The scene in the Florida parking lot shocked even those who planned it.

Hundreds of golf carts filed in Saturday, decked out in American flags; “Harris for President” posters; and red, white and blue streamers. Their drivers cheered, honked their horns and rode around town for hours, supporting Vice President Harris’s presidential bid for a parade in The Villages, a Florida retirement community that has been a stronghold for former president Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement for nearly a decade.

And it still is. The latest voter registration numbers for Sumter County, where The Villages is primarily located, show Democrats outnumbered three to one. In the 2020 election, Trump took 68 percent of the county’s votes.

But on Saturday, the Trump-loving town saw a turnout for a Harris rally that shocked organizers and paradegoers alike. It probably marked the largest golf cart caravan for a Democratic candidate in nearly a decade, said Dennis Foley, vice president of the Villages Democratic Club, which helped throw the event. The club expected to see around 250 people, but the attendance was at least double that. The unexpected show of support drew millions of views online.

President Biden’s exit from the race and swift endorsement of Harris stoked a fire in the community, where Democrats are often tight-lipped about their affiliation.

“There’s enthusiasm for Kamala and also a sense of significance to this election and that there’s a lot at stake,” Foley said. “So the combination, I think, has boosted everyone that was a little bit depressed.”

The rally was followed by a quick counter from Trump supporters in The Villages.

On Sunday, the Villages MAGA Club — which markets itself as a group for residents who “support the America first agenda to protect and preserve our great nation” — announced it would host a golf cart caravan to support the Trump-Vance ticket.

The club said in a Facebook post on Monday that the local sheriff’s office would attend the rally, writing: “We will kick out anyone who causes trouble. It’s what we expect from the democrats.”

H. Gary Morse, a Republican Party megadonor, developed The Villages into a routine stop for GOP political figures, including Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis. After Florida flipped from a battleground to a Republican bastion, The Villages made national headlines for contentious rallies in support of the then-president.

Going into the 2024 presidential race, the Republican side of the aisle remains “very firm” in The Villages, Foley said.

“There’s nothing we can say or do that will convince them,” he said.

The shift has been within the community’s Democrats, who are starting to make an appearance larger and louder than those of the past two election cycles, when the energy of the GOP faithful dominated the town.

“I think it’s just such a stronghold here that people don’t come out to speak up and say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m voting for someone other than Trump.’ And so this was an opportunity,” said resident Diane Ruggiero.

Ruggiero, a registered Republican, said she has never voted for Trump, but she sees reminders of her neighbors’ support for him every day in The Villages. Trump 2024 flags hang in front yards, and bumper stickers are slapped on golf carts, the main mode of transportation in the community.

When she saw information about the rally for Harris on a local news site Saturday morning, she wanted to attend to support Harris’s candidacy.

Hours later, Ruggiero; her husband, Jim Guy; and their dog, Skipper were driving in the parade, their golf cart adorned with a white “Harris for President” poster. Ruggiero wore a “Dog Mama for Kamala” pin that she’d been given at the rally. Others held handmade signs that read “I’m a cat lady,” a reference to comments made by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate when he derided Harris and other prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies” in 2021. A few wore orange jumpsuits, alluding to Trump being found guilty in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment in 2016.

As the golf carts made their way around the town square in The Villages, they were met with about a dozen Trump supporters who stood in a counterprotest, holding signs supporting Trump.

Among them were Tommy and Valerie Jamieson, who started The Villages MAGA Club together in 2022.

The couple said they’d read about the rally online and had already been in the area of the parade route for one of their own events. During the Harris rally, Tommy Jamieson said they stood peacefully with their signs.

“This was kind of like, ‘Okay, what in the world is going on?’” he said. “Democrats having a golf cart rally, it’s just come out of nowhere.”

After the rally, Jamieson said the club was “swamped” with calls to hold a rally supporting Trump, which they’ve scheduled for Saturday, adding that he expected it to be “one of the biggest rallies ever held here in The Villages.”

The back-and-forth rallies reflect a political divide that seems poised to become more pronounced in The Villages as its Democrats come out of the woodwork, re-energized by Harris’s entry to the race.

“We are fired up to fight off the Trump-Vance ticket,” Foley said.

The way Ruggiero sees it, Harris’s candidacy has given once-quiet left-leaners in The Villages new momentum.

“I could see that energy that now people are like ‘Oh, I’m not one out of 100. I might be one out of 10, maybe two out of 10,” she said.

The political arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun regulation group founded by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, plans to spend $45 million over the coming months to elect favored candidates in eight of the states that could determine control of the White House, House, Senate and local offices.

The effort will include a new student organizing drive, with plans to hire 30 new organizers for volunteer recruitment drives at 32 college and university campuses in Arizona, California, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group’s leaders said the effort will focus on younger voters, voters of color and suburban women, with new field offices in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“With MAGA Republicans pushing an extreme ‘guns everywhere’ agenda, this election is a life-or-death moment — so Everytown is going all-out to mobilize the majority of Americans who want to live free from the fear of gun violence,” Everytown for Gun Safety president John Feinblatt said in a statement. “From sending Vice President Harris to the Oval Office to helping our own volunteers win office, we’ll elect gun sense champions up and down the ballot.”

The group — along with its grass-roots networks, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action — endorsed Harris for president last week.

About 80 percent of the $45 million will go to television and digital advertising, according to a person familiar with the spending who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The full list of candidates that the money will support will be determined over the coming weeks. Some of the money is expected to support local candidates Everytown has recruited through its “Demand a Seat” program, which encourages activists and survivors of gun violence to run for public office.

Bloomberg, one of the biggest donors to Democratic politics, gave $19 million this year to Future Forward, a super PAC supporting Harris, and nearly $1 million to the coordinated Democratic presidential campaign, which at the time was supporting President Biden before he left the presidential race. Bloomberg remains a donor to Everytown, but the group also raises money from its grass-roots efforts.

Everytown announced a $60 million spending plan before the 2020 election aimed at defeating then-President Donald Trump and electing more Democrats who support gun regulations.

The race to define Vice President Harris is on. The likely Democratic nominee for president dropped a new biographical ad at about the same moment Donald Trump’s campaign released an attack ad framing her as “dangerously liberal.” Here’s an assessment of the claims made in each ad.

Trump ad: ‘I don’t understand’

This 30-second ad is heavily focused on Harris’s role in the administration to address the “root causes” of migration from three Central American countries, using a label bestowed by Republicans (“border czar”), which The Washington Post reported in 2021 that she shunned. “Republicans try to crown Harris the ‘border czar.’ She rejects the title,” the headline said. But numerous TV commentators adopted the phrase and applied it to Harris, as this video compilation shows, giving the Trump campaign an opportunity to make the label stick.

“This is America’s border czar — and she’s failed us.”

This voice-over is accompanied by video of Harris dancing in a colorful shirt. It attributes the label of border czar to a 2022 article in the conservative National Review, which called her “border czar” in the headline.

But Harris was not in charge of immigration issues, and she certainly wasn’t a czar.

In 2021, President Biden assigned Harris to take charge of the “root causes” strategy — essentially a diplomatic effort with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to stem migration from those countries. The efforts appeared to have some impact — border arrests from those countries dropped from 700,000 in the 2021 fiscal year to fewer than 500,000 in 2023, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. The downward trend has continued in 2024. For instance, nearly 77,000 migrants from those countries crossed the border in June 2021 — and the figure dropped to 24,000 in June of this year.

But the problem shifted. Migrants surged from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti — countries that were not part of the “root causes” strategy. In June, more than 106,000 people from countries other than the three Central American countries were arrested at the border — though that is down from a peak of 239,000 in December. On June 4, Biden issued an emergency order to curb asylum access, and White House officials say illegal crossings have dropped 50 percent since then.

“Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here.”

The text of the ad says “over ten million illegal border crossings” — which is technically accurate — but the voice-over is false.

CBP recorded about 10 million “encounters” from February 2021, after Biden took office, through June. But that does not mean all those people entered the country illegally. Some people were “encountered” numerous times as they tried to enter the country — and others (more than 4 million of the total) were expelled, mostly because of covid-related rules that have since ended.

CBP has released more than 3.2 million migrants into the United States at the southern border under the Biden administration through April, the Department of Homeland Security said. These numbers, however, do not include “gotaways” — which occur when cameras or sensors detect migrants crossing the border but no one is found or no agents are available to respond. That figure could add an additional 2 million, bringing the total number of migrants arriving during Biden’s presidency to around 5 million — about half the figure the voice-over claims remained in the United States.

“A quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl.”

The text of the ad says this happened on “Harris’s watch.”

Under Biden, according to CBP statistics, overall drug seizures have dropped, especially for marijuana, but until this year increased substantially for fentanyl — the drug most responsible for overdose deaths. Both the decrease in marijuana seizures and the increase in fentanyl seizures reflect trends that started while Trump was president.

Moreover, fentanyl deaths increased nearly 50 percent under Trump, rising to 95,000 from 64,000 in a 12-month period, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fentanyl deaths continued to increase under Biden but have dropped in the past 12 months, so the increase under Biden is 7 percent, for a total of about 102,000 deaths.

Most drugs come into the United States across the southern border with Mexico. But even a wall does not limit this illegal trade, as much of it travels through legal borders or in tunnels unaffected by visible physical barriers. Even if a wall could curb drug trafficking, it would have a minimal impact on the death toll from drug abuse. As president, Trump often touted how much seizures of drugs at the southern border had increased on his watch. This is an imperfect metric. It could mean that law enforcement is doing a better job. But more seizures also might indicate that the drug flow has increased, and that law enforcement is missing even more.

The amount of fentanyl seized at the border increased under both Biden and Trump, though so far the amount jumped by a larger percentage under Trump, CBP statistics show. In Trump’s four fiscal years, the number of pounds increased 586 percent, compared with 462 percent in the first three fiscal years under Biden.

“Brutal migrant crimes, and ISIS now here.”

Violent crime rates, especially for homicide in large cities, have fallen sharply during Biden’s presidency, after a surge during the pandemic. The violent crime rate is believed to be near its lowest level in 50 years. So the Trump campaign is forced to cite anecdotal stories of migrants killing people.

The reference to the Islamic State is sourced to a CNN report on the arrest of eight Tajik nationals “believed to have connections to ISIS.” Islamic State-Khorasan, the Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Islamic terrorist group, is led primarily by Tajiks. The individuals were allowed into the country but they were tracked down and arrested after intelligence officials connected them to the Islamic State. They are now in federal custody and will be deported.

“Do you have any plans to visit the border?”

The ad then selectively clips from an interview Harris had in June 2021 with NBC’s Lester Holt during a visit to Guatemala. He twice asks her if she plans to visit the border and she answers that she will go to the border, but expresses frustration at his question.

• Harris: “I’m here in Guatemala today. At some point, we are going to the border; we’ve been to the border …”
• Holt interjects: “You haven’t been to the border.”
• She answers: “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point that you are making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border. … I care about what’s happened at the border. I’m in Guatemala because my focus is dealing with the root causes of migration.”

The ad clips out all her comments about planning to visit the border, her concerns about the border and her focus that day on Guatemala. It just shows viewers this highly edited exchange:

• Holt: “Do you have any plans to visit the border? … You haven’t been to the border.”
• Harris: “And I haven’t been to Europe. I don’t understand the point that you are making.”

The implication is that she’s dismissive of the idea. The NBC interview took place on June 8, 2021. Harris visited the border on June 25, 2021.

