Rudy Giuliani disbarred in DC for his role in election 2020 subversion
Rudy Giuliani failed to file a response to the court’s query as to why his license should not be revoked, the appellate judges wrote in their opinion Thursday. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
The D.C. Court of Appeals on Thursday revoked Rudy Giuliani’s ability to practice law in the District after an attorney discipline board found the former New York mayor and personal attorney for Donald Trump violated the terms of his license while challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The decision by three judges on the court followed years of hearings and court filings in which the District’s law licensing oversight committee scrutinized Giuliani’s conduct, focusing on claims he made about the election in a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that the committee called “utterly false” and “recklessly so.”
Despite previously launching a full-throated challenge to the effort, Giuliani failed to file a response to the court’s query as to why his license should not be revoked, the appellate judges wrote in their opinion Thursday. As a result, they wrote, Giuliani is “hereby disbarred from practicing law in the District of Columbia,” where D.C. Bar records show he had been licensed to practice since 1976.
The decision adds to a mounting list of problems for Giuliani, 80, who faces indictments in Georgia and Arizona on charges related to election subversion.
Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman called the court’s decision a “miscarriage of justice.”
“Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision,” Goodman said in a statement, echoing an argument Giuliani made in previous hearings on the matter. His license was suspended in D.C. in 2021 after the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division suspended his license in that state.
A spokesman for the D.C. Court of Appeals says Giuliani has 14 days to file an appeal.
The D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility recommended to the court in May that Giuliani’s license be permanently revoked, sending the decision to the appeals court judges.
The board in its decision highlighted several elements of the Pennsylvania lawsuit, including Giuliani’s allegations that election boards in seven Pennsylvania counties were engaged in a deliberate scheme to change the outcome of the election by counting mail-in ballots that should not have been counted. The board also noted that Giuliani urged a federal judge to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters even though he had no “objectively reliable evidence” that any such scheme existed or that any illegal mail-in ballots had been counted.
Giuliani’s lawsuit, filed on behalf of Trump, was rejected by a judge. A federal appeals court refused to let the campaign file a revised complaint. During his testimony before the Ad Hoc Hearing Committee for the board, Giuliani often minimized his role in the litigation while asserting that he had done nothing wrong.
In arguing the case against Giuliani, Hamilton P. Fox III, the lead prosecuting attorney for the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel who led the investigation, rejected those claims and said Giuliani had used his law license “to undermine the basic premise of the democratic system that we all live in, that has been in place since the 1800s in this country.”
