Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and a key figure in the impeachment inquiry, managed to inadvertently telephone an NBC News reporter at 11pm one night this month and leave a lengthy voice message filled with snippets of an overheard conversation.

In the muffled recording — left on October 16 with the NBC reporter Rich Schapiro — Giuliani, the chairman of a security consulting firm, can be heard discussing business in Turkey and Bahrain. At one point, speaking with a pair of unidentified men, Giuliani declares: “The problem is we need some money.”

Nearly 10 seconds of silence tick by before Giuliani clarifies: “We need a few hundred thousand.”

It was not the first time that Giuliani had left remnants of a conversation on Schapiro’s phone. In a voice mail message left in September, he can be heard railing against the family of Joseph R. Biden Jr., suggesting with no evidence that he knows of corrupt activities by the former vice-president.

Calls and texts to Giuliani seeking clarity about the messages went unreturned on Friday. And Schapiro, in an appearance on MSNBC, said he had tried without success to ask Giuliani about the unusual recordings.

“I have yet to receive an intentional or unintentional call back,” Schapiro said.

Given Giuliani’s sensitive role in the impeachment inquiry, and his taste for the spotlight, there was some speculation that the messages could have been staged. But based on reactions from the Washington press corps who cover him, Giuliani, 75, is an accomplished inadvertent caller. On social media, the Giuliani stories began to flow.

“Everyone has a good Rudy butt dial story,” Josh Dawsey, a Washington Post White House reporter, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve heard him on what sounded like a plane, at the airport, at what sounded like a bar.”

Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for Axios, had another story. “He once texted me a voice memo recording of himself talking to a guy,” Swan recalled. “I couldn’t make any sense of it or figure out how he managed to text me a recording in advertently.”

David Martosko, a journalist at The Daily Mail, remembered once bumping into Giuliani and a Fox News producer at a Washington television studio. “He was just finishing telling her a story,” Martosko wrote on Twitter, referring to the producer.