The DC Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility found Rudy Giuliani violated ethics rules by making false 2020 election claims and should be held liable for professional sanctions, according to a new report by CNN.
This report by the attorney disciplinary committee is “preliminary and non-binding.” But it will move forward and is a “significant step forward” in the work to hold Trump lawyers accountable for their abuse of the court system using claims they could not and did not substantiate in their attempts to steal an election from The People.
The charges that the Trump lawyer violated attorney ethics rules stemmed from a case he brought in Pennsylvania, where Trump and his lawyers sought to toss the votes of hundreds of thousands of voters.
After Giuliani’s case was rejected by a judge, the Trump campaign was denied their efforts to file a revised complaint.
Giuliani was accused of having “weaponized his law license to bring a frivolous action in an attempt to undermine the Constitution.”
I discussed Giuliani’s efforts to steal votes in Pennsylvania Thursday morning in our Politicus Pod, including his reported girlfriend’s bonkers rantings about dead people voting as revealed in Mark Meadows’ texts obtained exclusively by Talking Point Memo published Wednesday evening:
The best part of this so far is that the disciplinary proceedings zeroed in on the lack of evidence Giuliani had BEFORE he filed the lawsuit. You know, having some kind of cause. Having a reason to make the wild claims he did. Something other than fantasy, conspiracy and pure fiction.
The effort to undermine the 2020 election was multi-pronged and seemed coordinated.
For example, Factcheck.Org had to do a deep dive on the “dead voters” claims due to Senator Lindsey Graham lying about this on Fox News, claiming they had evidence of it, and Giuliani, without evidence, calling Philadelphia an “epicenter of voter fraud” on the same program, adding that “we’re going to be looking at dead persons’ ballots, which may actually be very, very substantial.”
Which “may” be. Which may be is not evidence. It is hopeful delusion by this team.
“Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said the Trump campaign had “evidence of dead people voting in Pennsylvania…The Trump team has canvassed all early voters and absentee mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. And they have found over 100 people they think were dead, but 15 people that we verified that have been dead who voted. But here is the one that gets me. Six people registered after they died and voted. In Pennsylvania, I guess you’re never out of it.”
Later in the interview, Graham said, “I do know that we have evidence of six people in Pennsylvania registering after they died and voting after they died. And we haven’t looked at the entire system.”
Even if they had six people, that would not overcome the 45,000 vote lead then Vice President Joe Biden had at the time.
But, the only person charged with felonies for trying to apply for a mail-in ballot in his deceased mother’s name in Pennsylvania was a Republican.
There was also an incident, cited by Trump campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski, as a “concrete example” that also turned out to be someone who, although deceased on October 22, cast a ballot which was received November 2 and recorded.
Family members said she planned to vote for Trump but no one could explain how her ballot got sent back after her death. I was unable to find an update on that situation, so it’s unclear if charges were brought.
Factcheck continued: On the same program, former New York City Mayor and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani called Philadelphia “an epicenter of voter fraud” and said “we’re going to be looking at dead persons’ ballots, which may actually be very, very substantial.”
Philadelphia is a city of many Black people, like many of the other cities in which Republicans claim, without evidence, that voter fraud is rampant. What these consistent accusations of fraud are, in reality, is an attempt to delegitimize the lawful votes of Black people because Republicans know they do not win with the Black population. That is in and of itself a shameful attempt to intimidate and suppress the vote of people simply because of their race.
So, back to that disciplinary hearing focused on Giuliani filing a lawsuit before he had evidence.
CNN reports that Giuliani assured them that had it gone to discovery, he would have been able to provide more evidence and that he had been responsible in his filings because he was “responsibly alleging, based on the things that were told to me by other people. I wasn’t proving – I had a long way to go to prove.”
It is not responsible alleging to go off of things you’ve been told without doing any vetting of those claims. Giuliani knows this, as he was Manhattan’s US attorney.
Hamilton Fox, who brought the ethics charges, said Giuliani was pushing a “coordinated” effort to undermine the election.
Recommendations will follow this and then hearings in front of the entire board. The issue seems to be a desire to not chill other lawsuits (presumably of merit) while not allowing a “coordinated” effort to undermine faith and integrity in our elections to go unpunished.
It’s stunning and telling that Rudy Giuliani still has his law license after all of this. He tried to steal the most scared freedom the American voter has, based on nothing.
Giuliani shouldn’t be allowed to practice law after such a blatant attempt to sow discord and fuel lies about the most secure election in U.S. history.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
