The disciplinary arm of the Washington, D.C., Bar bought an ethics violation case against Rudy Giuliani on Friday over his claims of 2020 election fraud in a federal courtroom in Pennsylvania.
The charges, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, claimed the former New York City mayor broke Pennsylvania’s professional conduct rules in November 2020 when he “brought a proceeding and asserted issues therein without a non-frivolous basis in law and fact for doing so” and “engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
The filing zeroes in on how Giuliani, who presented oral arguments in a lawsuit in the federal court brought on behalf of former President Donald Trump’s campaign, attempted to use two instances of legally rejected ballots to invalidate up to 1.5 million votes in a state President Joe Biden won by 80,000 votes.
“The only place we have it happening en masse is in the [heavily Democratic] counties that you can call counties controlled by a Democratic machine that have quite an impressive list of voter fraud convictions as part of their history and tradition,” Giuliani said, according to the filing. “And all of the sudden, with this greater opportunity to do it, they did it on a grand scale.”
However, the Washington Bar filing says Giuliani “should have known the ‘evidence’ he provided” in the case “relied upon false or faulty statistics and analysis.”
Giuliani also claimed physical barriers were evidence of fraud, the filing said, “despite the fact that (a) the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found the boundaries to be consistent with state election law; (b) Plaintiffs never alleged facts showing improper vote counting; (c) there was no evidence that these boundaries were not applied equally to the campaigns of both major candidates; and (d) one or more Republican-controlled counties also imposed such boundaries.”
In addition, Giuliani presented 300 affidavits to support his stance in Pennsylvania, which the Washington Bar rejected as “(a) unsupported, (b) unrelated to Trump voters (c) involve conduct outside the seven Defendant Counties, and (d) by their own terms were isolated incidents that could not have affected the presidential election’s results by offsetting the Biden majority of over 80,000 votes.”
The lawsuit was tossed in November 2021 by a judge with prejudice, meaning it could not be returned to court, according to Axios. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more,” U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote.
The new filing is the latest in a string of punishments and suspensions for Giuliani over his claims of voter fraud, which have been widely rejected by the courts and election officials. His law license was suspended in New York, and one year ago, he was temporarily suspended from practicing law by the Washington appeals court.
The new claim will now go to a hearing phase in which Giuliani can respond to the allegations in front of a hearing committee. The appeals court has the ultimate authority over disciplinary proceedings, including punishments such as disbarment or suspension, according to CNN.
Reporting by The Washington Examiner.
