Rudy Giuliani was seated next to two lawyers at a table in a small conference room, participating in a federal bankruptcy court hearing that felt more like a freewheeling, wide-ranging interview about his financial affairs than a court investigation to determine exactly how he was doing anything. can dig itself.
Wednesday’s hearing near Manhattan’s Wall Street was steps away from Cipriani, where the former New York mayor and onetime attorney for Donald Trump met with the former president and his loyalists in December to launch his 2024 campaign.
Less than two months later, Mr. Giuliani was on the fifth floor of a bankruptcy courtroom down the street, where he testified for the first time about his strained finances after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy following a nearly $150 million defamation judgment. His choice is a lie.
The hearing combed through dozens of pages of financial statements, including the potential impact of ongoing litigation over defamation lawsuits and other allegations that could deal a further financial blow to the former mayor, whose income includes a “marginally profitable” career as a podcaster and radio personality.
“Hopefully it will be more profitable,” he said.
He told the court that Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee owed him nearly $2 million for their bogus legal efforts to overturn the election results after the 2020 presidential election.
The 79-year-old man cited an unwritten agreement to support the former president without pay, as well as his suspension from the legal profession and a long list of lawsuits filed against him.
The revelations came amid a three-hour explanatory hearing that offered one of the most comprehensive examinations yet of Mr. Giuliani’s finances.
He claimed that he did not pay any home insurance for his properties in New York and Florida, that he did not know that he owned any trademarks (he did), that he spent $726 a month on dry cleaning, that he paid $800 a month for a storage unit. He doesn’t have anything of great value in the Bronx, and he doesn’t have a driver’s license. His drivers are his spokespeople or other on-air co-hosts (who also work for him) or he pays Uber thousands of dollars a year to get around. Mr. Giuliani owes about $10,000 from an overdraft in his checking account, which he attributes to a bad check.
The former mayor is strapped for cash and has not received a pension during his eight-year term. She fell behind on her taxes in 2021 because she “didn’t have enough money” and made a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to sell her Manhattan apartment. He risked wiping out his IRA to cover nearly $1 million in income taxes from 2021 through 2022, agreeing instead to sell his Manhattan auxiliary cop, which had been on the market for weeks.
“Then of course bankruptcy came into play,” he said.
But Mr. Giuliani, asked at the beginning of the hearing to explain in his own words why he was filing for bankruptcy, pointed out that the jury verdict in December left him on the hook for tens of millions of dollars.
Jurors in a federal trial in Washington, D.C., found that he owes $148 million to a mother-daughter election worker couple who faced a wave of death threats and harassment after she repeatedly falsely accused him of manipulating the 2020 election results.
“I wouldn’t have gone bankrupt by then,” he said.
He claimed he was suspended from his legal practice “without cause” after disciplinary panels in New York City and Washington determined that he had spread patently false statements about the 2020 election while fighting the results.
Mr. Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001, worked at the firms of Bracewell and Greenberg Taurig before starting his own law firm, where he was the sole lawyer. He said Greenberg was “asked” to leave the firm after what he described as “huge pressure” from the firm’s clients after he joined then-President Trump’s legal team.
He said he offered his “unofficial” support for Mr. Trump “in the public interest” in 2016 as a “campaign volunteer” among a handful of top legal advisers.
“My main role was to be with him on almost all of his trips and to act as a sort of funnel for all the information that was coming in,” he said.
According to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump asked him to “take over” his campaign legal team in November 2020 after Trump-allied lawyers launched an unsuccessful effort to overturn election results in states he lost. “At that point, he had a lot of complaints about election fraud,” he said. “He asked me to lead this effort.”
He said his expenses were paid but he “didn’t get any salary.”
“When I took over, I understood that I would be paid by the campaign to cover my legal work and expenses,” he said. “When we sent the invoice for payment they just paid the expenses. Not all, but most. “They never paid the attorney fees.”
Asked if he thought he might have a possible claim against Mr. Trump, he said: “My understanding is that I would have a complaint not against Trump, but certainly against the campaign and the RNC.”
He said he never calculated how much he believed he owed him, but it was probably $2 million.
He said his income dropped dramatically after he joined Mr. Trump’s team, from a salary of “$5 to $6 million” at Greenberg to “probably a million or two million” at his own practice. He had to give up his clients after his law license was revoked. “It was a huge financial blow,” he said.
The defamation verdict is among a growing list of legal liabilities, including criminal charges in Georgia, over Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss. He is also an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal criminal case surrounding Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss.
He is also being sued for defamation by voting technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. A former Dominion executive also sued Mr. Giuliani.
Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, also sued Mr. Giuliani in court on Wednesday, calling the complaint “all kinds of crazy stuff.”
He also dismissed Noelle Dunphy’s lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, calling it “a completely scandalous frivolous lawsuit that should be dismissed.”
Mr. Giuliani has previously claimed that Mr. Giuliani cost him “millions of dollars,” including a libel complaint against President Biden for using the phrase “Russian pawn” to describe Mr. Trump’s former lawyer during the 2020 presidential debate. He filed many lawsuits, including a statement he made. and millions of dollars in lost clients and consulting business.
His legal fights are backed by two defense funds, including a political action committee run by his son Andrew Giuliani. That fund raised nearly $700,000 at a fundraiser hosted by Trump at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
A separate fund run by another Giuliani ally is being set up to receive funds from smaller donors, usually in increments of $10 to $20, according to his lawyers. They said right-wing news network Newsmax also hosted a fundraiser for the fund.
Andrea Schwartz of the U.S. Trustee, who presided over the hearing, repeatedly reminded Mr. Giuliani that all attorneys in various jurisdictions must be approved by the court.
“The only reason we are here today is because Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the courage to speak out and stand up to the permanent political class in Washington and refuse to be unfairly censored or bullied,” his political advisor said. Ted Goodman, who attended the hearing, distributed printed copies to a handful of journalists who were watching the hearing in an adjoining room.
“The American people are waking up to the fact that our justice system has been disgustingly weaponized for partisan political interests, and the fact that we are here today is just another example of this gross injustice,” he added.
As he left the courthouse on Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani told the court he had given “all the information” he could and that he had “nothing to hide.”