Rudy Giuliani has been hit with ethics charges from the D.C. Bar in connection to his involvement after the 2020 presidential election in pushing false claims of widespread fraud in that election. The arm of the bar behind the case against Giuliani alleges he brazenly violated rules of professional conduct for lawyers in the context of an election-related court case in Pennsylvania in which he argued on Trump’s side.
The charges are not criminal in nature. The matter was apparently filed by the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel with the D.C. Court of Appeals, and Giuliani stands accused of having “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.” During oral arguments in the Pennsylvania case where Giuliani argued for Trump, Giuliani claimed the “only place we have it happening en masse is in the Democrat — heavily controlled 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. And all of the sudden, with this greater opportunity to do it, they did it on a grand scale.”
Obviously, there was no evidence for Giuliani’s bombastic claims — no real-world evidence, at least. Per the new D.C. filing against him, Giuliani “cited to the district court as a basis for his fraud allegations several sources that could not, as a categorical matter, prove that” those the Pennsylvania case targeted had “committed or facilitated election fraud during the 2020 election.” The case involved a push to block Biden’s win in Pennsylvania. Giuliani provided 300 affidavits in the Pennsylvania case, documents that the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary arm said were “(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.”
There will now be a hearing phase for the allegations against Giuliani, after which point info from the bar says the hearing committee dealing with arguments over the claims against him will put together “a report and recommendation, with proposed findings of fact, conclusions of law, and a recommended sanction,” and these conclusions are subsequently passed to the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility. The D.C. Court of Appeals “reviews and approves any disciplinary actions that include the suspension or disbarment of an attorney accused of misconduct,” CNN says.
Texas legal authorities also recently started pursuing accountability for those involved in promoting lies about the election. A disciplinary committee of the State Bar of Texas brought a court case against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over an infamous post-2020 election court case targeting the presidential election outcomes in four states, all of which Biden won. That case, like the Pennsylvania one in which Rudy was involved, failed. A judge will determine any eventual punishments for Paxton. In the meantime, that committee of the bar said Paxton’s claims in that post-election case were “not supported by any charge, indictment, judicial finding, and/or credible or admissible evidence, and failed to disclose to the Court that some of his representations and allegations had already been adjudicated and/or dismissed in a court of law.” The committee brought a similar court case against Brent Webster, the current First Assistant Attorney General in Texas.
