When he ran for president in 2007, his net worth was north of $50 million, fueled in large part by the money he made giving speeches in the afterglow of his time as “America’s Mayor.” By the time Trump was in office, his consulting business had become a global affair, allowing him to rake in millions in contracts despite never having registered with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It’s true that Giuliani is “not starving,” and at various points over the years he has been rolling in dough. But his post-mayoral pursuits of quick cash to support lavish spending have become the stuff of legend. He added that despite the large sums other lawyers were pulling in for their lobbying, “I have enough money. At the time of the Times’ report, Giuliani “rejected the portrayal of events,” saying that “he had made clear that he did not work on clemency cases” because of his role as Trump’s attorney. Kiriakou told The New York Times that at one point while Giuliani went to the bathroom, one of his confidants said the former mayor could help - but “it’s going to cost $2 million - he’s going to want two million bucks.”Īn associate of Kiriakou reportedly flagged the conversation to the FBI, but it’s unclear whether anything was done with the tip. Roughly a year after he allegedly asked Dunphy about potential pardon recipients, Giuliani was reportedly part of a meeting at Trump International Hotel with a former CIA officer named John Kiriakou. Parnas eventually flipped on Trump and Giuliani during the first impeachment, handing over reams of texts, emails and other evidence to Congress.īut as my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin noted Tuesday, Dunphy isn’t the only person to have claimed that Giuliani was in the business of selling pardons. Parnas was a key facilitator to the work Giuliani was doing in Ukraine to strong-arm the country into investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. That overlap in timing matters when you consider that Dunphy’s lawyer, Justin Kelton, told MSNBC on Monday night that a former Giuliani associate named Lev Parnas was present for the exchange and could most likely corroborate the claim. At the same time, he was already deep in the scheme to extort Ukraine that would culminate in Trump’s first impeachment later that year. Given that Giuliani and Dunphy’s alleged conversation took place in February 2019, according to the complaint, it seems Giuliani was ahead of the curve. Accordingly, in the waning days of his term, lobbyists and lawyers close to the administration were raking in thousands of dollars in consulting fees in exchange for a chance to get their clients’ names on the president’s desk. As of early December 2020, Trump had granted clemency just 45 times, a record low for that point in a presidency. Right-wing celebrities and prominent Trump supporters were some of the only beneficiaries of the president’s nearly unchecked pardon power. For most of Trump’s tenure, the normal channels for requesting a pardon or a commutation had become massively clogged.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |