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Donald Trump’s top ally and attorney Rudy Giuliani was disbarred from practicing law in Washington DC on Thursday, months after a similar decision in his home state of New York left his reputation in tatters.
The former New York City mayor was Trump’s lead attorney in 2020 and early 2021 as the ex-president launched a series of increasingly desperate schemes to hold on to power. It began in Ukraine, where Giuliani was Trump’s man on the ground as part of efforts to coerce that country’s government into opening a criminal investigation into Joe Biden, with the purpose of damaging Biden politically.
After Giuliani’s shenanigans abroad lead to the first impeachment of Trump that year, the ex-mayor would go on to represent Trump at home during the 2020 election and in the days following. In the weeks after his defeat by Biden, Trump leaned on Giuliani and other members of his legal team like Jenna Ellis and Jon Eastman to file legal challenges aimed at halting or reversing the certification of the election results in states including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.
Those efforts failed across the board, and Giuliani himself was forced to admit in one instance that the Trump campaign never had the hard evidence of massive numbers of fraudulent ballots which Trump himself was claiming to have obtained.
On Thursday, the consequences of that admission — and his overall scheme to undo the election, which culminated in January 6 — were laid bare once again in the nation’s capital. Giuliani will be permanently banned from practicing law in the District of Columbia.
His spokesman Ted Goodman told NBC News that the decision was “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice" and called on top legal minds to speak out in Giuliani’s defense. But the exact opposite has been happening for years; all credible constitutional legal scholars have rejected the various arguments put forward by the Trump team in 2020, and have derided the continued inability of Giuliani or anyone else who represented those arguments to actually prove the unsubstantiated claims of fraud they were pushing at the time.
“The people coming after Mayor Giuliani can’t take away the fact that he remains the most effective prosecutor in American history, who did more to improve the lives of others than almost any other American alive today,” Goodman added.
Giuliani himself added an element of comedy and sad bufoonery to the proceedings with his own behavior. He frequently made outlandish claims which neither he nor his allies could back up, all the while relying on far-from-credible eyewitnesses who where thrust into the spotlight by Trump’s legal team. Then there was the spectacle presented by the former mayor himself — sweating some kind of black ooze at one press appearance, audibly breaking wind during one hearing where he attempted to present a group of Trump supporters as eyewitnesses to fraud, and calling a press conference at a landscaping company due to a confusing mix-up with the Four Seasons hotel.
Altogether Giuliani’s contributions to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election likely hurt more than they helped. Now, he claims the RNC and Trump campaign still owe him $2m in unpaid legal fees and he has filed for bankruptcy as the staggering costs of his ride-or-die attitude come to bear.
There’s also the issue of the stunning $148m defamation judgement won against him by two election workers in Georgia, whom Giuliani and other Republicans led a harassment campaign against over bogus election fraud claims.
But the fallout is not likely to end there. The once-mayor of New York still remains under felony indictment in Arizona, for the Trump campaign’s election schemes there, as well as in Georgia where the case is currently held up by the Trump campaign’s efforts to delay or shutter the case.
