Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on Friday responded to reports that allies of Rudy Giuliani are pressing the ex-president’s team to help pay for his growing legal bills, with Cohen predicting that Trump won’t pay Giuliani “two cents.”
Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” who in recent years has become one of his most vocal critics, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid during an interview Friday that Giuliani shouldn’t expect any financial support from the former president.
“He’s going to get stiffed. All right?” Cohen said, adding that Trump “does not pay legal bills.”
“Nor does he learn from his previous mistakes, which is the same exact thing that he did to me,” Trump’s former lawyer added. “He doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself.”
The New York Times first reported this week that Giuliani’s advisers were in talks with Trump’s team and attempting to get it to use some of the funds in its $250 million campaign bank account to reimburse the attorney for his work in the multistate legal effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The requests to Trump’s team reportedly increased after FBI agents executed a search warrant on Giuliani’s apartment and office and obtained electronic devices as part of a probe into the embattled attorney’s dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs.
Reid on Friday asked Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018, if he was “surprised” that Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, “didn’t try to get paid up front.”
“He thought Donald Trump was going to pay him $140,000 a day. He has a better chance of sling-shooting himself to the moon,” Cohen responded while laughing.
“It’s impossible. Donald Trump wouldn’t pay him two cents,” he continued. “His feeling is, it is an honor and a privilege to go to prison for him, to do his dirty work.”
Cohen, who later in the interview called Giuliani “dopey,” said he wanted to “welcome” the fellow ex-personal attorney of Trump to the “under-the-bus club.”
Cohen in 2018 pleaded guilty in two separate cases, one brought by former special counsel Robert Mueller for allegations of lying to Congress and the other brought by New York prosecutors for allegations of tax and bank fraud.
Last week, the former Trump lawyer commented during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber” that Giuliani knows “he’s in big trouble,” adding that the raid of his apartment was a sign of the “chickens coming home to roost.”
“He knows that it’s not going to end well,” Cohen said at the time. “So, unlike what happened with me, unlike, you know, [Paul] Manafort, who took it to trial, or Roger Stone, who went to trial, I didn’t. I pled guilty, and I got 36 months.”
He went on to argue that Giuliani was “only right now imagining what does he have to do in order to stay out of prison because Rudy Giuliani has no interest in being in prison during the golden years of his life. That I can assure you.”