Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to keep his witness list top secret just blew up in his face.
U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman said on Monday that the court had “neither directed nor permitted” Giuliani’s December 23 witness list “to be filed under seal,” ordering the list to be unsealed for the public docket. The filing includes a retired priest who played a critical role in the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal in New York. It also named Monsignor Alan Placa, Ryan Medrano, Michael Ragusa, and Giuliani’s rumored girlfriend Maria Ryan, according to Law & Crime.
Giuliani is headed to trial next month to determine whether he must hand over his multimillion-dollar Florida condominium to a pair of 2020 Georgia election workers he repeatedly defamed while pushing Donald Trump’s lie about a stolen election. Giuliani owes the mother-daughter duo, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, some $150 million in damages, but he’s still working to worm his way out of the payments.
Earlier this year, Giuliani claimed that the condo was his permanent residence, granting it homestead protection from debt collection proceedings under state law. But his legal opposition has argued that Giuliani was less than forthcoming during the discovery process, suggesting that the disgraced politico wasn’t being honest about how he utilizes the property.
In November, the former gang-busting federal prosecutor tried on a new legal defense to keep his stuff, arguing in a Manhattan courthouse that he couldn’t possibly hand over his assets to Freeman and Moss because he simply didn’t know where they were. Some of those assets include his Manhattan penthouse, a famously immovable object, as well as his Mercedes convertible, which he was seen driving in Florida on Election Day. In response, Judge Liman said that the idea that neither Giuliani nor anyone else in the world has knowledge about the location of his assets was “farcical.”
The ex–New York mayor has been besieged with legal woes since he opted to join the MAGA movement.
Over the past couple of years, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (he refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”
Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.
But wait, there’s more: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case (in limbo but not yet dead) and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. In October, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing Giuliani made in the case, ruling that the ex–Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit. And Giuliani’s own legal representation in the Freeman and Moss case ditched him in November, declaring in a motion in federal court that they had reached a “fundamental disagreement” with Giuliani.
