During the efforts by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to overturn the results of the last election, three lawyers stood out for the absurdity of their efforts: Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and John Eastman, part of what Mike Pence memorably labeled as a ‘gaggle of crackpot lawyers’. If we ever needed any further evidence that Giuliani is truly an outstanding member of that exclusive club, we now have a ruling against him by a federal judge.
You may recall how Giuliani in public forums claimed that how two Georgia election workers Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman had illegally manipulated thousands of votes and were seen surreptitiously “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” (He presumably meant USB drives, not ports.) They are actually passing ginger mints to each other. As a result, the two women suffered severe harassment and death threats from the MAGA cultists.
The two women sued him for defamation and this is where things get even more weird. Giuliani did not comply with the discovery request to produce certain records and then claimed that it would cost too much to produce those documents. He conceded in an earlier court filing on July 25 that in order to save that expense he would conceded that he made “false” statements about them. You can read his stipulation here.
“Defendant Giuliani, for the purposes of litigation only, does not contest that, to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false,” Giuliani wrote in a signed stipulation that he said was intended to “avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes.”
He seemed to be claiming that ‘for the purposes of litigation’ only he was willing to concede the statements in order to avoid the cost of producing the documents but that such a concession did not imply any liability for his statements. Now the judge in the defamation case has ruled that by that statement, Giuliani has effectively conceded that he defamed the two women and so the court would no longer have to decide the issue of whether defamation had occurred. Hence he was liable for damages and the trial would move immediately to the question of how much he should pay in damages. The judge has already ruled that he has to pay the two women’s attorney fees of around. $90,000. The final damages could come to a lot more.
I am not a lawyer but what what Giuliani and his lawyers are doing is incomprehensible to me. There seem to be crackpot lawyers all over the place.
What has been notable during all these post-election shenanigans is how reckless these people are, smearing anyone with anything if they think it advances their agenda. They desperately need comeuppance.
Eugh. They deserve everything they got. Ginger… mints? Abomination!
What it sounds very much like is the “free man on the land” nonsense people were trying on a few years back -- the deluded impression some people were sold that if you spout just the right legalese-sounding magic spells, you get to just walk out of the courtroom, not pay taxes and so on and there’s nothing The Man can do to touch you because something something maritime law something something legal fiction something something lawful rebellion blah blah. But the victims in those situations were, in the main, demonstrably moronic dupes who read something they bought on the internet and thought they could bamboozle a literal judge. They were not, generally, former prominent politicians and literal, actual, qualified and formerly practicing lawyers themselves. But “yeah, FOR THE PURPOSES OF LITIGATION ONLY I admit I did the thing I’m being accused of, but I’m only admitting it to avoid having to do the thing I have to do, so y’know you can’t use it against me or anything…”.
The one question I always had for anyone espousing the free man on the land stuff was this: can you point to a single example, even one, of this stuff actually working? Because Youtube was FULL, a few years back, of these people getting arrested for
drivingsorry, “travelling” without car insurance or whatever, and sometimes being dragged literally kicking and screaming into police vehicles, loudly refusing to consent to being arrested, like that was going to make any difference. There were notably few (i.e. zero) videos of judges ruefully admitting that yes, Magna Carta did indeed apply in this case andJohn Smithsorry, “John of the family Smith” could actually just leave now, thanks, and forget about his tax bill.… the judge in the defamation case has ruled that by that statement, Giuliani has effectively conceded …
Thus saving the judge the headaches of a trial starring knothead lawyers and an obnoxious defendant, and providing law textbook authors a prime example of What Not to Do (even more so if RG’s attorneys attempt an appeal).
sonofrojblake @1:
I can’t help but think that, had they been Black, they would have been dead shortly thereafter.
There’s been some discussion about the possibility that Giuliani is deliberately avoiding discovery here and is willing to take the hit of the fine because some of what would come up in discovery would be guaranteed to make things a lot worse for a lot of the other charges he’s been hit with in Georgia, and he’s hoping to be able to avoid that.
The judge in this case practically accused him of that, noting that Giuliani’s legal career meant that he ‘should have known better’ and that the refusal to properly co-operate with discovery was almost certainly deliberate.
I realise the My Pillow guy is no lawyer but some of the claims he spouts in his “docu-movie” overlaps with the claims of election fraud made by Giuliani.
Here is a comedic summary of the film he made.
https://youtu.be/E63v1vD1XWw
#3 bill,
There is something of a cottage industry of youtube channels documenting America’s ‘sovereign citizen / Moorish National (etc.)’ interactions with police, and they don’t get shot. While it is true that black people are more likely than white to have a police interaction turn violent, it is still a low rate overall, and deaths are lower still.
This got me curious, so I looked up who’s representing Giuliani in this case… It’s a chap called Joseph D. Sibley IV, and digging around him turns up a 2004 paper called Race Judicata in which he “posits the theory of whether the Supreme Court adopted bad facts (in a U.S. Constitutional sense) to reach it’s determination” [sic] in Brown v Board of Education, which certainly has some crackpottish vibes about it. For example, the first sentence is:
[emphasis orginal]
Which is certainly an… let’s say “interesting“… opening, and it doesn’t get much better from there. I suppose some allowance should be made for the fact that he was apparently only a second year student at the time…
Dunc@#7:
Not entirely surprising. It’s been documented for years that the actual key issue for the Moral Majority sorts back in Reagan’s time wasn’t Roe v. Wade… it was Brown v. Board of Education, or more immediately, Bob Jones University v. United States, which was the court case involving BJU attempting to get out from its obligations under Brown. Roe v. Wade just allowed them to not have to openly admit what they really wanted.
There is a long history of making sure that some group is kept as a permanent ‘other’ so that they can be used as scapegoats rather than letting the people understand that their leaders are more interested in what is good for the leaders than what is good for the people. Letting Black kids go to school with White kids makes it harder to raise the White kids to always treat Black kids as the ‘other’, so obviously that’s something they’ve been trying to roll back…
“Giuliani really is a crackpot lawyer”
Should be WAS a crackpot lawyer. His law license has been revoked in NY and DC. Now, he’s just a crackpot. : )