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      Rudy Giuliani’s $148 Million Treachery

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      On Dec. 13, an election worker named Ruby Freeman took the stand in a Georgia courtroom and told the story of how her world was turned upside down by Rudy Giuliani. Three Decembers earlier, Giuliani shared a routine surveillance video of Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, doing the routine yet vital work of counting 2020 presidential ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.But Giuliani’s description of the video was anything but routine. He falsely claimed that the footage was evidence of vote fraud. In that moment, everything changed for Freeman. As she said in her testimony, “Giuliani just messed me up, you know.” That’s a polite way of describing the horrors that followed. She faced an avalanche of threats, racist attacks and harassment at work and home. She had to leave her house — and then, after law enforcement officials found her name on a death list, the house of the friend she’d been staying with. Even now she’s afraid to walk in public without a mask.The purpose of Freeman’s courtroom testimony was simple: to describe in detail how Giuliani’s lies had profoundly damaged her life. And make no mistake, Giuliani lied. He admitted that his statements were false back in July, and in August the court entered a default judgment against him, holding him liable for those falsehoods. The only question left for the jury was the amount of the damages. And Friday, the jury gave its answer: Giuliani now owes Freeman and Moss $148 million to compensate them for his cruel and obvious lies.The verdict is against Giuliani alone. But make no mistake, MAGA was on trial in the courtroom — its methods, its morality and the means it uses to escape the consequences of its dreadful acts. That’s because Rudy Giuliani isn’t truly Rudy Giuliani any longer. In his long descent from a post-9/11 American hero to a mocked, derided and embattled criminal defendant (he has also been indicted in Fani Willis’s sprawling Georgia case), he became something else entirely. He became a MAGA Man.I’m reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s famous line in “Ghostbusters”: “There is no Dana, only Zuul.” There is no Giuliani now, only Donald Trump.There are many MAGA Men and MAGA Women in the modern G.O.P. To meet one is, in significant respects, to meet them all. The names roll off the tongue. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Kari Lake, Roger Stone, Marjorie Taylor Greene, John Eastman — the list could go on and on. And while they all have different stories before Trump, they share variations of the same story after Trump. Giuliani’s story, MAGA’s story, is theirs as well.That’s what was most significant about his trial. It wasn’t the damage award, as substantial as it was. It’s the story, the tale that lays bare what a MAGA Man is.The first thing you need to know about a MAGA Man like Giuliani is that he’s dishonest. Truthfulness is incompatible with Trumpism. Trump is a liar, and he demands fealty to his lies. So Giuliani’s task, as Trump’s lawyer, was to lie on his behalf, and lie he did. He even repeated his lies about Freeman and Moss — the same lies to which he’d already confessed — outside the courthouse during his trial.A MAGA Man such as Giuliani supplements his lies with rage. To watch him pushing Trump’s election lies was to watch a man become unglued with anger. The rage merged with the lie. The rage helped make the lie stick. Why would a man like Giuliani, former prosecutor and hero mayor, be so angry if he hadn’t discovered true injustice? MAGA Men and Women are very good at using their credibility from the past to cover their lies in the present.Amid the lies and rage, however, a MAGA Man like Giuliani also finds religion. But not in the way you might expect. No, MAGA Man is not sorry for what he’s done. Instead, he feels biblically persecuted. Freeman and Moss aren’t the real victims; he is. Moreover, he also knows that the base is religious and likes to hear its politicians talk about God.Giuliani learned that lesson well. So during the trial, he compared himself to Christians in the Colosseum, battling the lions like the martyrs of old. He’s not alone in this, of course. Trump shared an image of Jesus sitting by his side as he stood trial. Stone got so religious that he claimed to see supernatural sights, including, he said, a “demonic portal” that’s “swirling like a cauldron” about the Biden White House.One of the persistent debates in American life centers on how strictly we should judge the sins of our national past. Were those people who owned slaves or broke faith with Native Americans or passed the Chinese Exclusion Act merely products of their time? MAGA Men and MAGA Women will not have that excuse. They know there is a different way. Before Trump, many of them — whatever their flaws — lived very different lives. And few of them more so than Giuliani.His trial and verdict write another page in the volume of truth that tells the real story of MAGA America. Every voter should know exactly who Trump is and what his movement is like. They should know what happened to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. We should remember their names. But if a MAGA Man remembers, he does not care. Whoever he once was is gone. He serves a new master now.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      ‘I miss my name’: Giuliani verdict lays bare limits of defamation law