“Kamala Harris. Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”

The ad ends with this tagline.

Harris ad: ‘Fearless’

This is a positive biographical 60-second ad that seeks to portray Harris as tough and decisive — the opposite message of the Trump ad. It begins with the voice-over saying: “The one thing Kamala Harris has always been: fearless.”

“As a prosecutor, she put murderers and abusers behind bars.”

This is pretty self-evident — this is what prosecutors do. Harris was district attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, and the line is intended to show she cares about crime and is not “dangerously liberal.”

“As California’s attorney general, she went after the big banks and won $20 billion for homeowners.”

As recently recounted by Fortune, during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 Harris walked away from a nationwide settlement that would have netted California no more than $4 billion in compensation for homeowners — what she called “crumbs on the table” — and cut a deal with three major banks that won state residents $20 billion. The agreement was intended to help people stay in their homes through lower mortgage payments. In a surprise, however, more than half chose the settlement’s option to sell their homes for less than what they owned the bank, according to a 2013 report by the program’s monitor, then-professor and now-Rep. Katie Porter (D).

Harris received some criticism for not seeking to charge bankers with crimes — which she acknowledged. “I too, like most Americans, am frustrated. Clearly crimes occurred and people should go to jail,” Harris told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “But we went where the evidence took us.”

“And as vice president, she took on the big drug companies to cap the cost of insulin for seniors.”

Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, cast the tiebreaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, an omnibus bill that included a provision to cap the cost of insulin offered through Medicare at $35 a month. It also required the federal government to negotiate to lower the prices of some drugs — a policy shift that infuriated pharmaceutical companies.

Drew Hammill, who was deputy chief of staff to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), told The Fact Checker that Harris “was a key player in securing the necessary votes to pass the IRA. The vice president helped will the legislation into existence and was an important advocate in securing the insulin provisions.” When Harris first ran for president in 2020, she pledged she would “stop pharmaceutical companies from price-gouging patients by setting a fair price for what they can charge for prescription drugs.”

“This campaign is about who we fight for. We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead. Where every senior can retire with dignity. But Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. To give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act.”

The ad then shifts to excerpts from Harris’s first campaign rally, in a Milwaukee suburb, where she tried to frame the election as a choice between the future and the past.

The key factual claims are that Trump wants to “give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act.”

Trump has not detailed specific tax plans, except for eliminating taxes on tips, but privately he has expressed interest in cutting corporate tax rates further if he is reelected, according to a Washington Post report. (His 2017 tax bill significantly cut corporate tax rates.) Congressional Republicans have also expressed interest in corporate tax cuts to increase U.S. competitiveness, according to another Post report. Trump also has dangled tax breaks to wealthy donors in exchange for campaign contributions, the report said.

As for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Trump was frustrated in his first term that he could not terminate the law. In 2023, he suggested he would again make an effort, posting on social media: “I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” But in 2024, Trump has mostly remained silent on his plans for the law — which remains popular and a rallying point for Democrats.

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PHOENIX — A top Republican election official in Arizona’s most populous county known for his vigorous defense of elections lost his primary election Tuesday to a state lawmaker who called elections in the county “a laughingstock.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who faced death threats and endless harassment for doing his job, lost his reelection bid to state Rep. Justin Heap, an attorney aligned with the state legislature’s ultraconservative Freedom Caucus. Heap has voted for legislation that grew out of false election theories and was endorsed by Kari Lake, the Senate candidate with a large following who routinely spreads misinformation about elections and has been highly critical of Richer.

As Heap campaigned for the job, he pledged to try to improve confidence in elections and engage with the public in a respectful manner.

“It has become clear that ensuring the right of every citizen to have confidence in their vote, regardless of party, has become the civil rights issue of our time,” Heap said during a June debate. “Unfortunately, our current county recorder has taken a different path, a path that disrespects and demeans the voters. A path that attacks anyone who criticizes his office and laughs off even the suggestion that there might be anything wrong with our election system.”

