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Trump Reportedly Instructs Aides Not To Pay Giuliani’s Legal Fees

   DailyWire.com
Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani speaks during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2020.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has reportedly instructed his aides not to pay the legal fees that attorney Rudy Giuliani has racked up in recent weeks as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The Washington Post reported that Trump’s relationship with Giuliani has soured in recent days and is “fracturing” as the president comes to grip that his presidency will end next week.

“Trump has instructed aides not to pay Giuliani’s legal fees, two officials said, and has demanded that he personally approve any reimbursements for the expenses Giuliani incurred while traveling on the president’s behalf to challenge election results in key states,” the report said. “They said Trump has privately expressed concern with some of Giuliani’s moves and did not appreciate a demand from Giuliani for $20,000 a day in fees for his work attempting to overturn the election.”

The president is reportedly angered that few close to him have been out in the media defending him against his second impeachment.

Numerous news reports and sources that The Daily Wire has spoken to point to Giuliani as having harmed the president more than having helped him throughout the course of the last few years.

“The current arc of the president’s behavior began on Nov. 14 when he put Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to undo the results of the election. The president sidelined people who told him it was over and that the challenges were specious,” The New York Times reported. “Instead the president listened to Giuliani, who was eager to encourage his efforts; both men wanted Sidney Powell at the infamous RNC press conference. At some point, Giuliani started seeing Powell as destructive, but things were in motion already.”

Politico reported that Giuliani’s early post-election efforts scared off top lawyers that the campaign had worked to recruit:

Trump’s senior campaign aides were gathered in their headquarters Saturday morning when word emerged that Rudy Giuliani would be holding a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.

They knew that meant trouble.

Senior campaign aides scurried to urge organizers to kill the event, infamously staged at the wrong “Four Seasons” — a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. But Giuliani plowed ahead anyway, delivering a conspiracy-filled rant that undercut the legal strategy the president’s advisers had meticulously mapped out in the run-up to the election.

Campaign officials described the episode as disastrous, saying it scared off many of the lawyers they spent months recruiting, who now no longer wanted to be involved. With the campaign already facing exceedingly long odds in its recount efforts, there are widespread concerns within Trump world and GOP circles that Giuliani’s antics are thwarting the president’s legal machinery from within.

Axios added that the “near-universal opinion” in Trump world was that Giuliani hurt Trump, which includes the following examples:

  • His debate prep fueled the president’s over-the-top antics in his first face-off with Joe Biden.
  • The former New York mayor ruined their carefully planned Wall Street Journal piece about Tony Bobulinski — an ex-business partner of Hunter Biden — by first giving the New York Post a hard drive containing alleged files from Biden’s laptop.

Sources close to the White House that The Daily Wire has spoken to also pointed at Trump’s first impeachment as an example of an area that they believe that Giuliani hurt the president, especially with some of the things that he said on television.

Following the publication of this report, Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller wrote on Twitter: “Just spoke with President Trump, and he told me that @RudyGiuliani is a great guy and a Patriot who devoted his services to the country! We all love America’s Mayor!”

This report has been updated to include additional information.

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