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      About halfway down the main hallway in the federal courthouse in Washington DC are the names of every judge who has sat on the bench since the early 1800s. Printed in gold lettering, the names include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Antonin Scalia and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom have gone on to the highest levels of public service.But this week, four floors above that hallway, in courtroom 26A, two little-known public servants mourned the moment they lost their own names.In harrowing detail, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye Moss testified about how Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump falsely accused them of election fraud and ruined their lives shortly after the 2020 election as part of a scheme to contest and overturn the results. They told eight Washington DC jurors how they received a flood of racist messages and death threats. And how they’ve fled their homes outside Atlanta, Georgia, isolated themselves from their community and started protecting their identities. “I don’t have a name no more,” Freeman said on Wednesday. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”As millions of Americans have heard by now, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, repeatedly lied about the two women, who are Black. He claimed that they wheeled suitcases of illegal ballots out from under tables after counting had concluded at State Farm Arena, that they were passing around USB drives and that they created a fake water main break.The case was one of several significant efforts to hold Giuliani, Trump and other allies accountable for the lies they spread about the 2020 election – an election Trump continues to insist that he won.The jury awarded Moss and Freeman $148.1m in cumulative damages.The Giuliani case was about more than defamation. It was about power.At issue in the case wasn’t really the fact that Giuliani lied, but whom he lied about. It was a case about the way powerful people can use their influence to destroy the reputations of the average person.Moss spoke about this during her testimony on Tuesday when she described a nightmare she continues to have. In it, she opens her front door, she said, and finds powerful people with nooses ready to kill her.“They could do that because of who they are,” Moss said. “I’m a nobody.”Giuliani showed little emotion or remorse as lawyers for Freeman and Moss played horrific messages they received, including voicemails filled with racial slurs and letters sent to their homes with graphic death threats.In the first moments of the case, Von DuBose, one of the attorneys for Freeman and Moss, asked the jurors to consider the power of a name. “What’s in a name? Power, purpose, pride,” he said. “Your name is the most important thing you know.”He went on to say that the case was about how the names of Freeman and Moss have been transformed by Giuliani’s defamatory lies. Unspoken, too, were those of two men who have built their careers around their names: Giuliani and Trump. Two men who have continued to benefit as Moss and Freeman suffered.Though they never intended it, Moss and Freeman have become symbols of the human cost of the cost of election denialism because of that imbalance of power.They have largely stayed out of public since 2020, but their presence in a Washington DC courtroom served as a stand-in for the droves of election workers who have faced lies and harassment from people who believe the election was stolen. Many of them have left the profession.That sentiment was driven home in a gut-wrenching moment when Moss testified about the initial weeks in December 2020 when she went back to work, even while receiving harassment, to prepared for Georgia’s January 2021 runoff election. “I literally felt like someone was going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”“Amidst all of this my goal was to get ready for the next election,” she said. “It’s hurtful … That’s the way people feel when I’m breaking my back to make sure their vote counts.”Usually in high-profile cases, it is the wealthy, famous person who is surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers in the courtroom. But in 26A this week, Giuliani sat alone at the defense table, flicking through his tablet, with a single lawyer, Joseph Sibley.Sibley did his best, with scattershot arguments to the jury to try to persuade them that Giuliani was not responsible for serious harm against the plaintiffs. He pointed to other actors, such as the far-right platform Gateway Pundit, that he said were really to blame for Freeman and Moss’s suffering because of how they disseminated the lies and videos. It would not really cost tens of millions of dollars to repair the reputation of the two women, he argued at another point.At the end, he made a simpler appeal: judge Giuliani by his good reputation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Rudy Giuliani is a good man. I know that some of you may not think that. He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” he said. “The idea of him being a racist, or him encouraging racist activity, that’s really a low blow. That’s not who he is.”At the plaintiffs’ table, about 10ft away, it was Moss and Freeman who sat quietly surrounded by a dozen attorneys. It was the first time the two women had come face to face with the man who has tormented them for years.“After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more. They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath,” Michael Gottlieb, one of their attorneys, said in closing arguments, needling Giuliani’s last-minute decision not to testify.He urged the jurors to “send a message” with their damages award.