A federal judge detained Rud on Wednesday

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Giuliani is liable in a libel lawsuit brought by two Georgia election officials who say they were falsely accused of fraud.

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The mayor paid lip service to complying with his legal obligations, while trying to portray himself as a victim in the case.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the sentence was necessary because Giuliani had failed to fulfill his duty as a defendant to pass on information requested by election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter.

Wandrea “Shaye” Wandrea ArShaye

Moss, as part of their lawsuit.

In their December 2021 complaint, Giuliani, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys and a close confidant of the former Republican president, was accused of defaming them by falsely alleging that they engaged in fraud while counting the ballots in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

In a statement on Wednesday, the women said they had endured a living nightmare and an unimaginable wave of hate and threats over Giuliani’s comments.

Nothing can fix everything we’ve lost, but today’s ruling is yet another neutral finding that confirmed what we’ve known all along: that there was never any truth to the allegations about us and that we didn’t do anything wrong . We have been smeared for purely political reasons, and those responsible can and should be held accountable, they said.

The ruling adds to the legal jeopardy for Giuliani at a time when he and Trump are both among 19 defendants charged this month in a racketeering case related to efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election. It also creates the potential for a huge financial penalty for Giuliani as the case moves to a federal trial in Washington, where a jury would determine damages for which he may be liable.

He is given one last chance to provide the requested information, known in law as discovery, but may face additional penalties if he fails to do so. In the meantime, Howell says, Giuliani and company must pay more than $130,000 in attorneys’ fees.

Howell expressed skepticism about Giuliani’s claims that he cannot afford to pay back the plaintiffs in the case, noting that he had recently offered his Manhattan apartment for $6.5 million and was reportedly with a flew to Atlanta on a private jet to surrender to the charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

Donning a cloak of victimization may work well for some audiences on a public stage, but in a court of law this feat has served only to undermine the normal process of discovery in a simple libel case, with the attendant need for repeated intervention of the court. Howell wrote.

Howell said that, aside from an initial document production of 193 pages, the information Giuliani turned over consisted largely of a single page of communications, blobs of indecipherable data, and “a piece of the financial documents that had to be produced.”

He may have calculated that his overall litigation risks are minimized by failing to meet his discovery obligations in this case, Howell said. Whatever the reason, obligations are case specific and withholding the required discovery has consequences in this case.

The judge said Giuliani paid only lip service to compliance with his discovery obligations.

Giuliani has attributed his failure to provide the requested documents to the fact that his devices were seized by federal investigations in 2021 as part of a separate Justice Department investigation that turned up no criminal charges.

Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, said in a statement that the judge’s ruling “is a good example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the trial is the punishment. This decision must be reversed as Mayor Giuliani is falsely accused of failing to preserve electronic evidence seized and held by the FBI.

Last month, Giuliani admitted to making public comments falsely claiming that election workers committed voter fraud during the 2020 election, but claimed the statements were protected by the First Amendment.

This caveat, Howell said, has more holes than Swiss cheese and suggested Giuliani was more interested in coming up with the workers’ claims than actually producing meaningful discoveries in the case.

But just as taking shortcuts to win elections carries risks, so even potential criminal liability for circumventing the discovery process carries serious penalties, no matter what caveats a non-compliant party tries to artificially maintain. to appeal, she said.

Moss had worked for the Fulton County Elections Department since 2012, overseeing the absentee ballot during the 2020 election. Freeman was a temporary election clerk, verifying signatures on absentee ballots and preparing them for counting and processing.

Giuliani and others alleged at a Georgia Legislative Subcommittee hearing in December 2020 that State Farm Arena surveillance videos showed the election workers committing election fraud.

As these allegations circulated online, the two women said they suffered intense harassment, both in person and online. Moss described her experience in emotional testimony to the members of Congress investigating the uprising at the Capitol. The January 6 commission also played video testimony from Freeman at the June 2022 hearing.

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