When it comes to chronicling Rudy Giuliani’s ongoing difficulties, it’s difficult to know where to start. It was, after all, earlier this month when a Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded that the former New York City mayor should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 presidential election.
But as we discussed soon after, that’s really just the start of the Republican lawyer’s troubles. Giuliani has also received attention from special counsel Jack Smith’s office; he was recently smacked with discovery sanctions; and he’s facing a credible defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.
But let’s also not forget the defamation lawsuit he’s facing from former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. NBC News reported on Tuesday:
Rudy Giuliani has conceded that he made “false” statements about two Georgia 2020 election workers in a filing related to their lawsuit about baseless claims of fraud that he made against them.
“Defendant Giuliani, for the purposes of litigation only, does not contest that, to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false,” Giuliani wrote in a signed stipulation dated July 25 that he said was intended to “avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes.”
In case anyone needs a refresher, let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
In the immediate aftermath of his election defeat, Donald Trump insisted that election workers in Atlanta corrupted the vote tallies by taking improper ballots from suitcases. The claims were immediately discredited, not just by independent journalists, but also by his own Justice Department.
Trump nevertheless rejected the truth and turned his lies into attacks that put innocent election workers in danger: The former president and some of his rabid followers decided that Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who had taken a temp job helping count ballots, were directly and personally responsible for including fake ballots in Georgia’s election tally.
Trump kept the smear campaign going — for roughly two years.
But it wasn’t just the former president; a prominent member of his legal team participated in the same campaign against these two innocent women who’d done nothing wrong. In fact, Giuliani not only falsely claimed that Freeman and her daughter had committed election fraud, the former mayor also said that Freeman and Moss were “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” The bipartisan House Jan. 6 committee later determined that the women had shared a ginger mint. Giuliani has now acknowledged, in a legal filing, that his statements weren’t true. As for the underlying case, Politico reported that Giuliani is not abandoning his effort to fight the defamation lawsuit, and one of the GOP lawyer’s aides “said his concessions and acknowledgments were an effort to bypass the fact-gathering stage and move on to legal arguments about whether he can be held liable for the damages Moss and Freeman are seeking.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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