Richer congratulated Heap on his win Wednesday morning, writing on X: “Elections have winners and, sadly, losers. And in this one, it looks like I’m going to end up on the losing side of the column. But that’s the name of the game. Accept it. Move on.”

In the November general election, Heap will face Democrat Tim Stringham, a U.S. Army and Navy veteran and political newcomer who is campaigning on a promise to “safeguard our elections” and “ensure that each eligible citizen gets to vote in a safe, secure and convenient way and that each vote will be counted fairly and transparently.”

If Heap wins in November, he could dramatically reshape how elections are run in the county, a fiercely contested battleground where former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election four years ago inspired profound mistrust among many Republicans about elections and government institutions. That movement sparked a rush of new involvement and activated pro-Trump voters determined to oust local officials who defend election results they don’t like, including Richer and members of the county governing board. Richer will continue to help run the upcoming presidential election, then leave office next year.

When Trump narrowly lost to President Biden in Arizona in 2020, he and his supporters quickly hyper-focused on Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and more than half of the swing state’s voters. Through emissaries, phone calls and text message, they sought to halt vote-counting and then tried to undermine the results. Republicans on the county board of supervisors who signed off on the results faced death threats and were called treasonous. A mob of protesters showed up at the home of one supervisor. Soon after, Richer took office.

Of the three remaining Republicans who were on the board in 2020, two decided not to run for reelection and a third lost his primary on Tuesday. The Republicans running for those seats have said they would work to make elections more transparent. One of those Republicans, Trump-endorsed Rep. Debbie Lesko, voted against accepting the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021. Another has advocated for getting rid of precinct-based voting and emergency ballot drop boxes.

Republican county attorney Rachel Mitchell, who has told members of her own party that Biden won the 2020 vote and that the 2022 elections in the state were accurate and legitimate, easily won her race against a further-right candidate. And a GOP supervisor, who joined the board after the 2020 election and was called a “traitor” for defending the validity of electoral outcomes, won his reelection. The general election race for county recorder is expected to be competitive, political analysts say.

Richer and the Republican supervisors shared election responsibilities and generally shared a similar vision on how voting should be run, how votes should be counted and how election employees should be defended. New leaders could take the county in a radically different direction.

Richer was endorsed by several traditional Republicans, including former governors Doug Ducey and Jan Brewer.

“For being the ‘establishment candidate,’ having the county party, the state party, Turning Point USA, Lake-world, Trump-world all against me — that’s hard to run against,” Richer said in an interview shortly before results began posting.

Richer, an attorney, assumed the once-sleepy job of helping run elections and recording documents in 2021, after he beat the Democratic incumbent in the 2020 election. He stepped into the job as Trump, his allies and supporters tried to overturn the former president’s 10,457-vote defeat and then turned against county and state Republicans who refused. Richer had nothing to do with the administration of that presidential election but took heat for it, anyway.

In that environment, Richer began sharing his view from inside of the recorder’s office in downtown Phoenix in the hopes of making it easier to understand complex voting rules and procedures.

Like an FAQ come to life, Richer threw himself into trying to make elections less mysterious, blasting out social media posts that fact-checked people who amplified misinformation — treating everyday constituents and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, all the same. Richer gave tours of the county’s vote-county operation, taking the curious into the bowels of the process and explaining how he kept voter rolls updated.

His approach drew praise from national election officials but ire from further-right Republicans who viewed him as dismissive of their concerns. Richer found himself in the eye of attacks after the 2022 midterm general election, when printer malfunctions at dozens of voting sites caused confusion and inconvenienced some voters. Lake, who lost her campaign for governor that year by about 17,000 votes, falsely claimed that Richer deliberately rigged the election to prevent her from winning. Death threats and harassment followed.

