Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is the last of 17 defendants to be served an indictment in Arizona’s fake-elector case for his role in an attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the Arizona attorney general said.
Kris Mayes posted the news regarding the Trump-aligned lawyer on her Twitter/X account late Friday.
“The final defendant was served moments ago. @RudyGiuliani nobody is above the law,” Mayes wrote.
The attorney general’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, said in an email to the Associated Press on Saturday that Giuliani faces the same charges as the other defendants, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.
Earlier Friday evening, Giuliani had tweeted a taunting message alongside a photo of himself surrounded by smiling friends. “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning,” he wrote in a now-deleted tweet, “1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”
— AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes (@AZAGMayes) May 18, 2024
Hours later, he was served notice of the indictment.
Giuliani’s political adviser, Ted Goodman, confirmed Giuliani was served Friday night after his 80th birthday celebration as he was walking to his car.
The indictment comes just days after Giuliani was suspended by WABC, a New York radio station for attempting to use his show to continue perpetuating the lie that the former president lost the 2020 election due to electoral fraud.
It also comes after Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in December 2023. The filing came after he was ordered to pay $148m in a defamation case brought against him by two Georgia poll workers whom he falsely accused of being involved in election subversion.
Earlier this month, Giuliani’s lawyers said in a court filing that “nobody seems interested” in helping the former New York mayor meet accounting obligations in his bankruptcy case.
“We look forward to full vindication soon,” Goodman said in a statement Saturday.
The indictment alleges that Giuliani “pressured” Arizona legislators and the Maricopa county board of supervisors to change the outcome of Arizona’s election and that he was responsible for encouraging Republican electors in Arizona and six other contested states to vote for Trump.
Taylor said an unredacted copy of the indictment will be released Monday. He added Giuliani is expected to appear in court in Phoenix Tuesday unless he is granted a delay by the court.
Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is among others who have been indicted in the case.
Neither Meadows nor Giuliani were named in the redacted grand jury indictment released earlier because they had not been served with it, but they were readily identifiable based on descriptions in the document. The Arizona attorney general’s office said Wednesday that Meadows had been served and confirmed that he was charged with the same counts as the other named defendants, including conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.
With the indictments, Arizona becomes the fourth state where allies of the former president have been charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related to the election.
Giuliani was also indicted last year by a grand jury in Georgia, where he is accused of spearheading Trump’s efforts to compel state lawmakers in Georgia to ignore the will of voters and illegally appoint pro-Trump electoral college electors.
Among the defendants in the Arizona case are 11 Arizona Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election – including a former state GOP chair, a 2022 US Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers. The other defendants are Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of election day operations, and four attorneys accused of organizing an attempt to use fake documents to persuade Congress not to certify Biden’s victory: John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis.
Trump himself was not charged but was referred to as an unindicted co-conspirator.
The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on 14 December 2020 to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.
Eastman, who devised a strategy to try to persuade Congress not to certify the election, became the first person charged in Arizona’s fake-elector case to be arraigned on Friday. He pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges.
Eastman made a brief statement outside the courthouse, saying the charges against him should never have been filed.
“I had zero communications with the electors in Arizona [and] zero involvement in any of the election litigation in Arizona or legislative hearings. And I am confident that with the laws faithfully applied, I will be fully exonerated at the end of this process,” Eastman said. He declined to make further comment.
Arraignments are scheduled 21 May for 12 other people charged in the case, including nine of the 11 Republicans who had submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump had won Arizona.
The Arizona indictment said Eastman encouraged the GOP electors to cast their votes in December 2020, unsuccessfully pressured state lawmakers to change the election’s outcome in Arizona and told then vice-president Mike Pence that he could reject Democratic electors in the counting of electoral votes in Congress on 6 January 2021.
Associated Press contributed to this report
