In a hearing in front of state lawmakers in Georgia on 11 December 2020, Rudy Giuliani baselessly accused a mother-daughter pair of election workers in the state of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine”.
He smeared Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as criminals whose workplaces and homes should be searched for evidence of voter fraud.
Donald Trump’s former attorney, who launched spurious lawsuits to overturn 2020 presidential election results, also appeared on podcasts and television shows to falsely claim those women wheeled a suitcase loaded with fraudulent ballots into a vote-counting centre and used a flash drive to manipulate the results to ensure Joe Biden’s victory.
Three years and one day after he introduced those bogus claims to Georgia lawmakers, Mr Giuliani sat with his attorneys for the first day of a civil trial in a federal courtroom in Washington DC, where an eight-member jury will determine how much he owes for defaming them.
The case is among the highest-profile attempts yet to hold members of Mr Trump’s circle accountable for the volatile aftermath of the 2020 election. His attorneys fear it could be the “civil equivalent of the death penalty” for him.
If jurors impose the tens of millions of dollars in damages the women could be awarded, his attorneys told the jury that “it would be the end of Mr Giuliani.”
Rudy Giuliani arrives for the first day of a defamation trial in federal court in Washington DC on 11 December— (EPA)
Mr Giuliani was already found liable for defaming those women, who faced a wave of racist threats and harassment fuelled by false claims amplified across social media and right-wing media networks.
Those threats and a pressure campaign against them are also at the centre of a sprawling criminal case in Atlanta, where Mr Giuliani is a co-defendant alongside the former president and a dozen others accused of a criminal enterprise to unlawfully overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
He also is an unnamed co-conspirator in a federal election conspiracy case that charges Mr Trump with four crimes connected to his alleged attempts to subvert the election’s outcome.
The lawsuit against Mr Giuliani initially included co-defendants including right-wing media outlet One America News, its owners and one of its star personalities. They later settled, leaving only Mr Giuliani, the former New York City mayor once hailed as “America’s mayor” and now embroiled in a growing heap of legal challenges stemming from his loyalty to the criminally indicted former president.
Von DuBose, an attorney representing the election workers, held up a ginger mint to the jurors in his opening statements on 11 December.
That’s what Ms Freeman handed her mother, “a piece of candy,” not a USB drive loaded with fraudulent votes to steal the election from Mr Trump.
Jurors will not see any video of them passing around a USB drive “because it doesn’t exist,” he said.
The only issue remaining at a four-day trial in Washington DC will determine just how much Mr Giuliani owes the defendants for their claims of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and punitive damages.
Mr Giuliani is not only liable for the harm caused by his own actions, but also for the actions of his co-conspirators, US District Judge Beryl Howell told jurors.
The judge’s default judgment in the case in August reprimanded Mr Giuliani for his failure to turn over evidence in the case and attempts to frame himself as a victim of unfair persecution.
“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,” the judge wrote.
“We will ask you to think about how needless, how cruel, it is for powerful figures like Mr Giuliani to target election workers and volunteers and brand them as fraudsters and criminals without evidence,” their attorney Michael Gottlieb told jurors in his opening statement.
“In the United States of America, behaviour like Rudy Giuliani’s is not the inevitable result of politics,” he said. “It is not acceptable, and it will not be tolerated.”
‘There is nowhere I feel safe’
Working out of Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in November 2020, the women’s actions were scrutinised by right-wing activists on surveillance video. They were accused of pulling ballots out of “suitcases,” a claim that spun out into a conspiracy theory that votes for Joe Biden were separately hauled into the vote count to manipulate the results. Those “suitcases” were bags from which ballots had been sealed and stored.
At a state legislative hearing on 10 December, 2020, Mr Giuliani accused the women of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” to “infiltrate” voting machines. He accused them of “illegal activity” and suggested police search their homes “for evidence”.
Four days before a joint session of Congress convened to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, then-President Trump made a now-infamous phone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that is now evidence in the criminal cases against him.
Mr Trump urged the state’s chief elections official to “find” enough votes to secure his victory in the state, despite three counts that verified Mr Biden’s decisive victory in the state.
He mentioned Ms Freeman’s name 18 times on the call. He claimed that the women pulled out “what looked to be suitcases or trunks” that were “stuffed with votes” with a “minimum” of “18,000 ballots, all for Biden.”
He called Ms Freeman “a professional vote scammer.”
