Government

Giuliani Shuts Up For First Time In Five Years, Will Not Testify At Defamation Trial

Rudy makes a smart decision? Is it a full moon?

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[Screenshot of Cameo]

Congratulations, Rudy Giuliani!

You finally made a good decision. Took ya long enough!

This morning, Giuliani’s lawyer Joseph Sibley IV announced that the former New York mayor would not be testifying after all in the ongoing defamation trial in DC. Rudy is in court this week so that a jury can decide just how big a check he should cut to poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss after falsely claiming that they tabulated thousands of fake ballots in Atlanta on election night.

Thanks to his flagrant refusal to cooperate in discovery, Rudy already defaulted in August, when Judge Beryl Howell found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy. The only remaining issue is the extent of the plaintiffs’ damages — a topic on which Giuliani is uniquely unqualified to opine.

There’s also the minor matter that Rudy is facing criminal RICO charges in Georgia for some of the same conduct. And yet the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York seemed to think it would be a swell idea to belly up to the witness stand and let a hostile attorney ask him a lot of questions about it.

Although, to be fair, his memory of trial practice may be a bit, umm, unreliable at this point. Last night, he appeared to imply that surprise witnesses were common back in his day, telling reporters, “When I was a prosecutor, the defense wouldn’t tell me who the witnesses were.”

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In this case, the parties submitted a list of expected witnesses, with Rudy vowing to show up and work his magic on the jurors. And during his opening statement Monday, Sibley promised the jury that his client would soon appear before them to explain why he shouldn’t have to pay money for ruining these women’s lives.

But then Wrecking Ball Rudy wandered out of the courthouse and defamed the plaintiffs some more.

“Everything I said about them is true … I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes,” he babbled, before suggesting that reporters should “stay tuned” to hear him prove it.

The next day, a furious Judge Howell interrogated Sibley as to how he was going to control the defendant on the stand. Would he be able to stop Rudy from vomiting out even more defamation in front of the jury?

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Sibley mumbled some nonsense about his client being old, so you can’t blame him if defamation just kind of falls out of his mouth after a long day in court.

“This has taken a bit of a toll on him. He’s almost 80 years old. I think he was sitting here all day at trial at his age,” Sibley said. Which was apparently true, since Giuliani shambled out the door and repeated the performance just hours later. This time he mixed it up by suggesting that Freeman and Moss’s lawyer, Willkie Farr’s Michael Gottlieb, is being subsidized by known criminal mastermind Hunter Biden.

Gottlieb represented the crooked company Burisma. He was close to Hunter. Somebody is paying millions for this. As we now know from one of the ladies, they have no money. So I know what lawyers charge. Somebody should be interested in, is this a political hit job?

In fact, Gottlieb did work with Hunter Biden at Boies Schiller at a time when Biden was working for Burisma. But Gottlieb did not “represent” Burisma, despite several rambling recitations of routine attorney correspondence by Fox, apparently seeking to bore readers into a fugue state where they might imagine some connection to Joe Biden and then … PROFIT!

Of course, if Rudy had participated in discovery, he could have asked about litigation funding. But sadly, he was indisposed, so now he’ll have to content himself with dark implications on the courthouse steps. Perhaps he could have elucidated the matter if he’d taken the stand in his own defense, but sadly it was not meant to be. This morning, Sibley announced that Giuliani would not testify after all.

That left the last witness as Northwestern University Professor Ashlee Humphreys, who testified that it would cost $47 million to repair the women’s reputations. Then Gottlieb closed this morning, summarizing Giuliani’s “defense strategy” for the jurors”:

Rich famous people have valuable reputations, and ordinary people are irrelevant, replaceable, worthless. Mr. Giuliani’s defense is his reputation, his comfort and his goals are more important than those of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. That is a fiction and it ends today.

Well, Hunter Biden would say that, wouldn’t he!

Giuliani won’t testify in defamation trial, closing arguments underway [WaPo]
Freeman v. Herring Networks [Docket, via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes the Law and Chaos Substack.

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