Giuliani associate blew up his own defamation case with an erratic outburst: court records

A Rudy Giuliani associate who claims to have inside knowledge of Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election recently saw his defamation suit fall apart against a former business partner.

New York businessman Mike Trimarco told QAnon podcaster Ann Vandersteel last month that he had been analyzing the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020 but switched over to researching alleged fraud after the election, and Raw Story previously reported that he revealed that White House aide Garrett Ziegler had served as a conduit between teams led by lawyers Giuliani and Sidney Powell to then-president Trump.

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne previously revealed that Trimarco had rented rooms at the Westin hotel in Arlington, Virginia, which served as the initial hub for those teams collecting affidavits to support their legal challenges, and he said the Giuliani associate played a key role in those early efforts to overturn Trump's loss.

“All of this would have fallen apart on that side of the river had it not been for [Trimarco] showing up and not just with a credit card, but trying to provide some adult supervision,” Byrne said. “He’s a real champion, and the MAGA crowd should know that when push came to shove, this fellow came up out of nowhere and was very valuable in helping corral all these forces and keep things from just spinning apart in the early days.”

Trimarco also told Vandersteel that Ziegler frequently visited the "cyber-patriots" working on election challenges from the hotel, but Powell, Flynn and Byrne moved their operation in mid-November 2020 from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation in South Carolina at the invitation of right-wing attorney Lin Wood.

“I mean, this guy — talk about people really working 24-7,” Trimarco said. “He would come around at 11, midnight, 1, after he’s done at the White House, to get information. I saw him come by one or two times. But he was working with a few key people on our team to get the information."

Trimarco, for his part, claimed he was responsible for getting crucial information from the other teams to Giuliani.

“If you wanted to get information from Sidney’s camp, at least at the very beginning, over to Rudy’s, you’d come through me,” Trimarco said. “That was the reason I was at a lot of these meetings — to get information over to Rudy, because he represented the president, for real. And we weren’t physically in the same location.”

However, Trimarco said that Ziegler was so good at his job that he often passed along information to his boss, trade adviser Peter Navarro, who then filled in the president.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president, and then it would circle back to Rudy.”

Ultimately, every single legal challenge failed to prevail, and that bad luck followed Trimarco to his own court battle against former business partner Chris Cicolini and attorney Michael Farley, whom he sued for defamation only to have the case thrown out after an outburst.

Trimarco had failed to produce evidence for discovery to the pair's legal team, who then filed a motion to compel him to meet that obligation, but he then failed to show up for two different video depositions.

He finally joined a Zoom deposition on May 6, 2021, two days after the last scheduled deposition, on the phone from his car, but he angered the judge with rude and disrespectful behavior.

"The record before the court suggested on the day of his noticed deposition Mr. Trimarco joined the video from his car," court records show. "While his own counsel, Mr. Farley, a court reporter, and a videographer were in attendance, Mr. Trimarco told Mr. Farley to ‘F’ himself. Mr. Trimarco refused to identify himself to the court reporter or be sworn in, and then he logged off."

Two of Trimarco's attorneys filed motions to withdraw from the case later that day, and he continued to miss deadlines to turn over evidence until the judge dismissed the case in November 2021.

"Plaintiff’s conduct to date has been harassing, discourteous, and disrespectful to the parties and the court," ruled Magistrate Judge Jennifer L. Hall. “I make no finding regarding the meritoriousness of Mr. Trimarco’s claim. I have not reviewed it and I don’t intend to waste any more court resources doing so even. Even if it were wholly meritorious, it would not outweigh the other factors, which all support dismissal with prejudice.”

Trimarco later claimed knew his former associates would not be able to pay damages, and he insisted that his profane outburst was a strategic move.

"But telling them, acting as their own attorneys during the deposition, to go F themselves I knew would cause Mr. Farley and Mr. Ciccolini to be triggered and then press an investigation by the Delaware US Attorney's Office on me, which in turn would highlight their own coercion and torts, which they did," he later told The Raw Story, adding that all the matter remained active in Delaware Chancery Court.

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