In a rare move, Richer sued Lake for defamation in June 2023, saying he saw a direct link between her rhetoric and threats against him. Lake has declined to defend herself against the lawsuit and asked a judge to begin the process of assessing damages.

Christine Jones, a Republican attorney and former GOP candidate who closely follows the state’s elections, said two things weighed against Richer with primary voters.

“His tone: He’s a little sarcastic and a little snarky and some of that is defensive because he was attacked and had death threats,” she said. “The second thing: He sued Kari Lake for defamation, which had the effect of pitting more than half of Republican primary voters against him.”

As he ran for reelection, Richer campaigned at events hosted by grass-roots Republicans — the type of forums his GOP colleagues at the county stopped attending after they gave way to shouting by those who wanted confrontations. Richer himself was sometimes heckled or booed. In March, a vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee told a crowd that she would “lynch” Richer if he walked in the room. She later described her comment as a joke.

In the final stretch of the campaign, Richer handed his GOP rivals a gift, telling reporters that he would vote for Biden, not Trump, in November. His comments came before Biden’s June 27 shaky debate performance and eventual withdrawal from the race.

“DID YOU KNOW that the current fake-Republican County Recorder, Stephen Richer, has admitted he’s voting for Joe Biden,” Heap wrote on X on June 28. He continued, “Say NO to Stephen Richer & Joe Biden’s epic failures.”

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani may avoid having to testify under oath about his finances after he reached a last-minute agreement with his creditors to pay an estimated $350,000 in administrative fees tied to his bankruptcy case, paving the way for its dismissal.

Lawyers for Giuliani and several creditors, including two former Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation claim against the former mayor, announced in a letter sent Wednesday morning to the judge overseeing Giuliani’s bankruptcy case that they had “conferred and reached agreement” to settle fees and move forward with dismissal.

A proposed order attached to the letter stated that Giuliani agreed to transfer $100,000 to an escrow account controlled by his attorneys and satisfy the remainder of the fees with proceeds from the sale of one of his two properties — his New York apartment or his condo in Palm Beach, Fla.

The proposal says a lien will be placed on both properties “as security” to make sure Giuliani pays fees owed to Global Risk Data, an accounting firm retained by the creditors to investigate his finances, but it also says the firm cannot seek to foreclose on or take other action related to either property for six months after the judge approves the agreement.

Lawyers for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the former Georgia election workers whom Giuliani falsely accused of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election, have previously sought to gain control of those properties and are expected to file suit seeking that real estate and Giuliani’s other assets once the bankruptcy case is formally dismissed. The proposed order says if they receive proceeds from the sale of either property, they will pay what is owed to GRD.

A spokesman for Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The agreement must first be approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane in the Southern District of New York, who last week threatened to reverse his decision to dismiss Giuliani’s bankruptcy case after Giuliani claimed he did not “have the ability to pay” the administrative fees — which must be resolved before the case can be closed.

Lane, who has been critical of Giuliani’s lack of financial transparency throughout the proceedings, was skeptical of the former mayor’s claim that he doesn’t have the money, citing Giuliani’s ownership of two apartments that are of “considerable value.”

“What little we know about the Debtor’s financial situation makes his stance here more troubling,” Lane wrote. “Even assuming that the Debtor does not have the funds on hand to immediately pay these bankruptcy expenses, he certainly has considerable assets upon which he can draw to pay such expenses.”

Lane threatened to hold an evidentiary hearing and require Giuliani to give sworn testimony about the state of his finances. But he gave the former mayor and his creditors until noon Wednesday to submit a letter with their suggestions of how to move forward. The proposed joint agreement was filed about three hours before that deadline.

The developments come nearly three weeks after Lane threw out Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, paving the way for numerous creditors, including Freeman and Moss, to pursue and potentially seize his assets.

