FUNNY
Giuliani butt-dials NBC reporter, heard discussing need for cash and trashing Bidens
Late in the evening on Oct. 16, Rudy Giuliani made a phone call to this reporter.
The fact that Giuliani was reaching out wasn’t remarkable. He and the reporter had spoken earlier that night for a story about his ties to
a fringe Iranian opposition group.
But this call, it would soon become clear, wasn’t a typical case of a source following up with a reporter.
The call came in at 11:07 p.m. and went to voicemail; the reporter was asleep.
The next morning, a message exactly three minutes long was sitting in his voicemail. In the recording, the words tumbling out of Giuliani’s mouth were not directed at the reporter. He was speaking to someone else, someone in the same room.
Giuliani can be heard discussing overseas dealings and lamenting the need for cash, though it's difficult to discern the full context of the conversation.
The call appeared to be one of the most unfortunate of faux pas: what is known, in casual parlance, as a butt dial.
And it wasn’t the first time it had happened.
“You know,” Giuliani says at the start of the recording. “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.
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.
Last December, he visited the Persian Gulf nation and had a one-on-one meeting with King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa in the royal palace. “King receives high-level U.S. delegation,” read the headline of the state-run
Bahrain News Agency blurb about the visit.
Giuliani runs a security consulting company, but it’s not clear why he would have a meeting with Bahrain’s king. Was he acting in his capacity as a consultant? As Trump’s lawyer? Or as an international fixer running
a shadow foreign policy for the president?
In May, Giuliani
told the Daily Beast his firm had signed a deal with Bahrain to advise its police ******* on counter-terrorism measures. But the Bahrain News Agency account of the meeting suggested Giuliani was viewed more like an ambassador than a security consultant. “HM the King praised the longstanding Bahraini-U.S. relations, noting keenness of the two countries to constantly develop them,” it said.
The voicemail yielded no details about the meeting. But 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 unclear 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.
Mangas’s name appears in court documents related to the case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader charged in the U.S. with laundering Iranian money in a scheme to evade American sanctions.
Giuliani was brought on to assist Zarrab in 2017. He traveled to Turkey with his former law partner Michael Mukasey and attempted to strike a deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to secure the release of their jailed client,
alarming the federal prosecutor leading the case.
Giuliani and Mangas were both employed by Greenberg Traurig at the time. The firm and Mangas had registered with the Justice Department to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of Turkey, according to an affidavit from Mangas.
Mangas did not return a request for comment.
Giuliani’s conversation partner can be heard responding to the $20,000 comment. But it’s possible to make out only the beginning of his answer, and even that is somewhat garbled.
“I’d say even if Bahrain could get, I’m not sure how good [unintelligible words] with his people,” the man says.
“Yeah, okay,” Giuliani says.
“You want options? I got options,” the man says.
“Yeah give me options,” Giuliani replies.
The exchange took place at the 2:20 mark in the voicemail message. The other man does most of the talking in the remaining 40 seconds, and it’s difficult to piece together what he says.
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.
The first one happened when the NBC News reporter was at a fifth-birthday party for an extended family member in central New Jersey