Rudy Giuliani is promoting unapproved dietary supplements as he scrambles to pay $148m in damages to a pair of election workers whom he defamed.
A US federal judge on Wednesday ordered Mr Giuiliani to "immediately" produce the money before he has a chance to conceal his true assets, saying he had been an "uncooperative litigant".
The former New York City mayor and Trump campaign lawyer was found to have defamed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss when he groundlessly accused them of helping to rig the 2020 presidential election.
In livestreams on Tuesday and Wednesday night, Mr Giuliani showed his followers how to make Christmas tree ornaments out of bottles of Balance of Nature dietary pills, urging them to help him "fight the traitors" by buying some.
"Balance of Nature should be taken every single day to make sure you get your vegetables and your fruits," he said. "I expect you to have these in Christmas stockings for all those that you love, okay?"
He did not mention that the supplements were temporarily taken off the market last month by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which said they had been wrongly advertised as helping to prevent or mitigate diseases such as cancer and Covid-19 without having been approved for that purpose.
The promotion, first reported by The Daily Beast, is the latest in a long line of attempted money-spinners ranging from advertising sandals, pillows, and cigars to hawking personalised messages on the celebrity voice clips app Cameo.
On Thursday Mr Giuliani filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming that he did not have enough assets to pay off as much as $500m in legal expenses.
However, the judge in Wednesday's hearing said that his claims of "financial difficulties" were "difficult to square" against his hiring of a spokesperson who "accompanied him daily to trial".
The case adds to a growing pile of debts and legal obstacles, including a pending lawsuit from voting systems company Smartmatic, a lawsuit from Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and a sprawling criminal case in Atlanta, where he is charged alongside the former president and more than a dozen others for joining a “criminal enterprise” to unlawfully overturn Georgia’s election results.
Meanwhile, the Washington DC Bar Association’s disciplinary committee has unanimously recommended that he be disqualified from practising law in the city for spreading false information about the 2020 election.
