Rudy Giuliani speaks outside the Fulton County jail, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Atlanta. Giuliani has surrendered to authorities in Georgia to face an indictment alleging he acted as former President Donald Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert the 2020 election. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson). Inset top: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, is comforted by her mother Ruby Freeman, right, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File). Inset bottom: booking photo of Giuliani via Fulton County (Ga.) Sheriff’s Office.
Rudy Giuliani has refused to participate in the defamation case against him by two volunteer election workers in Georgia — and now he will have to pay for it.
In a merciless ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found that Giuliani failed to preserve evidence in the case brought by Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, and that he deliberately refused to comply with discovery requests and orders. She ordered a default judgment against the man once known as “America’s Mayor,” as well as sanctions — the amount of which will be determined at trial.
Howell’s 57-page ruling included a painstaking review of Giuliani’s repeated recalcitrance, particularly his failure to preserve electronically stored information (ESI) from various devices. Howell referred to the fact that Giuliani himself had acknowledged several times during the litigation that he has decades of experience as a federal prosecutor and, therefore, understands how discovery works.
Giuliani, Howell wrote, “is taken at his word that he understands these [discovery] obligations. He assured this Court directly that he ‘understand[s] the obligations’ because he has ‘been doing this for 50 years[.]’ In this case, however, Giuliani has given only lip service to compliance with his discovery obligations and this Court’s orders by failing to take reasonable steps to preserve or produce his ESI.”
The fact that the stalwart Trump supporter is “a sophisticated litigant with a self-professed 50 years of experience in litigation — including serving as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — only underscores his lackluster preservation efforts,” the judge also wrote.
Howell, a Barack Obama appointee who previously served as Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, had no patience for what she implied was Giuliani’s performative disregard for a legal system he once championed.
“Rather than simply play by the rules designed to promote a discovery process necessary to reach a fair decision on the merits of plaintiffs’ claims, Giuliani has bemoaned plaintiffs’ efforts to secure his compliance as ‘punishment by process,”” the judge wrote (citations omitted). “Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straight-forward defamation case, with the concomitant necessity of repeated court intervention.”
According to Howell, Giuliani’s attempts at responding to discovery were meager, at best.
“[T]he result of these efforts to obtain discovery from Giuliani, aside from his initial production of 193 documents, is largely a single page of communications, blobs of indecipherable data, a sliver of the financial documents required to be produced, and a declaration and two stipulations from Giuliani, who indicates in the latter stipulations his preference to concede plaintiffs’ claims rather than produce discovery in this case,” she wrote.
Howell indicated that Giuliani’s apparent attempts to avoid responsibility would not succeed in her court.
“Perhaps, he has made the calculation that his overall litigation risks are minimized by not complying with his discovery obligations in this case,” she wrote. “Whatever the reason, obligations are case specific and withholding required discovery in this case has consequences.”
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The judge also noted Giuliani’s so-called “no contest” stipulations, in which he purported to admit that his statements about Freeman and Moss were indeed defamatory while simultaneously preserving the right to argue that very point on appeal — stipulations she described as having “more holes than Swiss cheese.”
Howell said that the caveats reflect Giuliani’s “goal to bypass the discovery process and a merits trial at which his defenses may be fully scrutinized and tested in our judicial system’s time-honored adversarial process — and to delay such a fair reckoning by taking his chances on appeal, based on the abbreviated record he forced on plaintiffs.”
Although the judge didn’t explicitly reference the criminal charges Giuliani is currently facing in Georgia, she appeared to acknowledge them in her ruling.
“Yet, just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks — even potential criminal liability — bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions, no matter what reservations a noncompliant party may try artificially to preserve for appeal,” she wrote.
Ultimately, the price Giuliani pays will be the result of his own actions, Howell wrote.
“Given the willful shirking of his discovery obligations in anticipation of and during this litigation, Giuliani leaves little other choice,” the judge wrote. “Default judgment will be entered against Giuliani as a discovery sanction pursuant to [federal discovery rules] holding him civilly liable on plaintiffs’ defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and punitive damage claims, and Giuliani is directed to reimburse plaintiffs for attorneys’ fees and costs associated with their instant motion.”
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani in December 2021 over falsely accusing them of engaging in voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani is among a handful of lawyers who have repeatedly pushed disproven claims that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud.
The defamation lawsuit is directly related to the criminal charges facing Trump, Giuliani, and 17 other co-defendants in the Peach State. According to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Giuliani falsely told a meeting of the Georgia House of Representatives Governmental Affairs Committee that Freeman and Moss were “surreptitiously” passing a USB port while working at State Farm Arena, where votes were being counted. Moss later told the U.S. House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack that another Georgia election worker had handed her mother a ginger mint.
Read Howell’s ruling below.
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