‘They Didn’t Call Me Back’: Rudy Giuliani Reportedly Gets Cold Shoulder from Trump’s White House, DOJ as FBI Shakeup Continues to Inflame MAGA
Rudy Giuliani — once Donald Trump’s fiercely loyal attorney, now bankrupt and disbarred in the fallout of the 2020 election scandal — appears to have lost his footing with the second-term president.
The new administration has reportedly shut him out, prompting Giuliani to complain on a recent podcast that no one at the White House or Justice Department will return his phone calls.
“I tried to reach them today, they didn’t call me back,” Giuliani said last Friday on the conservative podcast “Bolling!” with former Fox News analyst Eric Bolling.
Giuliani claimed he’d been calling FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi to complain about the Justice Department and FBI promoting officials involved in the Jan. 6 investigation. However, so far, Giuliani has only managed to reach a voicemailbox.
Patel’s decision to elevate Steven Jensen — a key player in the FBI’s hardline crackdown on Jan. 6 defendants — to lead the bureau’s Washington, D.C., field office has reignited anger across Trump’s base. Even Rudy Giuliani, who once hailed Patel as one of Trump’s “most consequential picks” and famously embraced Bondi on stage in 2018, is now publicly airing his frustrations, marking a sharp shift in tone from a onetime Trump loyalist.
“I’m very upset now because Kash Patel and Pam Bondi have taken one of the people that was running the unit going after Catholics in the Justice Department, and also going after January 6 people, and put them in charge of the Washington office of the FBI,” Giuliani told Bolling, referring to Jensen without naming him.
During the interview, the 80-year-old Giuliani went on to describe the FBI as “crooked” and added that Patel’s explanation “better be damn good” whenever they eventually discuss the matter — making it sound like Patel would have to ultimately answer to him.
Jensen’s sudden promotion at the FBI last week was rich with irony, given his central role in bringing criminal charges against hundreds of Trump’s most ardent supporters for raiding the U.S. Capitol in early 2021. But when Trump returned to office for his second term in January, he issued a sweeping pardon that wiped out the convictions and set nearly all of them free.
For Jensen to still be in the picture was an unforgivable transgression to the MAGA faithful.
In his chat with Bolling, Giuliani still praised Trump’s sweeping purge of prosecutors tied to the roughly 1,600 criminal cases from the Jan. 6 case, saying he’d been “over-the-top enthusiastic” about the news.
The disgraced former mayor then lashed out at what he called overzealous efforts by the Biden Justice Department to prosecute the Jan. 6 rioters as well as Trump allies like himself who were accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Giuliani, who delivered a fiery speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally just before the Capitol was stormed, was later indicted in Georgia for his role in the alleged racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. He remains a defendant after pleading innocent but has not yet stood trial.
Giuliani was also identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump over his alleged efforts to subvert the national election and incite the Jan. 6 riot — a case that has since been dismissed due to Trump’s election in 2024.
“I get a lot of sympathy and a lot of support, and there’s no question I was beaten up pretty bad,” Giuliani told Bolling. “But my friends, Steve [Bannon] and Peter Navarro, [got] much worse [by] being put in jail.”
Bolling was himself ousted from Fox News amid a sexual harassment scandal, lost his primetime slot at Newsmax, and has since reinvented himself as a MAGA-aligned podcaster.
In December 2023, Giuliani was ordered by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell to pay $148 million in damages to a pair of Georgia election workers he defamed. After the ruling, which came after a default judgment against him, Giuliani and one of his lawyers met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to plead with his former boss to help pay his legal bills. However, there has never been any indication that Trump pitched in.
That same month, Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York, revealing liabilities between $100 million and $500 million and assets between $1 million and $10 million. However, the case was dismissed last year by a federal judge due to Giuliani’s lack of transparency and failure to comply with court orders. This set the stage for creditors to pursue collections against his assets.
Giuliani was facing outstanding debts exceeding $1 million owed to defense attorneys who assisted him in various cases, leading to several lawsuits to demand payment. Giuliani also neglected to settle several years of unpaid phone bills that amounted to nearly $60,000 in debt, and it’s unlikely the Georgia election workers have collected the full amount of the $148 million verdict.
There have been a few instances when Giuliani received assistance from Republican donors to help fund his legal battles, including a separate defamation case involving the ballot technology company Smartmatic, which sued Giuliani and other Republican operatives for making false claims about its voting systems that were used during the 2020 election.