Rudy's little circle of grifters and cultists

At the end of September, a journalist friend gave me Rudy Giuliani’s phone number. When I called, he picked up on the second ring and promptly divulged previously unreported details about his collaboration with State Department officials on a quid pro quo this summer. Those conversations helped inform a report I filed with BuzzFeed, which was corroborated the next day in testimony and text messages from former Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker.

Giuliani forgot my name almost immediately, but we kept in touch. Truth is, I enjoy speaking with him. Two days after publication, on the evening he attended a Yankees playoff game with Alan Dershowitz, Giuliani — President Donald Trump’s 75-year-old informal cybersecurity adviser — accidentally texted me what appeared to be a password: Eight characters, beginning with the name of a networking company and including a capital letter, a special character, and a number. Multiple IT experts confirmed it could be nothing else, and, given the iPhone’s messaging setup, impossible to type with your butt or in any other unwitting way.

After an internal ethical debate, I alerted him. He replied, “Oh, that was just a butt dial,” but thanked me, punctuated with a smiley-face emoji.

Giuliani runs a global cybersecurity firm, but his technological gaffes have become legendary. After texting me the password, an NBC report revealed that around the same time he’d butt-dialed a journalist and accidentally left a voicemail documenting his discussion with an associate about how to get cash. “You know,” Giuliani says at the beginning of the recording, “Charles would have a hard time with a fraud case ’cause he didn't do any due diligence.”

At the time it was unclear who “Charles” was, but I might have found him. And I found him, through all things, in Giuliani’s attempt to straighten up his media act.