Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani talks to reporters as he leaves after his defamation trial in Washington, Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. A jury awarded $148 million in damages on Friday to two former Georgia election workers who sued Giuliani for defamation over lies he spread about them in 2020 that upended their lives with racist threats and harassment. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board on Professional Responsibility on Friday recommended former U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment, writing that it was “the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession” from future “frivolous” election outcome challenges.
In the report and recommendation, spanning 63 pages, the panel concluded that Giuliani’s license to practice law in Washington, D.C., should disappear for violations of two of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct. Giuliani in November 2020 filed a never-successful federal lawsuit in the Keystone State to overturn Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden by claiming a lack of poll-watcher access and pointing to “illegal” mail-in ballots, which he claimed were proof of “nationwide voter fraud.”
“In that federal lawsuit, Respondent focused his arguments on two types of allegedly ‘illegal’ mail-in ballots: (1) those ballots where voters were notified of and allowed to cure defects that would have otherwise prevented the ballots from being counted (‘the Notice and Cure claims’); and, (2) those ballots that were canvassed without close supervision by partisan observers (‘the Observational Barrier claims’),” the disbarment recommendation noted.
Rule 3.1 states that a lawyer “shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law.”
Rule 8.4(d) additionally says that a lawyer commits professional misconduct by “engage[ing] in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
Agreeing that Giuliani “did not have a faint hope of success” in overturning the election, since there were “not enough cured ballots to change the election results even if all of the cured ballots were deemed to be Biden ballots,” the panel wrote that the former NYC mayor’s “frivolous litigation” was in a class of its own and, as a result, warranted a disbarment recommendation:
Respondent alleged that the elections boards in seven Pennsylvania counties were engaged in a deliberate scheme to change the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election in Pennsylvania by counting mail-in ballots that should not have been counted. He urged a federal judge to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters even though he had no objectively reliable evidence that any such scheme existed, or even that any illegal mail-in ballots had been counted. No prior disciplinary cases involving frivolous litigation are remotely comparable to this case. We conclude that disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief.
When Giuliani’s law license was separately suspended in New York, that suspension order also said his ill-fated Pennsylvania federal suit in U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann’s courtroom showed that the sanction was appropriate.
“Before Judge Brann in the Boockvar case, respondent himself stated: ‘I don’t know what’s more serious than being denied your right to vote in a democracy.’ We agree,” the order said. “It is the very reason why espousing false factual information to large segments of the public as a means of discrediting the rights of legitimate voters is so immediately harmful to it and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law.”
Giuliani is not the only Trump post-2020 election lawyer to face disciplinary proceedings or threats of disbarment. For instance, John Eastman, recently suspended in D.C., also faces a disbarment recommendation in California.
Former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis just this Tuesday agreed to a three-year law license suspension in Colorado, acknowledging that she was “wrong” to turn a “blind eye to the possibility that that senior lawyers for the Trump Campaign were embracing” stolen election claims that they “knew or should have known were false.”
Notably, when Giuliani appeared in court to argue his Pennsylvania case, Ellis called the media “morons” for “laughing” at Giuliani’s performance.
“You media morons are all laughing at @RudyGiuliani, but he appears to have already established a great rapport with the judge, who is currently offering recommendations on martini bars for Team Trump in open court,” Ellis said at the time.
Though Giuliani repeatedly said outside of court that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, once inside court he clarified: “This is not a fraud case.” There was also a memorable back-and-forth with Brann when the judge asked Giuliani if “strict scrutiny” was the standard of review that should be applied.
Giuliani answered that the judge should apply “normal scrutiny,” which does not exist.
When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit handled the case, a unanimous panel led by a Trump appointee wasn’t any kinder to Giuliani’s theories.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
“The Trump Presidential Campaign asserts that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was unfair. But as lawyer Rudolph Giuliani stressed, the Campaign ‘doesn’t plead fraud. . . … [T]his is not a fraud case,”” the judge continued. “Instead, it objects that Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State and some counties restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots. It offers nothing more.”
Law&Crime reached out to a Giuliani spokesperson for comment on the disbarment recommendation.
Read the documents here.
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