Trump has cut off Giuliani for asking to be paid for his failed election cases, new book claims

‘Trump is annoyed that he tried to get paid for his election challenge work,’ Michael Wolff writes

A new book says Donald Trump has “cast out” and “cut off” his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for daring to ask that the former president pay him.

“Trump is annoyed that he tried to get paid for his election challenge work,” Michael Wolff writes in the book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, according to an excerpt published in The Times.

After Mr Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Mr Giuliani tried to overturn the results in dozens of failed lawsuits. But according to Landslide, all the former mayor has received for his efforts is “the cold shoulder” from Mr Trump and his family.

That’s a far cry from what Mr Giuliani’s team had charged. In January, the lawyer admitted to The New York Times that his associate had asked Mr Trump to pay him $20,000 a day – about 10 times the normal rate. Mr Giuliani has insisted the bill was sent without his knowledge.

Whatever the case, the former president didn’t pay it. In the final week of his presidency, isolated and twice-impeached, Mr Trump ordered aides not to pay Mr Giuliani’s fees. According to The Washington Post, the outgoing president was furious at his allies for not doing enough to keep him in the White House – even at Mr Giuliani, who had done more than most.

Mr Trump has long been accused of not paying his contractors, from construction workers to piano suppliers. In a 2016 presidential debate, he shrugged off stiffing one associate, saying, “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work.”

In Mr Giuliani’s case, the former mayor did severe damage to his own legal career by pursuing Mr Trump’s baseless voter fraud cases. Last month, a New York court suspended Mr Giuliani’s law licence over his “demonstrably false and misleading statements” in court about the 2020 election. Some experts believe his disbarment could be next.

“Given the First Department’s opinion, it’s hard to imagine that Rudy won’t be disbarred after a full hearing,” the lawyer and political commentator George Conway tweeted at the time. “It’s now almost inconceivable that he will ever set foot in a courtroom again as anything other than a defendant.”

Meanwhile, according to Mr Wolff, Mr Trump has started asking visitors to his Mar-a-Lago estate “if they know any good” lawyers who could help him overturn the election, almost six months into Joe Biden’s presidency.

The Independent has reached out to Mr Trump’s team for comment.