Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani reportedly demanded hefty compensation for spearheading the sitting President’s baseless legal efforts to delegitimize the results of the election.
According to the New York Times on Tuesday, Giuliani requested that the Trump campaign pay him $20,000 a day for his legal work, all of which would eventually fall almost entirely flat as Trump maintains bogus claims of widespread voter fraud and refuses to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden.
The Times reported that Giuliani’s request sparked tension among Trump’s aides and advisers, who ultimately ruled out his high asking price. The amount of compensation for Giuliani’s legal efforts is unknown.
The Times noted that Giuliani charging a $20,000-a-day rate would have made him one of the most highly compensated attorneys in general. Top-of-the-line lawyers in Washington and New York can charge as much as $15,000 a day if they dedicate all of their time working for a client.
Giuliani told the Times that he “never asked for $20,000” and that Trump voluntarily ensured that his personal lawyer would be compensated after the conclusion of his legal battles contesting Biden’s legitimate election victory.
“The arrangement is, we’ll work it out at the end,” Giuliani told the Times, before adding that whoever spilled the beans on his supposedly $20,000-a-day asking price “is a liar, a complete liar.”
The Times reported that some Trump allies are concerned that Giuliani is egging on the sitting president’s flimsy legal challenges because he sees financial advantage for himself in it. Giuliani reportedly wanted compensation for his work dating back to the day after the election as Trump began publicly fuming that he won despite projections indicating that Biden was in the lead to beat the mercurial president.
Multiple people close to the President told the Times that Giuliani pushed Trump to stoke numerous conspiracy theories about voting machine irregularities. Giuliani vehemently insisted to Trump that his other advisers kept him out of the loop about the viability of the sitting president’s legal efforts to overturn the results of the election.
On the heels of Trump’s lawsuit in Arizona fizzling out when the campaign dropped the Maricopa County case last week, the sitting president appointed Giuliani to take the lead on all election-related litigation and communications for it.
On the eve of a key hearing on a lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania, Giuliani reportedly pushed a lawyer out who had been leading the case, which left Trump’s team haphazardly looking for a replacement. The local lawyer who is now spearheading the case has acknowledged that Biden won the election and said that lawsuits won’t budge the results.
After the judge in the Pennsylvania case declined the Trump campaign’s request to postpone the hearing on Monday night, the next morning Giuliani told the state court that he would personally appear on behalf of the sitting president in the case.
