Donald Trump's attorneys and allies are racking up huge legal fees as the former president fights to stay out of prison.
Rudy Giuliani has been slapped with a defamation suit filed by Georgia polls workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, whom the former New York City mayor falsely accused of conspiring to add fake ballots to Joe Biden's total, and a federal judge ordered him to pay $89,172 for failing to turn over evidence, reported The Daily Beast.
“He has no one to blame but himself for ignoring plaintiffs' pending motion to compel the Giuliani businesses to comply with discovery obligations,” wrote U.S. District Court judge Beryl Howell.
Giuliani could face additional sanctions because he failed to pay up by July 7, and Howell issued a scathing order telling the former Trump lawyer to get his affairs in order.
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“Defendant Giuliani is CAUTIONED that failure to comply… may result in severe discovery sanctions,” Howell wrote.
Howell put Giuliani's former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik on notice last week in another case involving Freeman and Moss, and the judge gave his lawyer Tim Parlatore “a final opportunity” to turn over court-ordered evidence in the suit.
“[The court is] giving Parlatore the benefit of the doubt that his declaration reflected merely a misunderstanding of the applicable law rather than an effort to delay," she wrote.
However, Parlatore continues to argue that some of those documents are protected by attorney-client privilege that belongs to Trump’s re-election campaign, and the former president has not waived that privilege.
Another Trump lawyer, Alina Habba,is trying to wriggle out of a nearly $1 million penalty she drew by filing a conspiracy-filled lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others who tried to link the former president to Russian election interference in 2016, which U.S. District judge Donald Middlebrooks tossed out of court earlier this year.
“A continuing pattern of misuse of the courts by Mr. Trump and his lawyers undermines the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources from those who have suffered actual legal harm," Middlebrooks wrote in that scathing order. “This case should never have been brought. Its inadequacy as a legal claim was evident from the start. No reasonable lawyer would have filed it."
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was convicted of ignoring a congressional subpoena for testimony in the Jan. 6 investigation, and then he failed to pay his attorney for work on that case and another that spared him from being convicted of defrauding donors to his nonprofit.
A New York judge last week ordered Bannon to pay $480,000 to attorney Bob Costello, and another lawyer at his firm wants him to pay for his work on clawing back that money -- which attorney Joseph Polito says amounts to $66,896.
