NEW: Rudy Giuliani spent all year planning for his star turn. He would be featured in a documentary on his efforts to uncover the true Hunter Biden story, dropping the film in Sept in time to influence 2020. It didn't go as planned. by @tomlobianco ($) http://ow.ly/hscy50C7GzE 

Trump's lawyer courted donors for the movie in private meetings across the country (often drunk, as 2 Republicans noted) and set up interviews overseas with former Ukrainian officials who he was certain would blow open a scandal involving the 50-year old adult son of Joe Biden.

But Giuliani's team couldn't find investors. Fellow Republicans expressed deep skepticism that the former New York mayor could really deliver. Then September came and went without any documentary.

Perhaps no other incident captures the slapdash chaotic attempts of Trump's closest advisers and confidants to try and engineer an October surprise they were certain would flip the script in the president's favor and ultimately help him secure reelection.

It turns out there were 3 different factions in Trump's orbit who were running 3 different simultaneous efforts to uncover dirt on Hunter Biden, according to interviews with more than a dozen presidential advisers & Republicans close to the reelection campaign & White House.

By the time October arrived they'd been bumping into each other for months, scrambling to shoehorn their stories into a historic and unprecedented presidential race that no Hollywood screenwriter could possibly have written.

Nobody seemed to be coordinating their efforts, something the president's rivals have gleefully picked up on. "It's really amateur hour," Julian Epstein, a longtime Democratic attorney tracking Team Trump's attempts to smear Biden by going after his son, told @Politicsinsider

Republicans close to Trump & his campaign acknowledged a more competent operation may have succeeded. After all, they said, Hunter Biden has a checkered past on par with Trump himself.

But the Trump campaign, just like his White House and the 2016 team he assembled the last time he ran for president, has its own problems stemming from the person at the top who is widely known to have his own manic executive style.

"Everyone is always competing for Trump's affection," said a Republican close to the president's 2020 campaign. "Everyone is in and out of the Oval Office with a silver bullet, nine times a day, and his answer is always 'Pull the trigger.'"

Lots more to read in this @tomlobianco gem as we head into the final weekend of the 2020 campaign. Subscribe to @businessinsider and check it out. It's $1 for a month. Or here's a link for a 20% discount on the full year: https://www.businessinsider.com/subscription/prime-discount?r=birefer-dsamuelsohn