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Rudy Giuliani defended his work on former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election reversal, as he testified Monday in a Washington, DC, attorney disciplinary trial.
Over the course of several hours of questioning by the lead attorney in the D.C. Bar disciplinary office, Giuliani acknowledged that he was now vague about the election process in Pennsylvania — where he signed a lawsuit against Trump’s defeat, which is at the heart of the current law ethics. allegations — and argued against the idea that the allegations of fraud in the lawsuit should be more specific.
“You don’t go to court to prove – I mean, you’re very lucky if you do. You don’t start a lawsuit to prove, but to make a responsible claim,” said the former mayor of New York City. “I was making responsible claims based on the things I was told by other people. I wasn’t proving – I had a long way to prove.”
The Board on Professional Responsibility is hearing testimony from Giuliani and other witnesses as it weighs whether the lawsuit he filed on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2020 brought him into violation of lawyers’ ethics rules.
The disciplinary proceedings take the form of a trial, with several witnesses, including Giuliani. The disciplinary process, which was launched by DC disciplinary counsel Hamilton Fox, still has several steps to go before it is finally resolved.
At Monday’s hearing, Fox questioned Giuliani about the logic of the Pennsylvania lawsuit, where the Trump campaign attempted to throw out hundreds of thousands of mail ballots, and what evidence the Trump team had to support its allegations of mass fraud. In one exchange, Fox pointed to an account referenced in the lawsuit about ballots being damaged by a Pennsylvania county’s voting machines. He asked Giuliani what other evidence could be combined with that account to allege fraud.
“Of course I didn’t know that at the beginning of the trial. No lawyer would know that, Mr. Fox,” Giuliani said. “You find out when you make a discovery. You will find out if you ask further questions. I am in this case for two days.”
Giuliani described the Trump campaign’s legal strategy for challenging the 2020 election results and said he had hoped to build an eventual case in the US Supreme Court.
“My role was to show that in Pennsylvania the same series of eight or ten suspicious actions, illegal actions, whatever you want to call them – irregular actions – had followed that could not have been the product of an accident,” Giuliani said, while he suggested that the aim was to prove a conspiracy in many states.
There is no evidence of mass fraud in the 2020 election, and the lawsuit in Pennsylvania was dismissed outright by both a district court and an appeals court.
The disciplinary action filed against Giuliani has nothing to do with the Pennsylvania lawsuit filed in federal court in the state. His description of the larger strategy sheds new light on the Trump team’s plan to undo the former president’s electoral defeat — an effort that has come under scrutiny in both an investigation by the Justice Department’s special counsel as by a grand jury in Atlanta’s Fulton County.
Giuliani said Monday that he wrote only a few paragraphs of the initial complaint that was filed and that he relied on a local attorney to lead most of the case. That attorney, Ronald Hicks, withdrew from the lawsuit before it had been heard by a district judge, and Giuliani led the arguments for the Trump campaign.
“I gave (Hicks) language so that eventually we would have a chance to consolidate this case with other similar cases so that we can try to get one case to the Supreme Court,” Giuliani said.
At the time, there was a lot of focus on whether the Trump campaign actually claimed fraud in the lawsuit, as some of those claims were removed from the lawsuit shortly before the Pennsylvania case was heard. During those oral arguments, however, Giuliani made sweeping, baseless claims of “widespread, nationwide voter fraud” and a Democratic plot to steal the Pennsylvania election.
Fox said at the start of the proceedings that Giuliani was “responsible for filing a frivolous action asking a federal court to disenfranchise millions of people in Pennsylvania.”
Giuliani’s attorney, John Leventhal, told the hearing committee that his client had reasonable grounds to believe that the lawsuit had sound legal and factual grounds. Giuliani told the hearing committee that he received a “tidal wave of materials” while working on Trump’s legal efforts in 2020.
Giuliani on Monday doubled down on several conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, including an allegation that Black Lives Matters activists were bussed to Philadelphia to vote illegally in the election. The claim was based on the statement of an out-of-town hotel guest who saw a large group of people wearing Black Lives Matter gear at her Philadelphia hotel and on a statement about the alleged scheme of an unknown Uber driver. Giuliani provided the affidavit to the D.C. Bar Disciplinary Office at the beginning of the ethics review in an effort to demonstrate that the Pennsylvania lawsuit had a reasonable basis.
“Do you think this is reliable evidence of fraud in the 2020 Pennsylvania election?” Fox asked.
“I don’t know, we’d find out. We would definitely follow up on this,” Giuliani said.
Throughout Giuliani’s testimony, Fox asked him not to deviate from the specific questions he was asked and Giuliani accused Fox of not allowing him to provide the full context surrounding the 2020 legal work.
Giuliani’s testimony will resume Tuesday morning and his lawyers will also have the opportunity to ask him questions in the proceedings.
Giuliani is one of many attorneys targeted in professional sanctions proceedings. His license to practice law had already been suspended in New York by the state bar there, which said the former US attorney in Manhattan had “made demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, legislators and the public at large” in his work for the Trump administration. campaign.
Fox, the attorney who heads the D.C. bar’s disciplinary office, alleges that Giuliani violated the code of conduct for attorneys in Pennsylvania by filing a frivolous lawsuit and engaging in “conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice “.
Fox has framed its ethics charges as a case “on the respondent’s ethical obligation as a member of the bar to refrain from making claims in court that have no basis in law or fact whatsoever”
Lawyers for Giuliani argue that in the face of the fast pace of election-related litigation, he relied on information provided to him by others who helped Trump’s legal team and had reason to believe it was true.
Once the procedure is complete, the hearing committee will prepare a report and ultimately make recommendations to the Board on Professional Responsibility. That board will consider a round of briefings from both parties and hear arguments, but the final arbiter of the case will be the local D.C. Court of Appeals.
Giuliani has expressed interest in bringing in witnesses to talk about their investigation into alleged “irregularities” in voting. His initial list of potential witnesses included several prominent names in the Trump world, including some who played central roles in spreading Trump’s election-rigging lies, but his lawyers have since indicated that many of those witnesses will not testify on the advice of their own counsel. .
This story has been updated with additional details.