Late one night, on Oct. 16, Rudy Giuliani made a phone call to an NBC reporter. The call came in at 11:07 p.m. and went to voicemail. The reporter was asleep.
The message was exactly three minutes long and the words coming out of Giuliani’s mouth were not directed at the reporter, rather speaking to someone else in the same room.
It was a butt dial.
According to NBC News, Giuliani says at the start of the recording,
“You know, Charles would have a hard time with a fraud case ‘cause he didn’t do any due diligence.”
It wasn’t clear who Charles is, or who may have been implicated in a fraud. In fact, much of the message’s first minute is difficult to comprehend, in part because the voice of the other man in the conversation is muffled and barely intelligible.
But then, Giuliani says something that’s crystal clear.
“Let’s get back to business.”
He goes on.
“I gotta get you to get on Bahrain.”
Giuliani is well-connected in the kingdom of Bahrain.
Giuliani can be heard telling the man that he’s
“got to call Robert again tomorrow.”
“Is Robert around?” Giuliani asks.
“He’s in Turkey,” the man responds.
Giuliani replies instantly. “The problem is we need some money.”
The two men then go silent. Nine seconds pass. No word is spoken. Then Giuliani chimes in again.
“We need a few hundred thousand,” he says.
It’s not clear what the two men were talking about, but Giuliani is known to have worked closely with a Robert who has ties to Turkey.
His name is Robert Mangas, and he’s a lawyer at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, as well as a registered agent of the Turkish government. Giuliani himself was employed by Greenberg Traurig until about May 2018.
This was not the first time.
By the time of that call, it was already clear that Giuliani butt dials don’t only happen after 11 p.m. The late-night Giuliani butt dial came 18 days after a mid-afternoon Giuliani butt dial.
In the message, Giuliani is heard talking to at least one other person. The conversation appears to pick up almost exactly where Giuliani’s phone call with the reporter left off the day before, with Giuliani insisting he was the target of attacks because he was making public accusations about a powerful Democratic politician.
“I expected it would happen,” Giuliani says at the start of the recording.
“The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you.”
“You got the truth on your side,” an unidentified man says.
“It’s very powerful,” Giuliani replies.
Giuliani spends the entire three minutes railing against the Bidens. He can be heard recycling many of the unfounded allegations he has been making on cable news and in interviews with print reporters.
Among the claims:
- that Biden intervened to stop an investigation of a Ukrainian gas company because his son Hunter sat on the board
- Hunter Biden traded on his father’s position as vice president to earn $1.5 billion from Chinese investors.
Giuliani says,
“There’s plenty more to come out. He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia.
It’s a sad situation. You know how they get? Biden has been been trading in on his public office since he was a senator.”
“When he became vice president, the kid decided to go around the world and say, ‘Hire me because I’m Joe Biden’s son.’ And most people wouldn’t hire him because he had a drug problem.”
In the recording, Giuliani doesn’t mention anything about HIS activities in Ukraine, but he does make (unfounded) claims about Hunter Biden’s overseas work. Giuliani says,
“His son altogether made somewhere between 5 and 8 million. A 3 million transaction was laundered, which is illegal.”
Last week, Hunter Biden said in an ABC News interview that he will step down from the board of the Chinese investment company that he joined in October 2017.
Giuliani then says, before apparently turning to the president’s now-infamous call with the Ukrainian president,
“They don’t want to investigate because he’s protected, so we gotta force them to do it.
And the Ukraine, they’re investigating him and they blocked it twice. So what the president was [unintelligible word], ‘You can’t keep doing this. You have to investigate this.’ And they say it will affect the 2020 election.”
“No it….”
The recording cuts off before he can finish the thought.
Calls to his phone Thursday from NBC got a recorded message saying his mailbox was full.
Guess they’ll have to wait for his butt to respond.
(Photo, screen grab; via NBC News)
