Judge Shoots Down Rudy Giuliani Legal Attempt in 'Brutal' Opinion  

A federal judge has rejected Rudy Giuliani's "nonsense" arguments in a case taken by two election workers he falsely accused of fraud.

In a strongly worded decision, Judge Beryl Howell said she will allow a jury to decide damages to punish Giuliani for his "willful failure" and "willful shirking" of his obligations to hand over documents in the case.

The former New York City mayor had wanted a judge to decide damages rather than risk the huge payout that a jury may award to the election workers.

On August 30, Howell, who sits in Washington, D.C, found mother and daughter, Ruby Freeman and Shayne Moss, had been defamed by Giuliani. At the time, Howell ordered Giuliani to pay Freeman and Moss' legal fees and costs and said that a trial to decide defamation damages would be set for later this year or early 2024. It is now expected to begin on December 11.

After the 2020 election, Giuliani had accused Freeman and Moss of stuffing Trump ballots into a suitcase and smuggling them out of a Georgia polling center, making them the focus of a hate campaign by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Giuliani's claims were later shown to be completely false and the "suitcase" was a standard container used in polling booths across America.

Josh Gerstein, a senior legal affairs reporter with the Politico news site, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that there were "many brutal shots" in Howell's latest ruling.

In a decision filed on Sunday night, Howell said that Giuliani's arguments against a jury were "simply nonsense" and that he was trying to shift blame to the plaintiffs.

She said the blame lay with Giuiliani's lawyers for failing to explain they wanted a bench trial, in which lawsuit damages are decided by a judge, not a jury.

"Giuliani's counsel's two-sentence email cited three out-of-circuit, non-binding cases, dated between thirty and nearly fifty years ago, without any express statement that Giuliani planned to seek a bench trial," she wrote.

Howell, an Obama appointee, said she was deciding on a jury trial "as a sanction for Giuliani's willful failure to comply with his discovery obligations"

Noting that "over the course of this litigation, Giuliani raised no objection to plaintiffs' jury demand," Howell wrote that she previously sanctioned Giuliani for "the willful shirking of his discovery obligations in anticipation of and during this litigation."

Newsweek sought email comment on Monday from Rudy Giuliani's spokesman, Ted Goodman.

Howell's ruling against Giuliani was by a default judgment, as the judge found that he had failed to comply with a number of subpoenas. In her 57-page opinion on August 30, Howell called the discovery materials that he turned over insufficient. A jury will now decide how much Giuliani must pay in damages to Freeman and Moss for his defamatory remarks. Giuliani has already been sanctioned almost $90,000 for the poll workers' attorneys' fees in the case, and Howell said there could be additional sanctions.

In an opinion column for MSNBC at the time, Gerry Weber, a constitutional law attorney and adjunct professor at Emory University School of Law in Georgia, wrote that Giuliani effectively sealed his own fate by failing to adequately provide discovery materials. Had he responded to the subpoenas to the satisfaction of the court, he might have prevailed in the case, given the historically high burden of proof plaintiffs in defamation cases must meet, Weber added.

"But this was Giuliani's case to lose," Weber, who served for 17 years as legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, wrote. "Famously, defamation cases are hard for plaintiffs to win, and purposefully so. Since The New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, the Supreme Court has set a high bar for plaintiffs in libel cases because the First Amendment requires 'breathing space' to citizens and the press."

Weber further noted that, in July, Giuliani's legal team said in a filing that he did not contest the notion that his statements about Freeman and Moss were false. He did, however, attempt to argue that the pair had not suffered any damage as a result of his statements.

In her August decision, Howell also accused Giuliani of destroying evidence relevant to the case. Weber wrote in his column that such actions directly risked being handed a default judgment, which he called "the nuclear bomb of consequences in any lawsuit."

Giuliani and others alleged during a Georgia legislative subcommittee hearing in December 2020 that surveillance video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta showed Freeman and Moss committing election fraud.

Moss told the U.S. House committee investigating the Capitol riot that her life was shattered by the false accusations. She said she received hateful and racist messages, some "wishing death upon me. Telling me that I'll be in jail with my mother. And saying things like, 'Be glad it's 2020 and not 1920.'"

"There is nowhere I feel safe," Freeman said in her testimony, according to the Associated Press.