Giuliani should be disbarred over election case, DC ethics board says

[June 01, 2024]  By David Thomas
 
(Reuters) - Rudy Giuliani should be stripped of his law license for his work on a failed lawsuit challenging former President Donald Trump's 2020 U.S. election loss in Pennsylvania, a Washington, D.C. disciplinary board recommended on Friday. 

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani departs the U.S. District Courthouse after he was ordered to pay $148 million in his defamation case in Washington, U.S., December 15, 2023. REUTERS/Bonnie Cash/File Photo

Giuliani, formerly Trump's personal lawyer and before that a top Manhattan federal prosecutor and mayor of New York City, tried "to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters without the slightest factual basis for doing so," the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility said in its 63-page report.

The board found that Giuliani violated two legal ethics rules by making sweeping claims of voter fraud without evidence in the Pennsylvania lawsuit, which a federal judge dismissed.

Lawyers for Giuliani declined to comment.

John Leventhal, a retired New York state judge who is representing Giuliani, argued in November that the Pennsylvania lawsuit was flawed from its conception, and there was little Giuliani could do to improve it.

The board's recommendation now goes to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has final say on all disciplinary matters involving lawyers licensed in Washington.

Giuliani was called "America's Mayor" following the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on New York's World Trade Center. A hearing committee in July said Giuliani's conduct in the Pennsylvania case transcended "all his past accomplishments."

Giuliani separately faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona alleging he sought to subvert the 2020 election results. He has pleaded not guilty.

(Reporting by David Thomas; Editing by David Bario and David Gregorio)

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