“Send it to Mr Giuliani,” the lawyer said in his closing argument. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”The verdict came, and it sent a message. But it didn’t yet bring closure.It’s not clear when Moss and Freeman can expect to see a cent of the money they’ve been awarded. Giuliani is widely reported to have financial troubles and he is likely to use an appeal and every other legal maneuver to try to delay paying. And it’s not clear whether the case will even stop Giuliani from defaming them again.“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the federal courthouse on Friday.Giuliani had been far from repentant throughout the week. And since August, when Judge Beryl Howell entered a default judgment against Giuliani for defamation per se, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy, Giuliani has made at least 20 defamatory statements against Freeman and Moss, their attorneys said this week.The dynamic underscores the limits of defamation law to police misinformation. While it can force people to pay for their lies, it cannot force them to stop lying or persuade people not to believe the lies.RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said observers are concerned about instances in which defamers brush aside damages. In cases involving large media outlets, she said, it may simply be seen as the cost of doing business. And in others, like that of Giuliani, people may simply “be judgment-proof, bankrupt, or otherwise unwilling or unable to pay”, she said.“In both situations, we’re testing the outer boundaries of libel law’s ability to remedy the harm done by falsehoods and to deter defamers from telling future lies. We are also, more fundamentally, testing the rule of law,” she added.“If the incentive to lie to audiences eager to receive those lies is stronger than the power of any court proceeding, and if defamers have decided that they simply will not participate in cases brought against them and will avoid paying damages when they are issued, this raises far deeper concerns.”Even with the money, it won’t be able to undo the damage that the two women suffered to their reputations. Moss loved her job as a Fulton county election official and thought her interim position as the permanent absentee ballot supervisor would be made permanent.Instead, she was moved to a back office role under the impression she would never touch a ballot again.“I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with,” Freeman said outside the federal courthouse in Washington DC after the verdict on Friday.“I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” More

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      Rudy Giuliani defamation trial: key moments at a glance

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      A jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay former election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148.1m after he spread lies about them following the 2020 election.The verdict, after a four-day trial in Washington, came after Moss and Freeman testified in court that they feared for their lives when Giuliani falsely claimed they had tampered with votes.Here’s a look back at some of the key moments in the trial:
      The $148.1m damages award for to two Atlanta election workers is one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.
      Freeman and Moss testified about the effects of lies spread by Giuliani and others who put them at the center of an election conspiracy theory. They shared examples of the racist, harassing, threatening messages they received after being publicly named by election deniers.
      Freeman testified about her experiences following Giuliani’s defamatory comments, in which he accused her of committing election fraud. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am,” said Freeman.
      Lawyers for Freeman and Moss played audio and displayed several of the racist messages they received in court. It included one of a person saying a racial slur over and over again. Another was a picture of what Freeman described as a kind of “monkey beast” and had writing on it that said “Ruby Freeman’s father”.
      Freeman said she had to leave her home for safety reasons. She hired a lawyer to help keep her name off any home-related documents for her new place. She said she felt like she has lost who she is, and her good name.
      Moss detailed how she became anxious to even leave the house, and that the false claims caused her son to be harassed, eventually failing his classes. She said she still does not really go out.
      Giuliani was initially expected to testify. But after two separate incidents of him doubling down, his team did not put him on the stand. His lawyer said the women had been through enough, but also pointed to Gateway Pundit, the rightwing media outlet, as more culpable for the harassment.
      Speaking outside court on Friday, Freeman said: “Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful.Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work.”
      Her daughter Shaye Moss also gave a statement, saying: The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others to keep that flame blazing changed every aspect of our lives – our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health. And we’re still working to rebuild.
      Giuliani himself dismissed the verdict and told reporters outside Washington’s federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding”. “It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually,” he said.
