Sputnik
By Ilya Tsukanov
The former New York mayor and senior Trump legal confidant has had a rough several months, having his license to practice law suspended in NY and DC, seeing his home and office raided by the FBI, and getting hit with a defamation suit by America’s top voting machine maker, all over his work on the now former president’s election fraud lawsuits.
Donald Trump is reportedly refusing to share his sizable election war chest to help pay for Rudy Giuliani’s legal fees as the ex-attorney and erstwhile personal friend faces disbarment and a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
According to recent media reporting, citing fresh federal campaign filings, Trump raised tens of millions of dollars from supporters over the past six months, and is now sitting on almost $102 million in cash – the strongest showing among any other Republican politician and the party itself, with over $56 million of that money collected in 2021.
However, according to New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, allies of long-time Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani are “aghast” that the former president isn’t helping his ex-attorney with his sizable legal costs as he is assailed from all sides by Dominion and the federal government.
“Giuliani’s friends say he is saying he is close to broke, and his interview with [NBC New York] makes clear he knows he’s in legal jeopardy,” Haberman suggested.
According to the observer, Trump’s aides don’t see a way to help pay the former New York mayor’s legal bills in a manner that’s not “problematic for Trump,” given that Giuliani may have taken “actions a lawyer should have known were problematic, even if the client wanted it.”
On top of his $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion, Giuliani is also under investigation over claims by the Justice Department that he may have worked as an unregistered lobbyist for Ukraine and illegally pressured Kiev to probe the Biden family’s potential illegal pay-to-play activities in that Eastern European country.
Last month, pro-Democratic media gleefully reported that Giuliani’s legal defence fund had raised just $9,798, a fraction of its $5 million goal, to help cover the embattled lawyer’s legal costs.
Additionally, authorities in New York State and Washington, DC have forced Giuliani to stop practicing law and threatened to strip him of his law license entirely, depriving him of a way to earn money as a lawyer amid the legal and financial pressures arrayed against him.
Publicly, Giuliani has remained defiant, telling NBC New York Saturday that he was “more than willing to go to jail if they put me in jail,” and adding that those who imprisoned him would “suffer the consequences in heaven” for their sins because he “didn’t do anything wrong.”
Giuliani became the public face of Trump’s legal campaign to try to overturn the results of the November 2020 presidential election, which the Republican claimed had been rigged against him using a combination of faulty voting machines, late-night vote dumps, and other tricks. The Trump campaign filed lawsuits in half a dozen states where the alleged vote fraud took place, but the cases were thrown out by state courts. In December, the Supreme Court also threw out an appeal by Texas to investigate the allegations.
Giuliani and Trump reportedly had a falling out in January over the failure of the election challenge lawsuits, with a recently released book claiming Giuliani was called a “f***ing ***hole” by Justin Clark, another Trump attorney, as the two clashed over Georgia’s election and the alleged slow reaction by the Trump legal team to contest results before they were certified.
This news originally appeared in Sputnik.
