always has been in Ukraine. That's the best shot they have at linking Joe Biden directly.

Their hopes and dreams remain focused on proving that Biden would stop at nothing to protect his son, including orchestrating the 2015 ouster of the Ukrainian prosecutor who may or may not have been investigating Hunter Biden's employer for alleged money laundering and other crimes.

The FBI might help the right finally get to the bottom of what Hunter Biden actually did for that $50,000 a month he reportedly earned as a director of the energy company Burisma Holdings.

Maybe Giuliani's federal probing skills have gotten a little rusty since he left the U.S. attorney's office more than 30 years ago. There might be something in his files that a fresh set of prosecutorial eyes could see that Giuliani overlooked.

The feds, after all, have access to data the Republican Senate committee that cleared both Bidens of wrongdoing just before the election didn't have. They couldn't rummage through Giuliani's personal belongings in search of a "smoking gun" that might blow the lid off the Bidens' corruption scandal.

The right might once and for all get answers to those nagging questions surrounding the unclaimed laptop the FBI seized from a computer repairman in Delaware.

Was Hunter Biden lying when he said he had no idea whether the laptop was his? Could the FBI discover additional incriminating hard drives allegedly from that laptop buried underneath a pile of Giuliani's laundry?

The possibilities are limitless.

Of course, the right won't see it that way. They will argue that the raid is nothing more than a political vendetta to get back at Giuliani for his trying to expose the Bidens. They might even go so far as to claim it is an attempt to further cover up the Bidens' crimes.

No doubt, they will agree with Giuliani's attorney, Robert Costello, that the raid was "legal thuggery." This isn't supposed to happen to political bigwigs like Giuliani, he explained.

That's simply not true. The FBI has wanted to raid Giuliani's properties for months, even when Trump was still in office. But Trump's fixer in the Justice Department, Attorney General Bill Barr, blocked it.

You can bet that lots of people are sweating hard right now. But Hunter Biden isn't one of them. Nor is his dad.

Now that people who want to drain the swamp that Trump polluted are running the Justice Department, lots of ugly things will be coming out into the open.

The Biden Ukraine conspiracy that Giuliani and his associates promoted is as phony as their nonexistent evidence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. The only crime that might have been committed was Giuliani's double dealing.

The truth doesn't matter to the right, though. Everything always comes down to Hunter Biden.

Dahleen Glanton is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She joined the Tribune from the Los Angeles Times in 1989, was a metro editor and the Atlanta bureau chief, and covered Hurricane Katrina, the Obama Presidential Center and national gun laws. A Georgia native, she writes regularly about race, civil rights and neighborhood violence.