NEW YORK (AP) — Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, federal prosecutor and legal adviser to Donald Trump, was disbarred in the state on Tuesday after a court found he repeatedly made false statements about Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
A New York appeals court in Manhattan ruled that Giuliani be “disbarred from the practice of law, effective immediately, and until the further order of this Court, and his name stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the State of New York.”
Giuliani’s attorney Arthur Aidala said they were “obviously disappointed” but not surprised by the decision. He said they “put up a valiant effort” to prevent the disbarment but “We saw the writing on the wall.”
The court said in its decision that Giuliani “essentially conceded” most of the facts supporting the alleged acts of misconduct.
Instead, the decision said, he argued that he “lacked knowledge that statements he had made were false and that he had a good faith basis to believe the allegations he made to support his claim that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from his client.”
The court said it found that Giuliani “falsely and dishonestly” claimed during the 2020 Presidential election that thousands of votes were cast in the names of dead people in Philadelphia, including a ballot in the name of the late boxing great Joe Frazier. He also falsely claimed people were taken from nearby Camden, New Jersey, to vote illegally in the Pennsylvania city, the court said.
The order states that Giuliani, who had already had his New York law license suspended for false statements he made after the election, must “desist and refrain from practicing law in any form,” including giving to another an opinion as to the law or its application or any advice” or “holding himself out in any way as an attorney and counselor-at-law.”
Before pleading Trump’s case in November 2020, Giuliani, a former mob prosecutor, had not appeared in court as an attorney since 1992, according to court records.
He was the primary mouthpiece for Trump’s false claims of election fraud after the 2020 vote, standing at a press conference in front of Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside Philadelphia on the day the race was called for Democrat Joe Biden over the Republican Trump and saying they would challenge what he claimed was a vast conspiracy by Democrats.
Lies around the election results helped push an angry mob of pro-Trump rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to stop the certification of Biden’s victory.
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