Rudy Giuliani is now trying to blackmail Donald Trump right out in the open
Rudy Giuliani is now leaking to the media that Donald Trump has been refusing to pay his legal fees for months. Giuliani is sending a clear signal to Trump that he needs to pay up or Giuliani will flip on him. It means Giuliani is truly scared of what’s happening – and Trump should be.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Trump will pay Rudy’s ransom. At this point Trump is making these kinds of decisions based not on survival but on spite. But it does seem clear that Rudy, who is broke and now finally indicted, is ready to sell Trump out if need be.
This comes after Rudy already did a proffer interview with Jack Smith and presumably gave up Trump to at least some degree. So Rudy is clearly willing to roll even further on Trump.
The problem for Rudy is that even after his proffer session, Jack Smith still named him a co-conspirator, meaning Rudy didn’t really help himself. That’s not a surprise given that he’s barely coherent these days.
So what’s Rudy going to do, give a proffer interview to Fani Willis and flub that too? One of the reasons Trump may not be willing to pay Rudy is that Rudy is too senile to even give up what he thinks he has on Trump. But it’s still a dangerous game. Rudy could have documents, recordings, or other evidence that nail Trump, even if Rudy is useless as a witness. That would buy Rudy some leniency, and make it even harder for Trump to mount a trial defense. So Trump has a tough decision to make here.
But when Trump is at a point where he’s spitefully refusing to make the strategic move of paying Jenna Ellis’ legal bills simply because she praised DeSantis, it’s fair to say Trump isn’t playing with any more of a full deck than Rudy is.
Racketeering laws, and the broad net they cast, are designed to make it difficult to keep all your underlings from flipping on you. In this probe Trump has to pay eighteen people’s legal defenses at once if he wants to keep them from flipping on him – and they might flip anyway.
Throw in the fact that Trump’s 2024 fundraising numbers are pathetic and the PACs he’s been raiding for his legal fees are now reportedly broke, and Trump is having a hard enough time paying his own lawyers, let alone 18 other people’s lawyers.
This would be a tricky situation to navigate, even for a focused and savvy person who’s flush with cash. Trump is the opposite of all that. Even if Rudy is too senile to successfully flip on Trump, other defendants undoubtedly will.
Given that the Fulton County indictment already nails Trump to the wall, even before any of his co-defendants inevitably flip on him, there’s just no path for Trump to avoid conviction and prison.
And in his more lucid moments, Trump has to know that he has no possible way out of this. That’s the best explanation for why he’s spitefully refusing to pay the legal bills of the people he doesn’t like. He knows his life is over anyway, so why bother trying to win?
