Voting company Smartmatic tore into Rudy Giuliani for fabricating “excuse after excuse” to avoid handing over documents in its $2.7bn defamation suit involving him and Fox News for spreading misinformation about the 2020 elections.
After the 2020 elections, the voting system company filed a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox News, as well as former New York City mayor Mr Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell, after the network ran numerous reports which alleged the firm conspired with Venezuela’s socialist government to steal the 2020 elections from Mr Trump.
“‘The dog ate my homework.’ ‘I have to wash my hair.’ ‘I can’t go out, I’m sick.’ Since the dawn of time, people have made up excuses to avoid doing things they do not want to do. This is exactly what Giuliani has done here,” Smartmatic wrote in court filings on Monday.
The company accused Mr Giuliani of “half-heartedly” performing manual searches on his devices resulting in outcomes that were both “absurd” and inadequate after he said he had “misplaced” his iPhone.
Smartmatic claimed he only provided two public tweets to the company in response to their comprehensive document requests to establish whether he is telling the truth about not being able to afford a vendor to handle their data request.
Fox News and other defendants have denied the allegations.
Last year, Mr Giuliani counter-sued Smartmatic to recoup legal fees for defending himself against the lawsuit and the defamation lawsuit, which he called as “baseless” and which he claimed interfered with his constitutional right to speak freely on issues of public concern.
Smartmatic is now urging a New York state judge to compel Mr Giuliani to provide the requested documents and to furnish a financial statement that substantiates his assertion of being unable to afford an external vendor for the extensive discovery demand.
Additionally, Smartmatic is seeking sanctions against Mr Giuliani and requesting he cover a portion of the company’s legal expenses even as his legal bills seem to be piling up.
Mr Giuliani has said in a sworn affidavit to the company that he “lost” his iPhone he used between November 2020 and April 2021 and he was able to search for documents on a cloud-based backup of his phone.
He said he “did a manual search” of his current iPhone and iPad, but “was not able to find” any text messages with the keywords that Smartmatic is seeking as part of the discovery process.
The Smartmatic lawsuit is just one of the various legal battles that Mr Giuliani is facing. In the latest, he was named an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation in which Mr Trump was criminally charged for his attempts to overturn the 2020 elections.
