Rudy Giuliani is staring down hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits in addition to the new criminal charges – related to his work for Donald Trump after the 2020 election.
In civil litigation, the plaintiff will often seek discovery of the defendant’s finances, insurance policies, etc to find out if the defendant will ultimately be able to pay a judgement. Looks like Guliani is trying to avoid that because he’s embarrassed he’s broke:
While the former mayor has declined in court to provide details of his financial state, his lawyers wrote this week that “producing a detailed financial report is only meant to embarrass Mr. Giuliani and draw attention to his misfortunes.”
The article also cited campaign disclosures showing Trump’s PAC was paying Guliani’s bills related to record storage and production, at a cost of $300k. But it sounds like Trump cut him off:
On Wednesday, Katz argued Giuliani did not have the funds to pay for producing records in a lawsuit brought by voting technology company Smartmatic, adding that the “third-party source” that paid for his earlier bill was “not willing to give any additional money.”
By May, Giuliani was more than $320,000 behind in payments to the document hosting company, according to a sworn statement he made in court. “I do not have the funds to pay this amount at this time,” he wrote.
He negotiated for a year with what his lawyers say were “third-party funding sources” for help in paying his legal bills, and awaited funding for six months for help with the Trustpoint bill, according to Giuliani’s filing this week in the Smartmatic case.
But the $340,000 payment [previous one time payment from Trump’s PAC to catch Guliani up on data hosting bills] isn’t enough to cover more searches, Trustpoint “will not extend any further credit” to him, and his bill to keep his data held by the company will keep growing by the month, his court filings say.
On Wednesday, the New York state judge in that case gave Giuliani two weeks to find the money needed to produce the records to Smartmatic. If he fails to do so, the judge said Giuliani would be forced to pay some of Smartmatic’s legal costs.
What is fun is if he doesn’t produce documents he may ultimately get sanctioned with negative inferences (instruction to the jury that they should assume anything Guliani didn’t turn over was basically a smoking gun against him) or a default judgement as to liability (see Alex Jones). He’s fucked lol. Damn I am never not fascinated by the epic fall of Guliani.
he may ultimately get sanctioned with negative inferences (instruction to the jury that they should assume anything Guliani didn’t turn over was basically a smoking gun against him)
Is there precedent for this? It’s not like he’s refusing to turn over records, he’s just unable to due to financial hardships (allegedly, he could be lying I guess). If it were anybody else, that would be an incredibly fucked up thing for the courts to do to somebody.
Your right, it’s usually when the defendant is engaging in bad faith, like purposely hiding documents. The case I remember, defendant intentionally refused to turn over a bad document and might even have destroyed it, but one of the law clerks at defendant’s firm decided to be a whistleblower. I don’t know if there’s specific precedent for this if the grounds are just I’m to broke to conduct a search, but it’s possible. It’s usually a last resort, the judge will just keep issueing fines and attorneys fees for a few months. But at some point the case needs to move forward in the interst of justice, and the judge is going to have to figure out a way to do that if Guliani won’t turn over the documents needed for the case. I doubt the “I’m too broke” excuse is going to hold up forever.
Alright this is just too juicy to ignore.
In civil litigation, the plaintiff will often seek discovery of the defendant’s finances, insurance policies, etc to find out if the defendant will ultimately be able to pay a judgement. Looks like Guliani is trying to avoid that because he’s embarrassed he’s broke:
The article also cited campaign disclosures showing Trump’s PAC was paying Guliani’s bills related to record storage and production, at a cost of $300k. But it sounds like Trump cut him off:
What is fun is if he doesn’t produce documents he may ultimately get sanctioned with negative inferences (instruction to the jury that they should assume anything Guliani didn’t turn over was basically a smoking gun against him) or a default judgement as to liability (see Alex Jones). He’s fucked lol. Damn I am never not fascinated by the epic fall of Guliani.
Your last comment might be the most salient
I believe I recall that he ran away to avoid being served his court docs.
Def not a pattern of behavior. You can trust him. /s
Is there precedent for this? It’s not like he’s refusing to turn over records, he’s just unable to due to financial hardships (allegedly, he could be lying I guess). If it were anybody else, that would be an incredibly fucked up thing for the courts to do to somebody.
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Your right, it’s usually when the defendant is engaging in bad faith, like purposely hiding documents. The case I remember, defendant intentionally refused to turn over a bad document and might even have destroyed it, but one of the law clerks at defendant’s firm decided to be a whistleblower. I don’t know if there’s specific precedent for this if the grounds are just I’m to broke to conduct a search, but it’s possible. It’s usually a last resort, the judge will just keep issueing fines and attorneys fees for a few months. But at some point the case needs to move forward in the interst of justice, and the judge is going to have to figure out a way to do that if Guliani won’t turn over the documents needed for the case. I doubt the “I’m too broke” excuse is going to hold up forever.