DC Board Recommends Disbarment for Rudy Giuliani Over 2020 Election Lies
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Former Trump attorney and close ally Rudy Giuliani should lose his license to practice law in Washington, D.C. for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, a disciplinary board for the Washington, D.C. Bar said Friday.
The Board on Professional Responsibility — the disciplinary arm of the D.C. Court of Appeals, which governs members of the bar — recommended in its report that Giuliani be disbarred from the practice of law in the nation’s capital.
The board’s recommendation affirms an earlier conclusion from the bar’s disciplinary committee that Giuliani should be disbarred primarily for his involvement in Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar — a case that alleged without evidence that election fraud took place in multiple Democratic counties in Pennsylvania.
Last year, the bar’s disciplinary committee concluded that Giuliani made frivolous arguments that sought to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters, and was part of an effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election. The former New York City mayor filed the Pennsylvania lawsuit in an attempt to change the result of the 2020 election without any factual basis to the case’s claims, the panel said in last year’s report.
Today, the board agreed with the committee’s finding that Giuliani violated Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct — specifically the rules against a lawyer bringing a proceeding or issue before the court without a basis in law and fact.
“[Giuliani] alleged that the elections boards in seven Pennsylvania counties were engaged in a deliberate scheme to change the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election in Pennsylvania by counting mail-in ballots that should not have been counted,” today’s report states in its 63-page report. “He 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 even that any illegal mail-in ballots had been counted.”
Disbarment, the board claims, “is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief.”
Read the report and recommendation of the disciplinary board here.