A federal appeals court disbarred Rudy Giuliani on Monday over efforts he took to prevent the transfer of power after then-President Trump lost the 2020 election.
In a short order, a panel of three District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled that the longtime Trump ally should lose his license to practice law. The decision followed a scathing recommendation to disbar Giuliani from a disciplinary board associated with the D.C. Bar in May.
The board pointed specifically to Giuliani’s efforts to fight Trump’s loss in Pennsylvania, suggesting he urged a federal judge to deprive hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters of their rights, even though he had “no objectively reliable evidence that any such scheme existed.”
“We conclude that disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief,” the board wrote in May.
Giuliani was a central figure in several efforts to help Trump resist the transfer of power, including making calls to statehouse leaders. He’s facing election interference charges alongside Trump in Georgia and faces similar charges in Arizona. He’s also an unnamed and unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election subversion case against the former president.
He filed for bankruptcy in December after a jury ordered him to pay a staggering $148 million to two election workers in Georgia whom he baselessly accused of committing fraud, but that bankruptcy was ultimately dismissed; his appeal of the defamation verdict is ongoing.
Earlier this year, Giuliani was disbarred in New York over his 2020 efforts to keep Trump in power.
Once New York City’s mayor and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani “not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 Presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant,” a panel of judges in New York’s First Department Appellate Division wrote in July.
In a statement, Giuliani political adviser Ted Goodman called the disbarment an “absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice.”
“Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision,” Goodman said. “The people coming after Mayor Giuliani can’t take away the fact that he remains the most effective prosecutor in American history, who did more to improve the lives of others than almost any other American alive today.”
