August 1, 2021

Rudy Giuliani Is Reportedly Close to Broke—and Donald Trump Isn’t Taking His Calls

That’s what happens when you go to bat for a notoriously cheap, friendless, crappy businessman.

Matias J. Ocner/ZUMA

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Having raised more money than anyone else in the Republican Party so far this year, new filings show Donald Trump is flush with cash. Absolutely swimming in it. But even as the money flows in, the former president is reportedly stiffing one of his fiercest allies and loyal political surrogates, Rudy Giuliani, as the former New York mayor becomes increasingly ensnared in a federal investigation that’s reportedly costing him millions in legal fees.

Here’s the latest on the apparent fallout between the two men:

That’s particularly worrisome for Giuliani, whose legal defense fund has effectively failed to raise anything in his fight against the federal probe into whether he worked as an unregistered lobbyist for Ukrainian officials. Giuliani, who was recently suspended from practicing law in New York, is also facing a separate lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over his relentless election lies. And despite his penchant for conspiracy theories and misinformation, it appears, as Haberman notes, that Giuliani does seem to understand the gravity of his precarious legal situation.

“I’m more than willing to go to jail if they want to put me in jail,” he told NBC New York’s Melissa Russo in an interview last week. “And if they do, they’re going to suffer the consequences in heaven, I’m not. Because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Those remarks came despite the fact that the interview, as Russo explained in the segment, was supposed to focus on the upcoming 20th anniversary of September 11th. That Giuliani instead nervously discussed his legal jeopardy doesn’t exactly exude confidence in his chances of escaping jail time—or how he’s going to pay for all of this. But that’s what happens when you go to bat for Donald Trump, isn’t it?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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