As Rudy Giuliani worked to keep Donald Trump in power after the 2020 presidential election, he became frustrated with some of his alleged co-conspirators, one of them recently told prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, according to ABC News. At one “really ugly” meeting, Sidney Powell reportedly recalled, Giuliani erupted at her, calling her “a bitch.”
“There was a big shouting match in which Rudy called me every name in the book and I was the worst lawyer he’d ever seen in his life,” Powell said. “There were no circumstances under which he'd work with me on anything.”
The revelation is one of several shared with prosecutors by Powell and another former Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, both of whom recently took plea deals as part of a sprawling racketeering conspiracy case that saw them charged alongside the former president and 16 of his other allies.
ADVERTISEMENT
The subsequent proffer sessions, an opportunity for individuals to tell the government what they know about an investigation, were recorded, with portions of footage obtained by ABC News on Monday.
A spokesman for Guiliani appeared to confirm the details of his rant relayed by Powell—but claimed that it meant he should be cleared of any wrongdoing in the case. “The government's main witness, Sidney Powell, just cleared Rudy Giuliani from any involvement in a conspiracy by making it unequivocally clear that Rudy Giuliani told her that he would never work with her on anything, under any circumstances,” Ted Goodman, a political advisor to Giuliani, told The Daily Beast.
“If Fani Willis had any integrity, she'd dismiss the case against Rudy Giuliani and end this farce of a trial designed solely to keep President Donald Trump out of the White House in 2024,” he added.
But Giuliani’s meltdown was just one of several explosive details shared by Powell and Ellis as they outlined their efforts to flip the election result.
In one Oct. 23 session, Ellis said she approached then-top aide Dan Scavino at the 2020 White House Christmas party to apologize for her lackluster legal challenges, only for Scavino to stop her.
“And he said to me, in a kind of excited tone, ‘Well, we don't care, and we’re not going to leave,” Ellis said. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said ‘Well, the boss,’ meaning President Trump—and everyone understood ‘the boss,’ that’s what we all called him—he said, ‘The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.’”
She continued: “And I said to him, ‘Well, it doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?’ and he said, ‘We don’t care.’”
Ellis said that both she and Scavino had consumed alcohol prior to having the conversation, but that she didn’t believe it had affected either his state or her memory of the episode, ABC News reported. Scavino was not charged in Georgia’s racketeering indictment.
The lawyer’s recollection of the conversation is one of the clearest first-hand examples of conspiracy yet known to have been given to the government as it attempts to prove Trump scrambled to unlawfully reverse the election result.
An attorney for Trump, who has denied wrongdoing in the Fulton County case, called the “purported private conversation” described by Ellis “absolutely meaningless” in a statement to the network.
"The only salient fact to this nonsense line of inquiry is that President Trump left the White House on January 20, 2021, and returned to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Steve Sadow said. “If this is the type of bogus, ridiculous ‘evidence’ DA Willis intends to rely upon, it is one more reason that this political, travesty [sic] of a case must be dismissed.”
Attorneys for Powell and Ellis declined to comment to ABC News, while Scavino and a spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorney did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Ellis, Frank Hogue, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his legal team didn’t leak the video to ABC News as they’d never received a copy of it.
Sources close to the matter told the newspaper that the footage of the proffer sessions were sent to the attorneys for all the remaining defendants in the case as part of the discovery process.
As of Monday, four of the 19 defendants in the Fulton County case had accepted plea deals—Ellis, Powell, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall. Ellis tearfully pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, while Powell pleaded to six misdemeanors.
Both women were able to duck prison sentences, instead being handed multiple years of probation and hefty fines. Under the terms of their agreements, they will also have to write apology letters to the people of Georgia, and testify truthfully against their co-defendants, including Trump.
Prosecutors have reportedly discussed the possibility of deals with up to half a dozen other defendants in the case.
