Another chapter of Team Trump’s election lies was in the news with the start of jury deliberations in a defamation trial against Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. That means Mr. Giuliani sat through the entire case without testifying on his own behalf, despite the fact that he “repeatedly promised that he would use his defamation trial to explain why he falsely claimed two Georgia poll workers helped steal the 2020 election.”
In July of this year, Giuliani signed a statement that he “hereby does not contest” that he made “statements concerning Plaintiffs” (the two poll workers), that “the statements carry meaning that is defamatory” and that “to the extent the statements were statements of fact and otherwise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false.” The statement claimed to be “soley for purposes of this litigation,” a claim echoed by Giuliani’s lawyers at the time.
Even during the trial, he is continuing to make the defamatory statements he is being sued for. In keeping with his “I-could-prove-this-but-I-won’t-as-part-of-my-legal-strategy” claims, Giuliani continues to say that “everything I said about them [the pollworkers] is true.” Apparently that strategy was not too successful, because in August he lost the case. Jury deliberations now are in a follow-up case to determine how much money he owed the scapegoated poll workers.
This is the same two-faced tactic Giuliani has been using all along. To the public he swears that his election conspiracy accusations are true, then he goes in front of a judge and says the opposite. This week’s news reminded me of a post I wrote in 2022 talking about specifics of how the legal system has exposed the emptiness of his election accusations. I reproduce it here:
Would You Let This Man on Your Radio Show?
Normally I don’t like to even bring up lies and rumors, because often even to debunk them ends up promoting them. However, my guess is that these stories and Rudolph Giuliani won’t go away, so we have to deal with them.
The thing is, when you listen to Giuliani and ignore the content of what he is actually saying, he sounds like a smart lawyer giving you the inside scoop on complicated dealings he has been carefully following. So what do we actually know about Rudy Giuliani’s credibility?
Well, we know that he was “suspended from the practice of law in the State of New York”. The judgement lays out the basis of the suspension, concluding “that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent [Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statement to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign…”
The document contains too many examples for me to cover here, but the first one is that in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election, “more absentee ballots came in during the election than were sent out before the election,” thus raising the question of fraud, supposedly on behalf of Joe Biden. “Respondent does not deny that his factual statement, that only 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested, was untrue. His defense is that he did not make this misstatement knowingly.” The ruling goes on to tear apart the excuse Giuliani offered for his “misstatement”. Similarly, at various times Mr. Giuliani claimed that from 8,000 to 30,000 dead people voted in Philadelphia, including deceased boxer Joe Frazier, but failed to provide the court “a scintilla of evidence for any of the varying and wildly inconsistent numbers of dead people he factually represented voted in Philadelphia” even though he had “assured the public that he was investigating this claim.” The claim about Frazier is “unequivocally… false”.
Giuliani claimed that “Georgia election officials engaged in the illegal counting of mail-in ballots.” The claim was based on surveillance video of the counting which “were viewed in their entirety by the Secretary’s office, law enforcement, and fact checkers who, according to [Republican] Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all concluded that there was no improper activity.” Giuliani made his claims as late as January 3, 2021, but apparently they had already been refuted by officials on Dec 4, 2020.
I did some searching to see if there was any criticism of the judgement against Giuliani. The rightwing blog Legal Insurrection ran a post accusing the court of applying double standards in going after Giuliani and not other lawyers who had grievances filed against them. The article did not take issue with the accusations of falsehood. Jonathan Turley, a witness for the Republicans in all 3 presidential impeachments (Clinton and Trump) also found “troubling aspects of the opinion” suspending Giuliani, but did not dispute the substance of the accusations against Giuliani, saying “in all likelihood, it will result in Giuliani’s eventual disbarment.”
The original post was “Dangerous & Crazy at 570 kHz“.