Rudy’s Back, and He’s in New Hot Water

One of Donald Trump’s former fixers has turned into a headache that just won’t go away.

Attorneys for Rudy Giuliani’s creditors negotiating his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filed a request on Thursday, demanding that Giuliani reveal his financial secrets, including details on his cable TV earnings, the origin of his legal defense fund (led by his son), and even the nature of his work for Trump.

The far-reaching order is only possible thanks to allegations that Giuliani participated in “discovery misconduct”—that is to say, he failed to spill all the beans the first time around when he was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“Indeed, it was Giuliani’s discovery misconduct in the Freeman Litigation—concerning Giuliani’s defamatory statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers—that led U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell to enter a $148 million default judgment against Giuliani,” reads the motion, obtained by Law & Crime,

“Judge Howell found Giuliani’s misconduct in the Freeman Litigation so egregious that she further ordered immediate dissolution of the automatic thirty-day stay of enforcement of the judgment, allowing the plaintiffs in the Freeman Litigation to take immediate steps to enforce the judgment,” the motion continued, noting that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” effectively lost him the case by default.

The attorneys argue that Giuliani has every reason to continue to lie and hide his assets without a court order, especially as he wrestles with the multimillion-dollar judgment for defaming Freeman and Moss. Meanwhile, Giulani has several other legal woes, including other defamation suits from Hunter Biden, Dominion Voting Systems, and Smartmatic, not to mention the Georgia election-interference case in which Giuliani is one of more than a dozen co-defendants. And on top of all that, there’s still one more lawsuit against Giuliani—one of his former business associates, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault.

Attorneys for Giuliani’s creditors argue that all those threats could pose up to $4 billion in potential damages—an extremely tall order for anyone to contend with, but especially for an unpaid attorney with a reported $10 million in assets.

While pretty much everybody unanimously hated the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, at least one conservative loved it … albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Republicans tapped one of their youngest lawmakers, Alabama Senator Katie Britt, to helm the response. Over the course of 17 choked-up minutes, Britt, holed up in a kitchen somewhere, staccato-skipped her way through heavy topics, including immigration, sex trafficking, the curtailing of human rights (but not women’s), national security, and foreign affairs. Between the awkward pain behind her voice that most viewers read as disingenuous, and the Steven King–esque smile glitched between forced sorrows, Bette Midler rated Britt’s performance a D-, and her policies an F.

But amid the frenzy of criticism, Alabama’s other senator, Tommy Tuberville, attempted to pass along a compliment to the 42-year-old. Still, even he couldn’t see past the image of a little woman tucked away behind her big kitchen table.

“She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” Tuberville told HuffPost, apparently seeing the diminished image as a good thing. “I mean, she did what she was asked to do. I thought she did a good job. And it’s hard when you’ve never done anything like that.”

Tuberville said much the same during a Newsmax appearance on Friday, claiming Britt was the right choice (to be used by the party hell-bent on stripping abortion access) because “she’s a mom” and a “housewife.”

People were, unsurprisingly, aghast at the patronizing message.

“Journalists should just ask Tommy Tuberville about everything; he’s always going to say the dumbest fucking thing possible,” posted Hysteria podcast host Erin Gloria Ryan.

“‘Picked as a housewife.’ Britt is a United States senator. Just like Tuberville is,” wrote Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman.

It’s just another of a dozen such blunders that Tuberville has made in recent memory, highlighting his complete disregard for how the other half of the human race lives. Last month, Tuberville let slip that he couldn’t be bothered to read up on a court decision that stripped in vitro fertilization access within his state, even in the days that followed the ruling.

The centrist group No Labels has decided that it will plow ahead with its so-called “unity ticket” in the presidential election, promising to open Pandora’s box ahead of the November vote.

Nearly 800 No Labels delegates convened virtually on Friday and “voted nearly unanimously” to move forward with their presidential ticket, according to No Labels National Convention Chair Mike Rawlings.

The third-party movement has not named who its presidential and vice presidential nominees are. It will announce its candidate selection process on Wednesday.

The group, which has repeatedly been accused of running a pro-Donald Trump spoiler campaign, wants to offer a bipartisan ticket, with the presidential nominee from one major party and the vice presidential pick from the other.

No Labels has repeatedly positioned itself as a viable alternative to both Trump and Joe Biden, and promised only to run a ticket if the group believed it had a candidate that could actually win. Until now, No Labels’ reportedly preferred candidates have either been generally unpopular or have said no—and in some cases, both.

The group reportedly courted Nikki Haley, Joe Manchin, and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Haley dropped out of the Republican presidential primary earlier this week after a terrible performance. Manchin is one of the most unpopular senators nationwide. Both turned down No Labels before a formal offer could be made.

Hogan, who left office with record-high approval ratings, had weighed a presidential run on a No Labels ticket. But he ultimately decided to run for Maryland senator instead.

The only person who has actually offered to be on a unity ticket is Dean Phillips, who ran a painfully cringey Democratic campaign and who does not appear to have even made it onto No Labels’ radar.

It’s unclear just who No Labels will pick now, but Friday’s decision has definitely revealed one thing: No Labels just wants attention.

Political strategists and even former allies have warned that No Labels is “dangerous.” Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, suggested to The New Republic in May that No Labels CEO Nancy Jacobson and her husband, Mark Penn, “are sort of no longer relevant within the [Democratic] Party.”

