A federal judge sanctioned former New York City mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday as part of a civil case brought by two Georgia election workers.
A federal judge sanctioned former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, ordering him to cough up thousands of dollars as part of a civil case brought by two Georgia election workers whom he accused of rigging the 2020 presidential election, court filings show.
DC-based US District Judge Beryl Howell issued a default judgment against former New York City Mayor Giuliani, 79, for repeatedly failing to provide electronic communications or complete financial records to attorneys for Peach State election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shay” Moss in their defamation suit.
In a 57-page memo, Howell said the former federal prosecutor had “given only lip service” to a process he knew intimately from experience and instead “thwarted” the plaintiffs’ attorneys at every step.
“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straight-forward defamation case, with the concomitant necessity of repeated court intervention,” she wrote.
The evidence requested included private emails and messages from Giuliani’s electronic devices, which were seized by the FBI in April 2021 before being returned in August 2022 — at which point, Giuliani claimed, they had been “wiped out.”
However, Howell sided with the plaintiffs’ attorneys in finding that Giuliani had done little to preserve his personal communications, noting at least two devices were not seized by federal agents.
