Rudy Giuliani Is So Broke His Accountants Are Suing Him

Rudy Giuliani, who is already going broke, has been sued again by the accounting firm he hired to get him through his most recent divorce.

Giuliani hired BST & Co. CPAs, which is based in upstate New York, in 2018 to value his business assets during his divorce from Judith Nathan. The firm filed a lawsuit on Monday stating that Giuliani never paid them the $10,000 retainer they agreed on. BST is also seeking $15,000 in legal fees.

BST sent multiple letters to Giuliani over the past five years requesting that he pay up, according to the lawsuit. Giuliani allegedly ignored every single one.

The BST lawsuit is just the latest accusing Giuliani of failing to pay his debts—and he could be on the hook for much, much more money. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.

Giuliani has begun representing himself in court to save some cash. The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” is scrambling to find the money for all his legal fees and even listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg his boss Donald Trump to pay him for working as Trump’s personal attorney. That didn’t work, but Trump did agree to host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani. Entry cost $100,000 a plate, but Giuliani paid Costello just $10,000 in September.

In addition to the racketeering charges in Georgia, Giuliani was ordered to pay more than $130,000 to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The two women served as 2020 election workers in Georgia, and Giuliani falsely accused them for months of fraud. Freeman and Moss are also seeking between $15.5 million and $43 million from Giuliani for alleged defamation.

Meanwhile, Nathan says Giuliani owes her more than $260,000 for her country club memberships, condominium fees, and health care as part of their divorce settlement. Giuliani narrowly avoided jail time over that lawsuit in December. And one of Giuliani’s former associates sued him in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead raping and sexually abusing her over two years.

Elon Musk’s defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is shaping up to be one of the worst business decisions the Tesla founder has made in a while—which is a kind of accomplishment, given his disastrous time at Twitter/X.

In the three days since Musk filed the suit in a U.S. District Court in Texas, legal experts have openly dismissed the legal challenge as an effort to silence the press as well as criticism of Musk’s behavior and acumen. But few have completely shirked the pressure of the suit more than the man on the receiving end of it, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Carusone said that if the lawsuit doesn’t get dismissed, the media watchdog will pursue discovery, the wide-ranging legal process by which evidence and information is shared between prosecution and defense and, by way of being utilized in court, could become public record—or fodder for another Media Matters report.

Carusone said if it comes to that, Media Matters would seek communications regarding whether executives at the social media company “knew internally” about the failed safeguards against placing major brand advertisements back-to-back with white supremacist, pro-Nazi content. Carusone also told the Post that they would be seeking other internal communications regarding Musk’s overt antisemitism on the platform.

Media Matters’s investigation revealed that X, formerly known as Twitter, was placing ads from reputable companies alongside antisemitic, pro-Nazi posts. The ensuing fallout resulted in the hemorrhaging of some of X’s biggest and markedly safe advertisers, such as Apple, IBM, Disney, Lionsgate, and Paramount.

X claimed that the watchdog’s report was an inaccurate representation of their algorithm, arguing that Media Matters had artificially manipulated the report’s results by following just 30 accounts on the platform and refreshing pages at a higher rate than average. Yet Carusone said that wasn’t the point of the investigation—instead, Media Matters proved that X-touted safeguards meant to prevent this from happening either don’t exist or are completely ineffective.

“The point that we’ve been making is that the filters that they say exist are not working the way that they claim,” Carusone told the Post. “Ads can and do run alongside extremist content.”

A temporary cease-fire has gone into effect in Gaza, halting the bombing that has gone on for more than a month. Qatar, which brokered negotiations, announced Wednesday that fighting will cease for four days. Hamas will release 50 hostages, and Israel will release 150 Palestinian prisoners. All released prisoners will be women and minors.

Administration officials are feeling tentatively vindicated over the cease-fire deal, Politico reported Wednesday. The White House is taking it as a sign that Joe Biden’s strategy is working, although one official, speaking anonymously, acknowledged that there’s still “more to do.”

But the White House now has another issue on its hands. “There was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel,” according to the Politico report.

At least 11,000 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Israel’s retaliation to the October 7 Hamas attack. Health officials in Gaza said Tuesday that they are no longer able to get an accurate death toll because of the ongoing Israeli attacks.

