- Several of former President Donald Trump’s allies, including Rudy Giuliani, who are now facing criminal charges for helping him try to overturn the results of the 2020 election were never paid by the Trump political operation for work they did in late 2020.
- The failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between special counsel Jack Smith’s team and Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani associate, according to an attorney for Kerik.
- Trump and his allies raised $250 million off false claims that were peddled nationwide by people including Giuliani and Kerik, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot said.
- That money is now helping Trump pay a small army of lawyers defending him against criminal charges.
Several of the attorneys who spearheaded President Donald Trump’s frenzied effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election tried, and failed, to collect payment for the work they did for Trump’s political operation, according to testimony to congressional investigators and Federal Election Commission records. This is despite the fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million in the weeks following the November vote, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot said in its final report.
Among them was Trump’s closest ally, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according to Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik.
But the Trump campaign and its affiliated committees ultimately did not honor that pledge, according to campaign finance records. The records show that Giuliani’s companies were only reimbursed for travel and not the $20,000 a day he requested to be paid.
Parlatore also told CNBC that the Giuliani operation was never compensated for its work. According to Parlatore, the failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team and Kerik, a member of Giuliani’s team in late 2020.
“Lawyers and law firms that didn’t do s— were paid lots of money and the people that worked their ass off, got nothing,” Kerik complained in a 2021 tweet.
Bob Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, declined to comment further about the agreement, citing privileged conversations between his client and then-President Trump.
Trump has a long history of not paying his bills. But the revelation that he likely stiffed Giuliani, a longtime friend, is all the more striking given that much of the work Giuliani did for the Trump operation is detailed in a sprawling RICO indictment in Georgia released Monday, in which Giuliani is a co-defendant alongside Trump and 17 other people.
The indictment details trips Giuliani made, phone calls he placed and meetings he attended, all in service of what prosecutors say was a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election.
Criminal or not, what is indisputable is that Giuliani and his team did a lot of legal and PR work for Trump. Over more than two months, Giuliani served as the public face of Trump’s election challenges, which ultimately failed.
Nonetheless, these challenges helped Trump and his allies raise an unprecedented $250 million from small-dollar donors in the weeks following the November election, according to the final congressional report by the House select committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The money came in response to countless fundraising appeals that claimed it was needed to fund Trump’s election challenges in court.
Yet instead of paying the lawyers who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his loss, the money went into Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America.
Source: CNBC
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