Rudy Giuliani creates more problems for himself with butt dial to reporter

Current foreign lobbyist and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, accidentally left several minutes worth of a private conversation about his foreign dealings and conspiracy theories on the voicemail of an NBC News reporter earlier this month. Thanks to his two apparent butt dials, the nation now knows that he was seeking to get money from a contact who was in Turkey.

According to the report, published on Friday, Giuliani is heard talking with an unidentified associate.

“Let’s get back to business,” Giuliani tells the other person. “I gotta get you to get on Bahrain.”

Giuliani then brings up someone named “Robert.”

“He’s in Turkey,” Giuliani’s associate responded.

“The problem is we need some money,” Giuliani then explained. After nine seconds of silence, he continued, “We need a few hundred thousand.”

It is not clear what they were talking about or who Robert was, though the report speculates that it could be Robert Mangas, a registered agent for the Turkish government and an employee at Giuliani’s former firm Greenberg Traurig LLP. It notes that Mangas has been named in court documents related to an Iranian money laundering scheme.

Giuliani, of course, is at the center of Trump’s Ukraine scandal. Though he holds no public position, he has apparently been coordinating much of the administration’s foreign policy in Ukraine, serving as something of a shadow secretary of state. Congress is currently investigating Trump’s efforts to get the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on his political opponents.

Giuliani is also reportedly under a federal investigation into whether he broke lobbying laws in his own dealings in Ukraine. Several of his associates are already under indictment too, though Giuliani has denied any wrongdoing.

A federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that recipients of butt and pocket dial phone calls are legally free to record what they hear.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.