In June, Georgia’s State Election Board completed its investigation into what amounted to bogus claims of election fraud at the State Farm Arena, finding that the claims were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”
Last year, Ms Freeman appeared before a House select committee investigating the events of January 6, when a mob of Mr Trump’s supporters fuelled by similarly false claims that the election was stolen or rigged against him stormed the US Capitol and blocked the certification of millions of Americans’ votes.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?” Ms Freeman told the panel.
“The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not target one,” she said. “But he targeted me … a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stepped up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”
Shaye Moss, left, and Ruby Freeman speak onstage during the 16th annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at the American Museum of Natural History in 2022— (Getty Images for CNN)
Ms Moss began a full-time role with the Fulton County Department of Registration & Elections in 2017, handling voter applications and requests for mail-in ballots and helping process the vote count on Election Day.
Her mother, a retired local government worker at a centre coordinating 911 emergency calls for the county, had opened a small business selling fashion accessories.
Following a June primary election that endured the Covid-19 pandemic and technical difficulties, election workers had bolstered preparations for the major fall election. Ms Moss asked her mother to help. She signed up as a temporary worker.
By 10pm that night, after roughly 18 hours of work, with only a handful of election workers remaining at the State Farm arena, workers began packing up and sealing remaining absentee ballots into large plastic boxes for overnight storage until they could return the following morning.
With heightened scrutiny on the results, Mr Raffensperger and state elections director Chris Harvey called on Fulton County elections director Richard Barron to keep counting ballots. Under that order, Ms Moss pulled out the containers and election workers resumed the count under surveillance from an independent elections monitor and a state investigator, according to officials.
But Trump campaign attorneys later accused the women of committing fraud, triggering a right-wing media campaign against them, including segments on Fox News, One America News and The Gateway Pundit, which published a story identifying Ms Freeman alongside photos labelling her a “crook”.
The coverage ignited a firestorm of racist and hateful messages towards Ms Moss that turned her life “upside down,” she told the House select committee last year.
His statements “helped unleash a wave of hatred and threats we never could have imagined,” the women told The Independent in a statement in August.
“It cost us our sense of security and our freedom to go about our lives,” they added.
Rudy Giuliani is pictured leaving federal court in Washington DC on 19 May— (Getty Images)
Ms Freeman – known as “Lady Ruby,” a name emblazoned on a jacket she later refused to wear in public – told the House select committee that she spent the year that followed the attacks looking over her shoulder.
“I second guess everything that I do,” she said. “It’s affected my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies.”
By 4 December, 2020, Ms Freeman had received about “300 emails, 75 text messages, a large amount of phone calls and multiple Facebook posts,” according to a police incident report.
The women fled their homes on advice from FBI agents who suggested they remain in hiding until at least Inauguration Day.
Ms Freeman lost her name, her reputation and her sense of security, she told the committee, “all because a group of people starting with No 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter.”
Defence attorneys ask for ‘fair and proportional’ damages
Mr Giuliani himself could be called to the witness stand to testify in his own defence.
Jenna Ellis, among attorneys alongside Mr Giuliani who launched a failed legal campaign to overturn election results, also is on the trial’s witness list, along with other Trump-connected figures Bernie Kerik and Christina Bobb, among others.
Mr Giuliani could testify for an hour, according to court documents.
Ms Freeman and Ms Moss also are expected to testify for nearly two hours and up to three hours, respectively.
Ms Ellis – who was among Mr Giuliani’s co-defendants in the Georgia case – recently reached a plea agreement with Fulton County prosecutors charging her with one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.
Her testimony in Mr Giuliani’s trial could discuss his “efforts and strategy” to overturn election results, as well as video of the women working to count ballots on election night that he falsely claimed depicted fraud, according to a court filing.
Christina Bobb – a former anchor for One America News Network – promoted false claims about the 2020 election during her appearances on the far-right cable outlet. She has since joined Mr Trump’s legal team with his Save America PAC.
She “may testify about working with Defendant Giuliani to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the allegations against plaintiffs at issue in this litigation,” according to the latest joint filing. Her testimony also is expected to last 15 minutes on direct examination.
In his opening statement in his client’s defamation trial, Mr Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Sibley that there was “no question” Ms Freeman and Ms Moss were harmed.
But there is “not much evidence that Mr Giuliani was the cause,” he told jurors.
He asked jurors to consider awarding damages that are “fair and proportional” to what he claimed is his client’s limited role. “If you award the damages they are asking for, it will be the end of Mr Giuliani.”
