It turns out that Rudy can fail.
Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended on Thursday by a New York State appellate court, which found “uncontroverted evidence” that the former New York City mayor and top adviser to President Trump “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.”
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The five-judge panel was brutal in its assessment of Giuliani’s numerous post-election lies, laying out in stark detail how contradictory and unmoored from reality his bid to undercut President Biden’s win was after Trump lost the election.
“On their face, these numerical claims are so wildly divergent and irreconcilable, that they all cannot be true at the same time. Some of the wild divergences were even stated by respondent in the very same sentence,” the court wrote, pointing to a dizzying array of Giuliani claims that he’s failed to back up with any real evidence.
“Respondent has failed to produce any sources, whether ‘best’ or marginal, to support any of the figures he has presented to the public with authority. He has not identified, let alone produced the ‘newspaper and records’ he claimed were the bases for his assertions when he made them,” the report continues.
Giuliani became one of Trump’s loudest and most unhinged post-election defenders, using up whatever credibility he had left as “America’s Mayor” and former U.S. Attorney to allege time and again, with almost no evidence, that Biden’s campaign had rigged the election in multiple states.
That included a dark carnival tour around the country where in sham hearing after hearing, Giuliani and local GOP officials claimed electoral malfeasance and suggested widespread voter fraud while repeatedly failing to prove their claims.
One oft-repeated lie from Giuliani is that dead people voted en masse in heavily Democratic and Black Philadelphia—including legendary boxer Joe Frazier. That’s demonstrably false, as Frazier’s voting eligibility was canceled in 2012, three months after he died.
The court noticed.
“Respondent repeatedly stated that dead people ‘voted’ in Philadelphia in order to discredit the results of the vote in that city. He quantified the amount of dead people who voted at various times as 8,021; while also reporting the number as 30,000,” the ruling stated. “As the anecdotal poster child to prove this point, he repeatedly stated that famous heavyweight boxer Joe Frazier continued to vote years after he was dead and stated on November 7, 2020 ‘he is still voting here.’ The public records submitted on this motion unequivocally show that respondent’s statement is false.”
The court also highlighted a bevy of other obvious falsehoods or baseless claims Giuliani made in the months after the election: That tens or hundreds of thousands of underage Georgians had illegally voted, as had thousands of dead Georgians; that “illegal aliens” voted in Arizona; and that Dominion Voting Systems had somehow rigged things against Trump.
Giuliani’s attempted defense was that he didn’t know he was lying. But the court said he failed to provide “a scintilla of evidence for any of the varying and wildly inconsistent numbers of dead people he factually represented voted in Philadelphia during the 2020 presidential election,” and pointed out that he often repeated his various claims about the election over and over again between the election and this April, with the numbers of people he claimed illegally voted often changing in each telling.
Giuliani’s attorneys said they were “disappointed” with the appellate court’s decision to suspend Giuliani’s license without giving him a hearing, and predicted that he’ll be reinstated to the state bar.
“This is unprecedented as we believe that our client does not pose a present danger to the public interest. We believe that once the issues are fully explored at a hearing Mr. Giuliani will be reinstated as a valued member of the legal profession that he has served so well in his many capacities for so many years,” attorneys John Leventhal and Barry Kamins said in an emailed statement.
But the court disagreed.
“The seriousness of [the] respondent’s uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated. This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and of our current president, Joseph R. Biden,” the court wrote. “The hallmark of our democracy is predicated on free and fair elections. False statements intended to foment a loss of confidence in our elections and resulting loss of confidence in government.”