But within days of that order, a dispute emerged over fees incurred by GRD, an investigative accounting firm made up of former CIA and FBI officials hired by the creditors to probe Giuliani’s finances. The firm was retained after Giuliani repeatedly failed to fully disclose his cash and assets, including information about his businesses and other holdings that is required in bankruptcy proceedings — a lack of transparency the judge called “troubling.”

Rachel Strickland, an attorney for Freeman and Moss, pressed Lane to order Giuliani to turn over all the cash in his bank account and control of his New York apartment to satisfy court fees — a request the judge called “premature.” But in a July 17 hearing, Strickland urged the judge to take action quickly, accusing Giuliani of financial “shenanigans” and continuing to spend freely without authorization from the court.

Strickland said records from the only bank account Giuliani disclosed to creditors showed that he had burned through more than half of the $60,000 in the account after Lane agreed to dismiss the bankruptcy case — including $39,000 in fees related to his Florida condo and New York apartment. Giuliani also spent money on travel and other expenses related to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, she claimed.

Giuliani’s attorneys later clarified that his travel to the convention was paid for by a media company linked to My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, a fellow election denier and Trump associate who recently hired Giuliani.

Wednesday’s agreement comes seven months after Giuliani sought bankruptcy protection after he was ordered to immediately pay millions in damages to Freeman and Moss for the false claims he made about them in the aftermath of the 2020 election when he was serving as former president Donald Trump’s personal attorney.

In court documents, Giuliani has listed roughly $153 million in debts to at least 20 people and businesses, including Freeman and Moss. A list of top creditors filed in February said Giuliani owes more than $3.7 million in unpaid legal fees to three law firms — though he is disputing some of those bills — and more than $1 million in state and federal taxes.

The former federal prosecutor has claimed about $11 million in assets — including an estimated $5.6 million New York apartment and his Palm Beach condo, which is valued at $3.5 million. While Giuliani has put his New York property on the market, he had resisted selling his Florida home, with one of his lawyers claiming the sale could render the 80-year-old former mayor “homeless.”

The proposed agreement filed Wednesday suggested the Florida condo could soon be listed for sale.

A financial disclosure report filed in June said Giuliani had less than $100,000 in the bank at the end of May and was funding his living expenses through a rapidly diminishing retirement account. But creditors have repeatedly complained that Giuliani has not filed a complete picture of his net worth and have accused him of hiding money and assets.

Giuliani had repeatedly shifted legal strategies in recent weeks amid complaints from the judge and his creditors that he was not being fully transparent about his finances.

In December, he sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which allows an individual to reorganize and file a plan to pay off debts. But on July 1, Giuliani asked the judge to reclassify his case under Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would hand control of his personal and business finances to an outside trustee to liquidate. The request prompted immediate objections from the election workers and other creditors, who accused Giuliani of more delay tactics.

On July 10, an hour before a hearing on the matter, Giuliani abruptly switched position yet again, asking Lane to dismiss the bankruptcy case altogether. While some of the creditors pressed the judge to appoint a trustee, Freeman and Moss supported the dismissal and Lane ultimately agreed — saying there was no evidence that Giuliani’s “uncooperative conduct will change.” Lane granted that motion on July 12 — but has not yet finalized it.

A dismissal would allow Freeman and Moss and other creditors to immediately pursue legal remedies to collect money owed to them by Giuliani.

It also allows other pending lawsuits against the former mayor that had been frozen by the bankruptcy proceeding to resume, including defamation suits by the voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and a sexual harassment and wage theft claim by former Giuliani associate Noelle Dunphy. All are part of a committee of “unsecured creditors” that had sought relief in the bankruptcy case.

Giuliani has publicly suggested that he will seek to appeal the defamation judgment in the election worker case — which he was prohibited from doing while seeking bankruptcy protection, since litigation against him had been stayed. But the judge in that case has said Giuliani must put up a $148 million bond to pursue the appeal and pause collection efforts by Freeman and Moss, and it was not clear Giuliani had the funds to do that.