Bruce Castor dumps Rudy Giuliani as a client: ‘He’s not cooperating, and he’s not paying me’

Bruce Castor, the former Montgomery County district attorney and county commissioner who represented former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, filed an eight-page motion in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court on Tuesday, asking to no longer represent former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a civil suit.

Castor summed up his gripe about Giuliani to Clout more succinctly: “He’s not cooperating, and he’s not paying me.”

James Savage, a Delaware County voting-machine supervisor, sued Trump, his 2020 presidential campaign, Giuliani, and two local Republican poll watchers in November 2021, saying their unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election made him a target of hatred, ridicule, and physical threats.

Castor initially agreed to serve as Giuliani’s local lawyer but a lawyer from Texas was supposed to take over from there. That didn’t happen, and Castor, according to his motion, reluctantly tried to defend Giuliani.

The motion, which meticulously recounts Castor’s four decades in law and politics, dabbles in a bit of intrigue in two sections.

First, Castor says one of Trump’s other defense lawyers from the 2021 impeachment — who is not identified in the motion — suggested Trump would consider it “a favor” if he represented Giuliani in the case. Second, Castor wrote that a lawyer he knows — also unidentified in the motion — claimed to be “coordinating funding” to pay for Giuliani’s representation.

The money never came, and Giuliani did not cooperate in producing documents and scheduling depositions, even after Castor set a deadline and “unequivocally threatened” to quit the case, according to the motion.

Giuliani, whose license to practice law was suspended in New York in June 2021 for lies he told in Pennsylvania about the 2020 election, said through a spokesperson that Castor was fully paid for his work. .

The spokesperson, Ted Goodman, also accused Castor of having “zero respect” for the concept of attorney-client privilege.

“We understand he lacks the courage to stick with what he perceives as an unpopular cause among the cocktail party crowd, but it’s very disappointing to see him take these cheap shots at the mayor simply because he thinks the mayor is an easy target and because he wants to suck up to the anti-Trump legal community,” Goodman said in a statement.

Giuliani also faces the prospect of having his law license revoked in Washington, D.C., where the Office of Disciplinary Counsel accused him in December of violating rules governing attorney conduct by using “his law license to undermine the legitimacy of a presidential election.”

That case, which Giuliani called “an outrage” at the time, is still under review.

Giuliani was also sued this week by a former employee who alleged that he coerced her into sexual acts and owes her $2 million in unpaid wages. A lawyer for Giuliani told The Associated Press that he “vehemently” denied those claims.

A version of this article was included in this week’s Clout, a weekly roundup providing often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.