Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani raises less than $1 million in legal defense fund

Rudy Giuliani was able to raise less than $1 million from just 13 donors, among them his friends and a group of former President Donald Trump’s allies, to help pay off his legal fees as he faces a $146 million defamation judgment and a criminal prosecution, a new Federal Election Commission filing reviewed by CNBC shows.

Giuliani’s political action committee raised just over $727,000 from August through December, according to the FEC filing Thursday. His son Andrew Giuliani, who is helping run the PAC, did not return a request for comment on the haul.

The single biggest donation came from a Corona del Mar, California, woman named Caryn Borland, who donated $300,000, more than 40% of the total donations to Giuliani, the filing shows.

Borland, who also is known as Caryn Hildenbrand, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last year, the Caryn L Hildenbrand Living Trust donated $1 million to a legal defense fund for Trump, which also was the single largest donation to that fund, which had raised $1.6 million, according to a disclosure filed to the Internal Revenue Service.

Hildenbrand and her husband Michael, who donated more than $1 million in campaign-related contributions to Trump’ 2020 reelection bid, have shared memes and social media posts about the QAnon conspiracy theory according to The New York Times. The newspaper last month also reported that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, had once canceled a fundraiser with the couple because of their QAnon posts.

Though the Giuliani PAC misspells Caryn Borland’s first name on their filing as “Garyn,” the address matches that of the mailing address listed on the IRS filing for the donation made to Trump’s defense fund.

His PAC has spent over $500,000 on his legal fees so far and had $180,000 on hand entering 2024.

The attorney is facing a litany of legal and financial struggles as a result of his work for Trump trying to reverse Trump’s loss in the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

In August, Giuliani,…