“He should be disbarred”: Attorney disciplinary committee pushes ultimate punishment for Giuliani

An attorney disciplinary committee on Friday recommended that Rudy Giuliani be disbarred in Washington, DC, over his work on behalf of former President Donald Trump to skirt the 2020 election results.

CNN reported that the committee, which interrogates cases of legal ethics and attorney misconduct in the nation’s capital, issued the report and recommendation following Giuliani’s December, lawyer misconduct hearing. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee said in the report. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law. 

The three-person panel’s recommendation against Giuliani is not final, as D.C.’s Board on Professional Responsibility and the D.C. court of appeals still have to consider the case. The committee specifically slammed Giuliani for dishonesty after the 2020 election and what they called “calculated” efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the vote when he falsely asserted there had been election fraud that could overturn Joe Biden’s win of Pennsylvania in one of that state’s federal courts. A political advisor to the former New York City mayor, Ted Goodman, deemed the report a “great injustice” and said that “the decision-makers at the DC Bar Association are nothing more than an arm of the permanent regime in Washington.”

Giuliani’s legal team had argued to the panel that he had reasonable grounds to believe the claims were true and that he was reliant on what other Trump campaign workers told him about the alleged fraud. But the argument fell flat before the committee. “Mr. Giuliani has not acknowledged or accepted responsibility for his misconduct. To the contrary, he has declared his indignation over being subjected to the disciplinary process,” the committee wrote in its report. “We are convinced that a sanction must be enhanced to ensure that it adequately deters both Respondent (Giuliani) and other attorneys from acting similarly in the future.”

In addition to navigating the present, temporary suspension of his law license, Giuliani is also facing an attorney ethics review in New York. The committee’s recommendation leaves another stain on the top federal prosecutor’s credibility. “We have considered in mitigation Mr. Giuliani’s conduct following the September 11 attacks as well as his prior service in the Justice Department and as Mayor of New York City. But all of that happened long ago,” Friday’s recommendation read. “The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments.”