Left: Mike Lindell as seen in an ad on The Rudy Giuliani Show (Rudolph W. Giuliani/YouTube). Right: Giuliani interviewed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the RNC on July 16 (Ted Goodman).
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell wrote a letter to a U.S. bankruptcy judge to “clarify,” as Rudy Giuliani’s attorney put it Tuesday, that the former NYC mayor wasn’t the one who paid for “first-class airfare” to the Republican National Convention and hotel lodgings. Rather, it was Lindell’s streaming app and website FrankSpeech, which recently hired Giuliani to host a show, that footed the bill.
Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case remains in something of a zombified state after U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane decided the matter should be dismissed and yet, due to a lack of detail on how much cash is in the debtor’s bank accounts and due to lingering disagreements among the parties, the jurist has not been able to issue an order spelling out how the substantial fees of a forensic investigator hired by creditors will be paid and ultimately effectuating the dismissal.
The fight between Giuliani’s lawyers and an attorney for defamed Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman spiraled in back-and-forth letters late last week, as the latter party claimed that “America’s Mayor” spent cash on “first class” plane tickets to attend the RNC in Milwaukee.
Freeman lawyer Rachel Strickland said days earlier in court that a Giuliani bank statement showed his checking account had dropped from $60,000 to about half as much was in there a week earlier, claiming that there were Amazon and Apple expenses, expenses associated with Giuliani’s RNC appearance, and payments to maintain the debtor’s NYC and Florida properties during that time.
Global Data Risk, the forensic investigator hired by the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, has racked up an estimated $350,000 in professional fees over the course of the bankruptcy, fees that attorneys for creditors Dominion Voting Systems, Giuliani sexual assault accuser Noelle Dunphy, and Freeman’s daughter Shaye Moss, proposed should be paid in part by draining Giuliani’s checking and savings accounts and then having the difference paid through the sale of Giuliani’s Upper East Side multi-million dollar apartment.
But when Strickland told the judge about the bank statement after an hour long break from the status conference, she indicated that Giuliani was well on his way to draining his own accounts, in part through RNC travel that made it difficult for Giuliani’s own lawyers to confirm then and there how much cash (“liquid assets”) was in the bank accounts.
That clearly set the judge off.
“There are a lot of bad things that can happen,” Lane told Giuliani attorneys Gary Fischoff and Heath Berger, before intentionally rephrasing his words. “There are a lot of things that can happen that your client does not want to happen.”
The judge then set a “high noon” deadline for last Thursday to provide an update on the funds at issue.
When that deadline came, Berger claimed there were “extensive negotiations” between the parties but that a “final resolution has not been reached at this point.”
That set Strickland off, as she pushed back on the “extensive negotiations” characterization and cited to a CNN article reporting that Giuliani and an assistant flew first-class to Milwaukee despite telling the judge of “limited access to cash.”
“In light of the Debtor’s claims of limited access to cash and new reports of the Debtor, his assistant, and his companion flying first class this week, the Committee and the Freeman Plaintiffs requested additional disclosure from the Debtor regarding his recent expenditures,” Strickland said. “The Debtor has not provided the requested information.”
Giuliani’s attorneys briefly replied by claiming that Strickland and the Committee were, in fact, “provided Ms. Strickland and member (sic) of this Committee bank statements as originally requested[.]”
The docket was mostly quiet thereafter — until now.
On Tuesday, Fischoff wrote a letter responding to the “unsubstantiated rumor” about Giuliani paying for first-class airfare.
“To clarify the record, attached is a letter from Frank Speech representing that the paid for the Debtor’s first class tickets and his lodging to attend the Republican National Convention,” the lawyer said, adding in the note from Lindell.
“This representation letter is provided to confirm FrankSpeech has paid Rudolph Giuliani’s first-class airfare and hotel for the RNC form (sic) July 14th-July 20th, 2024,” Lindell said, signing the letter dated Monday in his capacity as president of FrankSpeech. “These expenses were covered entirely by FrankSpeech.”
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