Government

Rudy Giuliani Sold His Soul To Donald Trump. The Price: $340,000.

The devil went down to Georgia. But first he sent his lawyer.

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President Trump’s Newly Appointed Lawyer Rudy Giuliani Speaks At Conference On Iran

(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani is in deep shit.

That was readily apparent even before Monday, when he added a criminal indictment in Georgia to his various defamation lawsuits and disbarment proceedings.

But Rudy’s most pressing problem appears to be financial. To wit, how is he going to afford to pay his lawyers for the infinity billable hours it’s going to take to defend him in courts in DC, New York, and Georgia over the next two years.

Luckily, Rudy knows a billionaire. Better still, he knows a billionaire with a bottomless pot of cash that he’s in the habit of using to pay his allies’ legal bills. Sure, Trump famously stiffed Rudy for all the legal work done to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But maybe he’d like to slip “Co-Conspirator 1” a little cash for old times’ sake?

Leave aside that all Rudy managed to accomplish for his pal was two impeachments — let us not dwell on unpleasant things! Think instead of all the time Giuliani spent traipsing around the flyover states badgering local politicians to steal electoral votes. That’s got to be worth something, right?

Apparently not, according to CNN, which reports that Giuliani and his longtime lawyer Robert Costello schlepped down to Mar-a-Lago this spring to beg Trump for cash, to no avail:

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Giuliani and Costello traveled to Florida in late April where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, making several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest.

But the former president, who is notoriously strict about dipping into his own coffers, didn’t seem very interested. After Costello made his pitch, Trump verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s legal bills without committing to any specific amount or timeline.

It appears that Trump’s largesse consisted of a single $340,000 payment to Trustpoint from his Save America PAC to get Rudy out of hock to the discovery platform. Giuliani claimed to be so deeply in debt to TrustPoint that it wouldn’t release his emails to plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Georgia poll workers he defamed by saying that they tabulated thousands of fraudulent ballots on election night in Atlanta. At this point, Rudy’s been multiply sanctioned in that case by Judge Beryl Howell and is on the hook for the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ bills, as well as his own. He hoped to fend off discovery into his precarious finances by coming into compliance after the cash infusion to TrustPoint, but in the event Judge Howell ordered him to cough that up, too.

And now lawyers for Smartmatic are arguing in New York State court that Giuliani ought to be sanctioned there as well for flouting discovery in the voting machine company’s defamation suit. To which Giuliani responds, again, that he is too poor to conduct anything but a manual search of his devices.

“This is just an attempt to embarrass Mr. Giuliani,” his lawyer Adam Katz huffed earlier this week “Mr. Giuliani has not engaged in willful or contumacious behavior that necessitates sanctions. Indeed, sanctions would only exacerbate and further strain Mr. Giuliani’s limited financial resources.”

The New York Times reported in 2019 that Giuliani had a $230,000 monthly nut, between his six homes and eleven golf club memberships. And that’s before computing his three alimony payments. Now CNN says that he’s put his apartment in New York up for sale, and also intimates that the cash crunch might tempt the former mayor to flip on his failed benefactor. This suggests that Giuliani, whose alleged crimes involve testifying falsely at public hearings in an effort to induce state legislators to steal Biden’s electoral votes, has something valuable to trade — a highly dubious proposition, and one which Trump himself appears to have discounted.

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And meanwhile, Rudy’s gotten himself yet another civil suit, this time in California, where Business Insider reports that two agro-magnates say they plowed a million dollars into a non-existent documentary film meant to prove Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine and get Trump re-elected.

Oh, Rudy. You could have stayed in New York and kept cashing those Greenberg Traurig checks forever.

Rudy Giuliani made desperate appeal to Trump to pay his legal bills in Mar-a-Lago meeting [CNN]

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