Former President Trump on Thursday slammed the decision by a New York court to suspend his former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law in the state, calling the former mayor “the Eliot Ness of his generation.”
The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court announced earlier in the day that it is shelving Giuliani’s New York law license, after concluding that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” when he was representing Trump and his campaign in their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
The court wrote that the seriousness of Giuliani’s “uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated.”
Trump, in a statement hours later, likened Giuliani to Ness, one of law enforcement’s most acclaimed federal agents whose group the Untouchables is credited with busting the illicit operations of Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.
“The greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, the Eliot Ness of his generation, one of the greatest crime fighters our Country has ever known, and this is what the Radical Left does to him,” Trump wrote.
Trump denounced the court’s decision while again calling into question the results of the November election, even though a slew of courts, state governments and even former Trump administration officials have determined the vote was fair and free of widespread fraud.
“Can you believe that New York wants to strip Rudy Giuliani, a great American Patriot, of his law license because he has been fighting what has already been proven to be a Fraudulent Election?” Trump asked.
Those unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, however, are what caused the New York court to suspend Giuliani’s license.
“These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client. We conclude that respondent’s conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law,” the court wrote.
Giuliani, in the days and weeks following last year’s vote, was one of the attorneys overseeing Trump’s legal challenges to the electoral results in a number of states. He repeatedly made claims that the election was stolen and muddied by fraud, despite the lack of corroborating evidence.
The court also cited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in the license suspension, writing that his false statements are “corrosive” to the public’s trust in elections.
It said Giuliani’s misconduct “directly inflamed tensions that bubbled over into the events of January 6, 2021 in this nation’s Capitol.”
“One only has to look at the ongoing present public discord over the 2020 election, which erupted into violence, insurrection and death on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, to understand the extent of the damage that can be done when the public is misled by false information about the elections,” the court wrote.
Giuliani reportedly claimed that there was “no causal nexus” that linked his conduct to the Jan. 6 riots.
The court, however, contended that it does not have to illustrate a direct connection between the two to “understand that the falsehoods themselves cause harm,” concluding that the insurrection showed the negative influence false statements can have on public trust in elections.
“This event only emphasizes the larger point that the broad dissemination of false statements, casting doubt on the legitimacy of thousands of validly cast votes, is corrosive to the public’s trust in our most important democratic institutions,” the court wrote.
Posted 3 years ago
