Rudy Giuliani Has a Problem: The former mayor and Trump attorney, in late 2020, accused two women of having worked to commit election fraud, leading to threats against them. He now admits that wasn’t true.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, during his time as former President Donald Trump’s attorney during and after the 2020 election, said many outlandish and untrue things, many of them while standing in front of Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
One of those things was the accusation, not backed by any evidence, that a pair of poll workers in Georgia had worked to cheat in the 2020 election. Those two women were Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother, and daughter, who were poll workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Giuliani had alleged that the two women were passing USB drives “like vials of heroin or cocaine,” in charges later repeated by Donald Trump himself, along with heavily edited videos that supposedly show them manipulating the drives.
The two were harassed as a result, they testified before the January 6 Committee last year, and Freedman even had to flee her home.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman said last June, as reported by NBC News. “I have lost my name and I have lost my reputation. … All because a group of people starting with number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter.”
The two women were cleared of any wrongdoing last year, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations declaring that the accusations of election fraud were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”
And now, in a court filing, Giuliani has admitted that the accusations were not true.
“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 admitted in a filing this week, in a case in which Freeman and Moss are suing him.
The January 6 Committee, in their report, called Giuliani’s conduct in this instance “callous, inhumane, and inexcusable.”
The admission, he said, is to “avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes.”
Michael J. Gottlieb, an attorney for the plaintiffs, expressed happiness with Giuliani’s admission.
“Giuliani’s stipulation concedes what we have always known to be true — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss honorably performed their civic duties in the 2020 presidential election in full compliance with the law, and the allegations of election fraud he and former-President Trump made against them have been false since day one,” Gottlieb said, per CNBC. “While certain issues, including damages, remain to be decided by the court, our clients are pleased with this major milestone in their fight for justice, and look forward to presenting what remains of this case at trial.”
CNN had reported earlier this month that Giuliani was working to settle the lawsuit.
Giuliani’s attorney Ted Goodman stated, per CNBC, that “This is a legal issue, not a factual issue… Those out to smear the mayor are ignoring the fact that this stipulation is designed to get to the legal issues of the case.”
Politico, meanwhile, noted this week that the attorneys that called themselves the “elite strike force team” have been having a rough go of it lately, as a panel in Washington earlier this month recommended that Giuliani be disbarred.
“Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York, and early this month, a disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., recommended that he be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” conduct,” Politico said of Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis. ‘A federal appeals court recently upheld court sanctions against Powell for making ‘entirely baseless’ claims and “frivolous allegations of widespread voter fraud.’ And in March, Ellis was censured by a judge in Colorado for making false claims ‘on Twitter and to nationally televised audiences’ that ‘undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.’”
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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