President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani appears to have accidentally called an NBC News reporter by mistake, in what is known as “butt-dialing.”
“The problem is we need some money,” Giuliani says in the three-minute recording about overseas dealings. “We need a few hundred thousand.”
NBC News’ Rich Schapiro was the recipient of the accidental call. He writes he had been speaking to the former NYC mayor earlier in the evening of October 16 and the call went into his voicemail, as he was sleeping. Schapiro also reports, “it wasn’t the first time it had happened.”
It is not known to who Giuliani was speaking, nor specifically what deals he was working on. More importantly, perhaps, it is not known in what capacity Giuliani was working.
A former federal prosecutor, Giuliani opened a security consulting firm after leaving office as New York City’s mayor. He’s also President Trump’s attorney, he admits he has acted as a spokesperson for an Iranian group that once was on the U.S. terror watchlist, and he has been conducting shadow government foreign policy on Trump’s behalf.
And those are just the roles we know about.
Giuliani also “told the Daily Beast his firm had signed a deal with Bahrain to advise its police force on counter-terrorism measures. But the Bahrain News Agency account of the meeting suggested Giuliani was viewed more like an ambassador than a security consultant. ‘HM the King praised the longstanding Bahraini-U.S. relations, noting keenness of the two countries to constantly develop them,’ it said.”
Right before Giuliani says, “The problem is we need some money,” he asks for a man he calls “Robert.” It is not known who that is.
The other time Giuliani butt-dialed Schapiro was last month, on September 28.
Giuliani spends the entire three minutes railing against the Bidens. He can be heard recycling many of the unfounded allegations he has been making on cable news and in interviews with print reporters.
Among the claims: that then-Vice President Biden intervened to stop an investigation of a Ukrainian gas company because Hunter sat on the board, and that Hunter traded on his father’s position as vice president to earn $1.5 billion from Chinese investors.
“There’s plenty more to come out,” Giuliani says. “He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia.”
“It’s a sad situation,” he adds. “You know how they get? Biden has been been trading in on his public office since he was a senator.”
You can listen to the recording and read the full report here.