The fighting has also killed at least 53 journalists and media workers. But now that fighting will pause, more journalists can enter Gaza and show the full extent of destruction, which the administration has so far seemed content to ignore.

The majority of U.S. citizens back a cease-fire, and support has slowly but steadily grown among Democratic members of Congress. Biden, however, has until now resisted calling for an all-out cease-fire, even telling reporters two weeks ago that there was “no possibility” of one. His resistance to a cease-fire has contributed to a major disconnect between Biden and younger voters.

Even Floridians don’t like Matt Gaetz.

A mere 21 percent of Floridians responded that they approve of the man they elected to congress while another 57 percent said they flat out disapprove of the job Gaetz has done since being elected, according to a Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab survey. That’s a far cry from Gaetz’s results in the 2022 election, when he swept Florida’s 1st Congressional District by a margin of 35 percentage points.

The poll comes on the heels of several weeks of high drama sparked and stoked by the far-right congressman, in which he led a charge to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for daring to coordinate a bipartisan effort to avert a government shutdown. Since then, Gaetz has worked to aggressively divide and strong-arm the caucus alongside a minority cohort of conservative colleagues.

All that time in the limelight drew more attention to some of Gaetz’s other scandals, including the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into allegations of sexual assault and misuse of funds by the congressman.

In February, the Justice Department concluded its own investigation into Gaetz, opting against criminal charges relating to allegations of sex trafficking and sex with a minor, determining that they couldn’t bring a strong enough case to court.

“I am the most investigated man in the United States Congress,” Gaetz said during an October ethics inquiry

Despite all the bad press, Gaetz has trudged ahead, with rumors swirling that the controversial politician may run to unseat Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during the 2026 gubernatorial election. Gaetz has since snubbed the report as “overblown clickbait,” clarifying that his singular focus is getting Donald Trump elected to a second term in the White House.

Failing the longshot bid, Gaetz may be pushed out of politics altogether if he falls short on gathering the numbers to keep his current seat.

“The poll was not great for the congressman, but it’s early and these assessments can change,” Kevin Wagner, a pollster and political science professor at FAU, told Newsweek. “Even people that disapprove can still vote for him if they like the other choices less.”

Ron DeSantis’s team can’t decide how to respond to Nikki Haley’s growing success in the presidential race. The infighting is so bad that some advisers are turning on each other.

Two leaders of DeSantis’s Never Back Down super PAC nearly got into a fistfight during a private meeting last week to discuss how to push back on Haley, NBC News reported Tuesday.

“You have a stick up your ass,” Never Back Down’s top consultant, Jeff Roe, told fellow board member Scott Wagner, according to an anonymous source who was in the room.

“Why don’t you come over here and get it?” demanded Wagner, a longtime DeSantis adviser. He had to be restrained by two other board members.

After the meeting, three close DeSantis allies launched a second super PAC for the Florida governor called Fight Right Inc. The move was partly urged by DeSantis and his wife, Casey, who are growing increasingly frustrated with Never Back Down’s leadership team, NBC reported.

DeSantis was once lauded as the natural successor to Donald Trump, but his campaign has failed to launch. When Haley first announced her candidacy, her support was in the single digits. She was far behind DeSantis, and even further behind front-runner Donald Trump.

But a Monmouth University poll released last week showed that Haley has surpassed DeSantis and now boasts a sizable lead over the Florida governor—even though she still trails the former president by a significant distance. Trump is still comfortably in first place with 46 percent support. But Haley has taken second place with 18 percent. DeSantis, meanwhile, trailed behind at a paltry 7 percent.

DeSantis’s major donors have grown frustrated with his lack of momentum, and one of his biggest former backers is considering switching to team Haley. Billionaire Ken Griffin, a Republican megadonor, told Bloomberg last week that he is “actively contemplating” donating to Haley’s campaign.

Griffin was DeSantis’s biggest donor during the 2022 election, giving $5 million to his gubernatorial reelection campaign. Griffin also repeatedly said he would “love” to see DeSantis run for president in 2024. But Griffin changed his mind in September, withdrawing his support from DeSantis in part due to the governor’s weird feud with Disney.