Trump reneged on 'handshake agreement' to pay lawyers pushing false election claims: report

15 August 2023

Four of former President Donald Trump's legal advisers listed as unidentified co-conspirators in United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith's criminal indictment for the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election were never paid "despite the fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million in the weeks following the November vote," CNBC's Brian Schwartz reports.

"Trump has a long history of not paying his bills," Schwarts writes, noting one of the people that he "stiffed" was Rudy Giuliani, the ex-New York City mayor who was Trump's personal defense counsel and a long-time personal friend.

"Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according to Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik," Schwartz says. "But the Trump campaign and their affiliated committees ultimately did not honor that pledge, according to campaign finance records. The failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith's team and Bernard Kerik, a member of Giuliani's team in late 2020, according to Parlatore."

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Schwartz recalls that "Federal Election Commission records and testimony from the House January 6th Select Committee hearings reveal that none of the private sector lawyers identified -- but not indicted -- in that case got paid for their post-election work: Not Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro or John Eastman."

Trump reneging on his gentleman's contract with Giuliani, Schartz observes, "is all the more striking" given that Giuliani was charged along with Trump by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis for trying to steal the election in Georgia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970 — upon which Giuliani built his career as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Trump's fundraising push after he lost to President Joe Biden is also under scrutiny by Smith, whom Politico's Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney explained on August 8th is investigating if Trump's Save America Political Action Committee "violated federal laws by raising money off claims of voter fraud they knew were false."

Those efforts, predicated on Trump's insistence that the election was stolen from him, raked in $250 million, according to the final report released by the House January 6th Select Committee.

"The money came in response to countless fundraising appeals that claimed it was needed to fund Trump's election challenges in court," Schwartz continues. "Yet instead of paying the lawyers who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his loss, the money went into Trump’s leadership PAC."

In fact, "Trump's entire political network, including his joint fundraising committees, spent over $47 million combined from the start of 2020 through the end of 2021 on legal fees, according to a report by OpenSecrets," Schwartz adds. "Today, that money is instead helping Trump pay his own legal bills. The PAC spent over $20 million in the first half of the year alone on legal fees as the president faced the first two of his four indictments."

Schwartz's report is available at this link.

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