Rudy Giuliani faces ethics charges in DC over failed election arguments
Rudy Giuliani. Image from Shutterstock.
Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, is facing ethics charges in Washington, D.C., as a result of his unsuccessful arguments in a federal lawsuit seeking to invalidate as many as 1.5 million votes in Pennsylvania.
Giuliani allegedly made “conclusory accusations” about widespread voter fraud and promised 300 “affidavits, declarations or our own statements that we’ve written down” to support it, according to the June 6 complaint by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals’ Board on Professional Responsibility.
But those documents were unsupported, unrelated to Trump voters, involved conduct outside the counties sued and were “isolated incidents” that could not have affected now-President Joe Biden’s 80,000-plus margin of victory in the state, the board said in its complaint.
Giuliani represented two voters whose incorrect ballots were correctly disregarded by county officials, the ethics complaint said. Rather than ask that the two ballots be counted, Giuliani instead sought to invalidate the counting of up to 1.5 million votes in counties that allowed voters to cure their deficient mail-in ballots.
The ethics complaint alleges that Giuliani engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice by asserting issues “without a nonfrivolous basis in law.”
Giuliani has been on inactive, nonpracticing status in Washington, D.C., since 2002. He was suspended there on an interim basis in July 2021 as a result of his interim suspension the prior month in New York for “demonstrably false and misleading statements” claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Hat tip to Law.com, the Legal Profession Blog, Law360 and Reuters, which had coverage of the ethics complaint.
See also:
ABAJournal.com: “Afternoon briefs: Search of Giuliani’s home is ‘legal thuggery,’ says his lawyer; top legal officer earns $50.9M”
