After years of investigations, Rudy Giuliani was indicted this week, as part of the Georgia case against Trump and several other defendants.
The former mayor is reportedly asking for help in paying his legal bills.
Rudy Giuliani Needs Help
Former President Donald Trump and 18 others were indicted earlier this week, as part of their efforts to overturn the election result in Georgia in 2020. And even if none of the 19 defendants are ever convicted of anything, they’re likely looking at substantive legal bills for the foreseeable future.
One of those defendants is former New York Mayor-turned-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was indicted after years of investigations that did not previously lead to criminal charges.
According to CNN, Giuliani made a personal visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago in recent months, where he asked the former president for help with his legal bills. In the meeting, per CNN, Giuliani and his attorney “believed they could explain face-to-face why Trump needed to assist his former attorney with his ballooning legal bills.”
While he “didn’t seem very interested” in helping, Trump “verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s legal bills without committing to any specific amount or timeline,” CNN said. One source told the network that Giuliani asked Trump to pay a data vendor called Trustpoint, and that Trump’s Save America PAC later agreed to pay that $340,000 bill.
While Giuliani has done a great deal of buck-raking in the two decades since he left office as mayor, he has claimed more recently that he cannot afford his legal bills.
“These are a lot of bills that he’s not paying. I think this is very humbling for Mr. Giuliani,” the ex-mayor’s lawyer said in court this week, per CNN.
Giuliani’s bills, even prior to the indictment, were described as in the seven figures.
Giuliani has been sued repeatedly, including by voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion, as well as by two election workers who say the attorney defamed them by accusing them of voter fraud, a case that was referenced in the indictments in Georgia. Giuliani is also the defendant in a high-profile sexual harassment suit and has faced disbarment proceedings as well.
This week, per Business Insider, Giuliani was subject to claims in yet another lawsuit, this time by a group of farmers who say they gave him $300,000 in 2019 to pitch a documentary about President Biden and his son’s dealing in Ukraine- a movie that was never made.
That was part of a total of $1 million that they say they were cheated out of, although Giuliani is not a defendant in the lawsuit.
Giuliani and other investors claimed that they “all represented that they possessed key documents that were ‘smoking guns’ that would establish that the Ukrainian government engaged in a quid pro quo exchange with the Biden family to benefit Burisma,” and that the film would help defeat Biden in 2020. Mother Jones reported in 2021 that the film was “a disaster that only resulted in 15 minutes of low-quality footage.”
The investors promised that the film would be “bigger and more profitable than Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’” That film, which came in 2004 and made the case against then-President George W. Bush, remains the highest-grossing documentary in history, although it did not succeed in helping to defeat Bush in that year’s election.
The suit also claims that Giuliani lost interest in the movie project, and pivoted to his efforts to spread the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop.
Another Trump lawyer who was indicted Monday, Jenna Ellis, is the recipient of a crowdfunding effort on GiveSendGo, reportedly after cutting her Trump ties.
“We will fight for Jenna. If you would like to help support our efforts please consider donating by clicking the link below,” her lawyer Mike Melito read, per The Independent. “America and the profession of law are worth the fight.”
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles over the years that focus on politics, technology, and the economy for over a decade. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
