Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and personal attorney for Donald Trump, was paid $300,000 for pitching investors on an anti-Biden film that was never made, a lawsuit filed earlier this month by the investors, who are seeking their money back, claims.
In 2019, the two farmers — California fruit-and-nut farming barons and brothers Baldev and Kewel Munger — invested $1 million into a documentary they were told would expose President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, holding corrupt business dealings in Ukraine ahead of the 2020 election, Insider reports. According to the suit, Tim Yale, a political operative and defendant in the suit, introduced the two to Giuliani who, by that time, was already working to dig up dirt on the Bidens. The complaint alleges that Giuliani, alongside Yale and cannabis investor George Dickson III, who is also listed as a defendant, pitched the farmers on a documentary that would be "a possible 'kill shot' to Biden's presidential campaign."
The trio "all represented that they possessed key documents that were 'smoking guns' that would establish that the Ukrainian government engaged in a quid pro quo exchange with the Biden family to benefit Burisma," the suit continues, referencing the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden to sit on its board. Republicans have long worked to prove the connection between Hunter Biden's work on the board and then-vice President Biden's effort to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the company, but haven't brought forth any tangible evidence of the alleged corruption.
The information the proposed film would reveal would incriminate the Bidens, secure a second term for former president Trump, and yield a hefty payoff for the Mungers. "Yale and Dickson represented that this documentary movie was going to be bigger and more profitable than Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' which earned $200 million at the box office," the brothers, who hold part ownership of the world's largest producer of blueberries and had previously given tens of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates, wrote in the suit. Promissory notes attached to the complaint as exhibits show that the Mungers, through one of several multinational LLCs they control, gave Yale and Dickson $1 million in four installments of $250,000 between April 2020 and August 2020. Out of that sum, $300,000 went to Giuliani himself, while the rest "was stolen by Dickson and Yale for their own personal use," the lawsuit alleges.
The film was never made or released, and since Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, the Munger's investment disappeared. After conducting interviews with a range of Ukrainian officials, Giuliani failed to produce the supposed "smoking gun" and instead set his sights on the emails and data obtained from Hunter Biden's laptop.
