Former Latest York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrive to talk to police gathered at a Fraternal Order of Police lodge during a campaign event in Statesville, North Carolina, Aug. 18, 2016.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Several of the attorneys who spearheaded President Donald Trump’s frenzied effort to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election tried, and failed, to gather payment for the work they did for Trump’s political operation, in line with testimony to congressional investigators and Federal Election Commission records. That is despite the undeniable fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million within the weeks following the November vote, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot said in its final report.
Amongst them was Trump’s closest ally, former Latest York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would receives a commission by the Trump political operation for his or her post-election work, in line with Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik.
However the Trump campaign and its affiliated committees ultimately didn’t honor that pledge, in line with campaign finance records. The records show that Giuliani’s corporations were only reimbursed for travel and never the $20,000 a day he requested to be paid.
Parlatore also told CNBC that the Giuliani operation was never compensated for its work. Based on Parlatore, the failure to pay Giuliani and his team got here up last week in a personal 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 did not do s— were paid plenty of money and the people who worked their ass off, got nothing,” Kerik complained in a 2021 tweet.
Bob Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, declined to comment further concerning the agreement, citing privileged conversations between his client and then-President Trump.
Trump has an extended history of not paying his bills. However the revelation that he likely stiffed Giuliani, a longtime friend, is all of the more striking provided that much of the work Giuliani did for the Trump operation is detailed in a sprawling RICO indictment in Georgia released Monday, by 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’s indisputable is that Giuliani and his team did a number of legal and PR work for Trump. Over greater than two months, Giuliani served as the general 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 within the weeks following the November election, in line with the final congressional report by the House select committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The cash got here in response to countless fundraising appeals that claimed it was needed to fund Trump’s election challenges in court.
Yet as an alternative of paying the lawyers who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his loss, the cash went into Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America.
According to the ultimate report by the House select committee, “After raising $250 million dollars on false voter fraud claims, mostly from small-dollar donors, President Trump didn’t spend it on fighting an election he knew he lost.” Trump’s entire political network, including his joint fundraising committees, spent over $47 million combined from the beginning of 2020 through the tip of 2021 on legal fees, in line with a report by OpenSecrets.
Today, that cash raised by Trump’s political operation is as an alternative helping Trump pay his own legal bills within the criminal cases against him. Trump’s Save America PAC spent over $20 million in the primary half of the 12 months alone on legal fees because the president faced the primary two of his 4 indictments.
The PAC began the second half of the 12 months with only about $3 million in money available.
Sidney Powell, an attorney later disavowed by the Trump campaign, participates in a news conference with President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., Nov. 19, 2020.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Giuliani isn’t the one unindicted co-conspirator within the special counsel’s election case who got stiffed by the Trump operation.
Federal Election Commission records and testimony from the House Jan. 6 select committee hearings reveal that not one of the private-sector lawyers identified — but not indicted — in that case got paid for his or her post-election work: Not Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro or John Eastman.
Giuliani and Eastman wanted a mixture of reimbursements and payments, but records show they received virtually none of that cash. Powell needed to turn to her own law firm to pay her volunteers. All of the while, the Trump team raised a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of dollars off the false claims of election fraud that Powell and Giuliani promoted on TV and in court.
Chesebro, for his part, told the House committee that the work he did for the Trump team was pro bono.
On Monday, all 4 lawyers entered a recent phase of their legal relationship with Trump, once they were charged alongside him within the Georgia RICO case.
Giuliani, Chesebro, Powell and Eastman were among the many greater than a dozen other co-defendants within the indictment brought against Trump in Georgia on charges of attempting to illegally overturn the 2020 election leads to the state and elsewhere.
Giuliani wanted $20,000 a day
Matthew Morgan, an election lawyer for the Trump campaign, recalled to the House select committee in 2022 that Giuliani requested $20,000 a day from the Trump political operation to fight the election results. Working five days per week for 2 months, November and December 2020, this might have amounted to around $800,000 in legal fees.
But Giuliani never got it. Based on federal records, two corporations linked to the previous Latest York City mayor got about $100,000 in travel fees and reimbursements from the Trump operation. Kerik’s company saw about $85,000 for travel-related expenses, in line with the records. But not a penny more from team Trump for his or her services.
Eastman wanted refunds and payment
Longtime conservative attorney John Eastman had an alleged role in attempting to stall the certification of the 2020 election results.
Attorney John Eastman speaks next to President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, as Trump supporters gather ahead of the president’s speech to contest the certification by Congress of the outcomes of the 2020 U.S. presidential election on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
Morgan told the House select committee that when Eastman first officially got here on board in December, he did so on a voluntary basis, but he requested that his expenses be reimbursed by Trump’s team.
Federal Election Commission records show that Eastman didn’t directly receive a single reimbursement from Trump’s campaign, despite that agreement.
Shortly after Jan. 6, 2021, Eastman requested payment “for services rendered,” in line with Morgan’s testimony to the select committee. Though Morgan didn’t recall how much Eastman asked for, he said his understanding was that “the services requested was for the totality of all of the work he’d done for the campaign.”
Morgan told the committee that he sent the request to a different Trump campaign legal advisor, Justin Clark.
FEC records show that no payments were ever made by any of Trump’s committees to Eastman.
Eastman’s attorneys declined to comment.
The undeniable fact that neither Giuliani nor Eastman got paid also reflected a deep rift that emerged after the election between top staffers on Trump’s formal campaign and the small band of lawyers pushing fringe theories of how Trump could overturn his loss.
A bunch of Trump campaign leaders and legal minds, occasionally known as “Team Normal,” pushed back against the conspiracy theories being peddled by the skin attorneys.
Ultimately, it was members of “Team Normal” that had a say within the campaign’s purse strings.
Clark later recounted an email he received on Christmas Eve 2020 from Giuliani associates, looking for payment.
“What I make of it’s that I believe these guys were reporting on to Mr. Giuliani, and when it got here time to receives a commission, they were trying to me to get money, and I used to be never within the position to be prepared to simply write checks to people ….we’re not only going to set money on fire to do stuff,” Clark told the House committee.
An attorney for Clark declined to comment.
Powell paid staff through her own firm
Sidney Powell is the likely third unnamed co-conspirator in Smith’s federal indictment, in line with NBC News. She’s also one among the co-defendants within the Georgia case brought against Trump and his allies.
Powell was one among the leading voices on Fox News shortly after the election, peddling the false claim that voting machine corporations Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems were each involved in conspiracies to stop Trump from becoming president.
Each corporations have denied the claims and brought Fox to court. This 12 months, Fox settled the Dominion lawsuit, agreeing to pay the voting machine company an unprecedented $787.5 million. The defamation suit levied against Fox by Smartmatic remains to be open.
Powell later told the House select committee that her firm, Sidney Powell P.C., not the Trump campaign, paid assistants who helped her pursue those claims concerning the election.
“When money was donated, I desired to be certain they got paid,” she said in her interview with the House panel. “That is all I remember about that part. And I paid them.”
FEC records indicate that no payments from Trump and his allies ever went to Powell’s law firm.
But her nonprofit group Defending The Republic raised over $16 million because the November 2020 election, in line with the group’s 990 tax forms. The group doesn’t reveal its donors, nonetheless, and it’s unclear how much of that cash ended up in Powell’s personal coffers.
Powell didn’t reply to a request for comment.
