Photo : Drew Angerer ( Getty )

Maybe Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani needs to learn how to lock his phone.




According to NBC News, Giuliani butt-dialed one of its reporters on at least two occasions , allowing the writer to overhear Trump’s hype man mouthpiece discussing how much he needs cold, hard cash and bad-mouthing the Bidens (Joe and his son, Hunter) .

NBC reporter Rich Schapiro explains he could only make out some of what Giuliani shared in an inadvertent voicemail he left on Schapiro’s phone late the night of Oct. 16.


But what could be clearly discerned from the 3-minute recording i s Giuliani telling an unidentified man on the call, “we need some money. ” A s NBC reports:

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 who “Robert” is or what exactly Giuliani and the other man are discussing, but NBC reports that Giuliani has ties to a lawyer named Robert Mangus who did work in Turkey for a firm both he and Giuliani worked for.

Mangus did not return a call for comment, NBC reports.

Then, in a second, earlier butt-dial in September to the same reporter, Giuliani can be heard bad-mouthing former Vice President and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.


In that call, Giuliani, again speaking with an unidentified man, can be heard spouting what has been debunked in various media reports as conspiracy theories about the Bidens.

P er NBC:

“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, and that Hunter Biden traded on his father’s position as vice president to earn $1.5 billion from Chinese investors.


Butt-dialed calls always tend to lead to at least some confusion, if not downright awkwardness, for both the butt-dialer and the butt-dialee.

But as The Week points out, Giuliani’s inadvertent dials to NBC are among at least five instances of his calls going astray, name-checking butt-dials to reporters at the Washington Post, Politico and Axios.