“So now they’re going outside the party looking for relevancy,” Messina said.

Historically, third-party candidates perform poorly in presidential elections, typically receiving (at best) a sliver of the electorate. The exceptions (Theodore Roosevelt in 1912; Ross Perot in 1992) prove the rule. But a third-party candidate could peel critical votes away from Biden while Trump cruises to victory.

Another outcome could be that a third candidate prevents anyone from getting 270 electoral votes, meaning that state delegations in the House of Representatives pick the winner. If Republicans maintain their state-delegation majority in the next Congress, it would almost certainly swing for Trump.

So while No Labels says it doesn’t want either Biden or Trump in power, it could be the thing that ensures Trump gets back to the White House.

For a group that bills itself as nonpartisan, No Labels seems to court connections exclusively with right-leaning figures. The organization has accepted donations from a man with close financial ties to Jared Kushner, as well as Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow.

And one of the group’s members is former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who oversaw a contentious, highly partisan, and decidedly far-right four years. He defended voter ID laws, rejected the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, and backed a bill that banned people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity.

Joe Biden may have handed Republicans a massive win when he went off script and referred to an undocumented migrant as an “illegal” during his State of the Union address.

At one point during the speech, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene began heckling Biden about Laken Riley, a college student who was murdered. A Venezuelan national named José Ibarra has been charged for her death.

In a back and forth with Greene, during which Biden repeated into his microphone what the Georgia MAGA Republican was shouting, the president said, “Laken Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right.”

To Biden’s credit, he immediately then said, “But how many thousands of people being killed by legals? To her parents I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself.”

But the damage was already done—and Republicans are reportedly planning to capitalize on it.

Punchbowl News reporter Mica Soellner reported Friday that a Republican aide, speaking anonymously, had told her Biden’s comments would be used in upcoming Republican ads.

Republican lawmakers were particularly delighted that he had used the term “illegal” and said “thousands have been killed,” the aide said. It was “good of him” to acknowledge that, the aide also told Soellner.

For what it’s worth, Biden did not actually say that thousands of Americans have been killed by migrants. But the damage may have already been done.

Republicans have continually accused Biden of allowing an unchecked flow of undocumented migrants into the country. They falsely claim that immigration is the cause of rising crime levels and the deadly fentanyl epidemic.

Biden has responded by trying to get tougher, even cruel, on immigration, including supporting a draconian bill that would have increased security regulations on the border—a measure that the GOP promptly killed, at the behest of Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.

While Biden’s campaign co-chair tried Friday to brush off using the word “illegal” as a “small mistake,” many progressive Democrats are concerned about the damage Biden has wrought with just one word. Soon after he said it, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez both tweeted that “no human being is illegal.”

Many lawmakers reportedly grew visibly upset while sitting in the chamber. Representative Joaquin Castro said the comment was “ugly and uncalled for.”

Castro’s guest to the speech was Priscilla Martinez, the widow of North Texas rancher Aaron Martinez. Martinez was killed by a neighbor who had repeatedly harassed the family over their Latino ethnicity.

“Across Texas, many families can tell similar stories of hate and harassment inspired by the rhetoric of Donald Trump,” Castro tweeted after the State of the Union.

“The rhetoric President Biden used tonight was dangerously close to language from Donald Trump that puts a target on the backs of Latinos everywhere. Democrats shouldn’t be taking our cues from MAGA extremism.”

The Republican National Committee elected a pair of new leaders on Friday and, surprise surprise, they were both hand-selected by Donald Trump. Their introduction to the higher echelons of conservative fundraising stands as a marking point: Trump’s takeover of the party is now complete.

North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley was elected to replace outgoing RNC Chair (and expired Trump favorite) Ronna McDaniel, while the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was selected as co-chair.

Their introduction comes at a critical juncture for Trump, who is struggling to pay for a legal comeuppance that so far includes more than half a billion dollars in judgments and mountains of cash for his four upcoming criminal trials.

Both of the new RNC leaders are 2020 election deniers, and both also echoed Trump’s agenda in their acceptance speeches. Whatley claimed he would hire “real-time monitors” to oversee the upcoming presidential election to thwart interference (a plan that didn’t work out so well for conservatives last time), while the younger Trump “bigly” quoted some of his catchphrases.

Both also pledged that raising money would be a top priority for the caucus, which in January reported a measly $8.7 million in its coffers—nearly a third of what the DNC has on hand. Still, it’s a bit transparent why that might be so important to them. Even though the RNC typically functions to back campaigning officials all the way down the ballot, the co-chair has already sworn the RNC’s cash will help cover the presumed GOP presidential nominee’s legal woes.

“We have no time to waste,” the 41-year-old Trump said on Real America’s Voice earlier this week. “We have to ensure that every single penny of every dollar donated goes to causes that people care about. That’s part of the reason that I think I’m such a great fit for this: There’s no one more loyal to Donald Trump.”

Some members of the party are fearful of the consequences of that decision, including Nikki Haley, who warned upon bowing out of the presidential race that Trump could make the RNC his “personal piggy bank.”

“There will be zero money available for any candidates down ballot. Zero,” Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, told USA Today. “All of it will be funneled into the presidential, and despite what (Trump aide) Chris LaCivita says, I’m pretty sure as much of it as can be will actually be funneled into covering Trump lawsuit costs.”