Rudy Giuliani’s law license should be revoked over his work on a failed lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results on behalf of then president Donald Trump, a Washington attorney ethics committee has recommended.
He now faces being disbarred in the capital after the review panel late on Friday condemned the lawyer and ex-politician for aggressively pursuing the false assertions Trump made about his defeat by Democratic rival and now US president Joe Biden.
Giuliani “claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence”, wrote the three-member panel in a report that details the errors and unsupported claims the former mayor of New York City made in a Pennsylvania lawsuit seeking to overturn the election result.
Between the November 2020 election day and the January 6 insurrection by supporters of Trump at the US Capitol, Giuliani and other Trump lawyers repeatedly pressed claims of election fraud that were untrue and almost uniformly rejected by federal and state courts.
He is the third lawyer who could lose his ability to practice law over what he did for Trump: John Eastman faces disbarment in California, and Lin Wood this week surrendered his license in Georgia.
“Mr Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy,” wrote the panel members, Robert Bernius, Carolyn Haynesworth-Murrell and Jay Brozost.
“The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments,” they wrote. “It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done.”
Giuliani has already had his New York law license suspended for false statements he made after the election. The Washington review panel’s work will now go to the DC court of appeals for a final decision.
Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, called for support from Washington lawyers and criticized the panel’s work as “the sort of behavior we’d expect out of the Soviet Union”.
Giuliani ran a short and disastrous campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2008 election.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting
