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(Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty)
Donald Trump tried to pay his lawyer with a horse. That’s it, that’s the tweet.
The Guardian got its hands on an advance copy of “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice,” by New York Times reporter David Enrich, which contains a hilarious anecdote of the famously tightfisted client trying to settle accounts by giving his lawyer the deed to a race horse.
Describing “a lawyer at a white-shoe firm” who worked for Trump in the 1990s, Enrich writes: “The bill came to about $2m and Trump refused to pay.
“After a while, the lawyer lost patience, and he showed up, unannounced, at Trump Tower. Someone sent him up to Trump’s office. Trump was initially pleased to see him – he didn’t betray any sense of sheepishness – but the lawyer was steaming.
“‘I’m incredibly disappointed,’ he scolded Trump. ‘There’s no reason you haven’t paid us.’
“Trump made some apologetic noises. Then he said: ‘I’m not going to pay your bill. I’m going to give you something more valuable.’ What on earth is he talking about? the lawyer wondered. ‘I have a stallion,’ Trump continued. ‘It’s worth $5m.’ Trump rummaged around in a filing cabinet and pulled out what he said was a deed to a horse. He handed it to the lawyer.”
Enrich describes the lawyer’s stunned and angry response, in which he threatened to sue.
Trump, Enrich writes, “eventually coughed up at least a portion of what he owed”.
As it is written, so shall it be.
Even now that Trump has infinity GriftBux through the Republican National Committee and various PACs to pay his attorneys, sometimes he still stiffs his lawyers just for the hell of it. As in the case of Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump refused to pay more or less on principal. The Guardian outlines another telling episode from an upcoming book on America’s Erstwhile Mayor, Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, by author Andrew Kirtzman.
Kirtzman writes that Giuliani’s girlfriend/assistant Maria Ryan wrote a letter to Trump in January of 2021 requesting $2.5 million for “defending you during the Russia hoax investigation and then the impeachment,” a “general pardon,” and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of the above was forthcoming, with Trump saying that Giuliani would get “paid on the come,” a casino reference to craps indicating that the lawyer was SOL unless he managed somehow to keep Trump in office for a second term.
And so it is hardly surprising that the roll call of Trump’s many lawyers published this morning in Politico is mostly populated by weirdos who spend their time hanging out on Newsmax and Fox vomiting out nonsensical untruths about federal law and procedure. But when you’ve been able to stack the bench with Federalist Society loyalists, sometimes nonsensical word vomit is good enough to get you what you want anyway.
Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book says [Guardian]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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