Rudy’s Back and He’s in New Hot Water
One of Donald Trump’s former fixers has turned into a headache that just won’t go away.
Attorneys for Rudy Giuliani’s creditors negotiating his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed a request on Thursday, demanding that Giuliani reveal his financial secrets, including details on his cable TV earnings, the origin of his legal defense fund (led by his son), and even the nature of his work for Trump.
The far-reaching order is only possible thanks to allegations that Giuliani participated in “discovery misconduct”—that is to say, he failed to spill all the beans the first time around when he was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
“Indeed, it was Giuliani’s discovery misconduct in the Freeman Litigation—concerning Giuliani’s defamatory statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers—that led U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to enter a $148 million default judgment against Giuliani,” reads the motion, obtained by Law & Crime,
“Judge Howell found Giuliani’s misconduct in the Freeman Litigation so egregious that she further ordered immediate dissolution of the automatic thirty-day stay of enforcement of the judgment, allowing the plaintiffs in the Freeman Litigation to take immediate steps to enforce the judgment,” the motion continued, noting that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” effectively lost him the case by default.
The attorneys argue that Giuliani has every reason to continue to lie and hide his assets without a court order, especially as he wrestles with the multimillion-dollar judgment for defaming Freeman and Moss. Meanwhile, Giulani has several other legal woes, including other defamation suits from Hunter Biden, Dominion Voting Systems, and Smartmatic, not to mention the Georgia election-interference case in which Giuliani is one of more than a dozen co-defendants. And on top of all that, there’s still one more lawsuit against Giuliani—one of his former business associates, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault.
Attorneys for Giuliani’s creditors argue that all those threats could pose up to $4 billion in potential damages—an extremely tall order for anyone to contend with, but especially for an unpaid attorney with a reported $10 million in assets.