Rudy Giuliani faces possible disbarment — and here’s why that matters

Facts are stubborn things. That is a lesson that the MAGA crew is learning the hard way.

Exhibit No.1: Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former consigliere and one of the chief enablers of the Big Lie. Last Friday a committee of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that oversees attorney conduct recommended that Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and mayor of New York, be disbarred for professional misconduct arising from his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The committee, comprising two lawyers and a citizen representative, made its recommendation after reviewing the record of a December hearing on the charges against Giuliani.

The committee’s decision must still  be reviewed by the Court of Appeals. But whether or not Giuliani eventually loses his law license, the committee report and recommendation put on the record both make clear exactly what Giuliani did in service to Donald Trump’s “big lie” and how he abused his position as a lawyer in the effort to thwart the will of the American people. 

Every time America’s institutions stand up for honesty and truth, and record the facts of our turbulent times, they fortify democracy and the rule of law in this country. They make possible not just the informed judgments of citizens today but the judgments that history will one day make as well.

This commitment to honesty, truth and facts is also a foundational principle of the American legal profession. 

As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1850, “There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid.” 

Lincoln warned lawyers that they should not “for a moment yield to the popular belief” and urged them “to be honest at all events.” He said that those who “cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer…. [and] choose some other occupation.”

What the D.C. bar disciplinary committee’s report makes clear is how far short of Lincoln’s admonition Rudy Giuliani — who once himself prosecuted mobsters and Wall Street con artists — has fallen. 

The committee focused in particular on what Giuliani did in Pennsylvania in the aftermath of the 2020 election. It found that he violated the rules governing the practice of law in that state by “filing a lawsuit seeking to change the result of the 2020 presidential election when he had no factual basis, and consequently no legitimate legal grounds, to do so. His prosecution of the lawsuit also seriously undermined the administration of justice.” 

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The bill of particulars that the committee offers is detailed and devastating. It is a troubling reminder of all that Giuliani did in the aftermath of the 2020 election in service to Trump. 

The timeline begins the day after the election, when Giuliani agreed “to take charge of post-election litigation challenging the voting results.” As the committee recounts, he “immediately met with other attorneys to prepare to bring litigation in approximately ten states (including Pennsylvania).”

The path that would eventually lead to endangering Giuliani’s law license began with the filing of complaints in the federal district court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Those complaints, which Giuliani helped draft, contained “allegations about widespread election fraud that were important to his national litigation strategy.”

The disciplinary committee found that the complaints “contained only vague and speculative allegations about random and isolated electoral irregularities which did not and could not support [Giuliani’s] inflated legal claims.”

Giuliani made matters worse during oral argument when he told the court that he had “personally witnessed” election fraud in Pennsylvania. He argued that “Democrats ‘stole an election … in this Commonwealth’ and that he had ‘hundreds of affidavits’ supporting his assertion.” 

The disciplinary committee minces no words in its judgment: “These claims were simply not true.” 

It takes Giuliani to task for proceeding with his litigation even though an investigation had “unearthed no evidence of systemic fraud.” It finds that he failed in his obligation as a lawyer when he “commenced litigation without evidence that its core factual claim was true. Respondent based the Pennsylvania litigation only on speculation, mistrust, and suspicion”:

Without such evidence, Mr. Giuliani had no legitimate grounds… to seek an injunction that prohibits Defendants from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential general election in Pennsylvania on a statewide basis . . . and/or [an] injunction that the results of the 2020 presidential general election are defective and providing for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to choose Pennsylvania’s electors.

The disciplinary committee further determined that Giuliani’s conduct violated Rule 3.1 of Pennsylvania’s Rules of Professional Conduct, which states that a lawyer “shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law.” 

Giuliani “sought to upend the presidential election but never had evidence to support that effort,” the report concludes. “Surely Rule 3.1 required more.” The conduct of the defeated president’s lawyer, the committee found, was “prejudicial to the administration of justice.”

In recommending that Giuliani suffer the ultimate discipline of the legal profession, the committee noted the grave damage that his reckless conduct had done to that profession, as well as to democracy and the rule of law in this country”:

Mr. Giuliani’s misconduct was calculated to undermine the basic premise of our democratic form of government: that elections are determined by the voters…. [N]o lawyer — until 2020 — used frivolous claims of election fraud to impede the peaceful transition of presidential power and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy.

In an essay entitled “Truth and Politics,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that democracy cannot survive if the people are left to believe that “everything… [is] possible and nothing is true.” Arendt argues that the “freedom of opinion” on which democracy depends is “a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”

The D.C. disciplinary committee calls Giuliani to account for his professional misconduct, and also helps to provide the kind of factual information on which democracy itself depends.

That is why the two impeachments and two criminal indictments (so far) of Donald Trump matter. That is why the Jan. 6 select committee’s report matters. That is why the report and recommendation to disbar Giuliani matters.