DC Bar Panel Recommends Permanent Disbarment For Wrecking Ball Rudy

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani is having a rough one. He’s getting sued by voting machine companies, poll workers, and his own former employee. With Trump out of the White House, he’s no longer a power broker in DC. And even as his suspension from the practice of law in New York remains temporary, the DC Bar has now recommended that he be permanently disbarred in the nation’s Capitol.

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In a scathing report issued this morning, a unanimous panel found that Giuliani violated Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct when he filed a baseless lawsuit seeking to toss out hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.

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“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” they wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law. He should be disbarred.”

In 2020, Giuliani argued an election case filed on behalf of the Trump campaign premised on the theory that COVID and safety restrictions which placed election monitors behind plexiglass barriers during tabulation rendered the votes presumptively fraudulent. Secondarily, he claimed that the decision of some county elections officials to allow voters to cure defective ballots disenfranchised voters in other counties who were not presented the right to cure. His solution for these problems was simple: either all mail-in ballots should be tossed out in the offending counties, or the court should make a statistical adjustment of the tally, based on a mathematical formula supplied by Rudy’s “expert.” In either event, the remedy would result in the state’s electoral votes being awarded to Donald Trump.

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Giuliani presented no evidence that a single ballot was illegitimate, and anyway Pennsylvania’s own judiciary had already ruled that the social distancing protocols did not violate state election law.

Mr. Giuliani, however, contended that observational boundaries were a per se fraud that he had “personally witnessed”. He claimed they were “a deliberate scheme of intentional and purposeful discrimination” against the Trump campaign, concluding that Democrats “stole an election . . . in this Commonwealth” and that he had “hundreds of affidavits” supporting his assertion. These claims were simply not true.

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At a disastrous hearing the former prosecutor ranted at length about supposed election fraud dating back decades perpetrated by dastardly, and then appeared flummoxed when US District Judge Matthew Bran wondered what level of scrutiny ought to be applied to his claims.

“The normal kind, Your Honor,” Rudy replied cheerfully.

The trial court and the Third Circuit both rejected his claims post haste, and then, after New York suspended him from the practice, DC issued its own reciprocal suspension.

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In a December hearing, the DC Bar’s Disciplinary Counsel moved to disbar him for filing a totally frivolous lawsuit which “caused an astonishing waste of the resources of the District Court, the Third Circuit, and multiple defendants in a compressed time frame.” And indeed the panel agreed with bar counsel, writing that “Respondent based the Pennsylvania litigation only on speculation, mistrust, and suspicion.”

After an objective appraisal of the facts, a reasonable attorney would have concluded that there was not even a faint hope of success of the observational barriers claim. Comment [1] to Pennsylvania Rule 3.1 makes clear that, when representing his client, a lawyer may only pursue “lawful and ethical measures.” A lawyer with “excessive and misplaced zeal” breaches his ethical obligations when he litigates a case that has no factual basis.

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The hearing examiners found that Giuliani violated Pennsylvania’s rules for attorney conduct in several ways, not least of which by requesting the wholesale disenfranchisement of the state’s urban voters, relief so “outlandish” and “shocking in itself” that it constituted a breach of ethics.

At a hearing in December, Giuliani presented more of the “evidence” of vote fraud he’s relied on in support of his claims of a stolen election. But none of it related to the lawsuit’s claims that the plastic barrier allowed Democratic operatives to sneak in fraudulent ballots. Moreoever, his lack of repentance seemed to further anger the tribunal.

In view of Respondent’s intransigence, we are convinced that a sanction must be enhanced to ensure that it adequately deters both Respondent and other attorneys from acting similarly in the future.

And while the panel expressed respect for Giuliani’s past accomplishments, it found that “his utter disregard for facts denigrates the legal profession” and recommended his disbarment.

The DC Court of Appeals will now take up the recommendation, but Giuliani vowed to keep fighting.

“The decision-makers at the DC Bar Association are nothing more than an arm of the permanent regime in Washington,” his spokesman Ted Goodman told Politico. “This is also part of an effort to deny President Trump effective counsel by persecuting Rudy Giuliani—objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history. I call on rank-and-file members of the DC Bar Association to speak out against this great injustice.”

Well, Trump famously stiffed “one of the most effective prosecutors in American history” for his post-election services. But it’s a Friday in July, so, what the hell, right?

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Government, Legal Ethics, Rudy Giuliani