      Ashlee Humphreys, a professor from Northwestern University and an expert witness of Freeman and Moss, walked through the significant reputational damage done to them, showing how their names are now associated with election fraud.
      Freeman and Moss’s lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, said they hope the case sends a clear message to people launching smear campaigns not to do it.
      The jury began deliberations on Thursday and returned their verdict on Friday afternoon. More

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      Multimillion-dollar ruling against Giuliani shows cost of spreading election lies

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      The judge had already decided Rudy Giuliani defamed the two former Georgia election workers, the question was just how much that cycle of lies and ensuing harassment should cost him.A jury declared on Friday that it was worth an eye-popping $148m, far beyond expectations and a major blow to the former New York mayor and key Donald Trump ally.The case was one of a handful of ways pro-democracy groups are seeking consequences for election subversion ahead of the next presidential election. The plaintiffs hope the high-dollar decision will show to Giuliani and others that there’s a financial and human cost to spreading lies. The stakes are high with the 2024 presidential election quickly approaching and Trump probably on the ballot once again.This week’s case was a test for accountability for purveyors of election lies from the everyday people who get caught in their web through no fault of their own. The test worked: Giuliani will have to pay up. Whether it matters to serial liars remains to be seen, but it serves as a strong deterrent to those considering spreading unfounded election conspiracies.Beyond the money, however, this was an avenue for Freeman and her daughter, Moss, to speak directly to one of the people responsible for tearing their lives apart. A public figure such as Giuliani expects and accepts a level of intrusion into their privacy. Everyday people working elections, as Freeman and Moss were, shouldn’t have to.They took the stand this week to detail the onslaught of threats and harassment that came after Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, and Trump’s team put them at the center of an election conspiracy.Imagine this happened to you, their testimony called to mind. Imagine you were working your regular job, one you loved and found important. Imagine, then, that strangers saw surveillance video of you doing your job and twisted it into a narrative, saying that you had passed a USB drive to alter vote-counts, when in reality you passed a piece of candy. That you packed suitcases with fake votes to steal an election.Imagine some of the most powerful people in the country, with the most ardent followers, sent those lies ping-ponging around the internet to the point that your name online is attached to them forever, bringing a wave of hateful, racist, threatening messages to your inbox.It would dismantle your life. It dismantled theirs, they told the jury.Trump and his allies needed someone to scapegoat to try to overturn Georgia’s results, and they found it in these two women, said Michael Gottlieb, Freeman and Moss’s attorney.When she testified, Freeman wore a shirt with her name on it when she worked the elections in December 2020. She was proud of who she was. That’s how she was identified, she said. She no longer wears her name proudly – she had to move homes, hiring a lawyer for her new place to ensure her name wasn’t connected to it. Moss watched her son struggle in school, believing the whole ordeal was her fault. She doesn’t leave her house any more. She feels ostracized, anxious, afraid.Their testimony drove home the human cost of election lies, a harrowing tale for Americans watching democracy falter over the past few years. It was a warning sign to voters: this is the state of our politics today, that two unwitting public servants have their lives upended for political games and gain.Giuliani did not testify in the case himself, despite expectations that he would, later saying he was concerned the judge would deem any missteps as contempt of court. His lack of testimony came after his lawyer declined to cross-examine Freeman. Joe Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, said he did not take the stand or question Freeman because the women had been through enough.But Sibley also acknowledged in his closing remarks that Giuliani “hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days”.The case shifted, with Giuliani’s team no longer attempting to defend his actions but instead deflect blame. Sibley pointed to another defamation case by Freeman and Moss against the rightwing media outlet Gateway Pundit, saying the outlet probably identified the women first and ignited the flood of harassment.The testimony – even the damages themselves – may not deter Giuliani and his associates. He plans to appeal and tie up any payouts as long as possible, and it’s unclear whether he has money to cover the damages. (That’s a limit of defamation law visible in the defamation verdicts against Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who owes Sandy Hook shooting families millions but largely has not yet paid them.)And after the verdict was announced, Giuliani sounded just as obstinate as ever. He called the number “absurd” and claimed it would be “reversed so quickly it will make your head spin”.The lack of reconciling with the effect of his actions tracks with the continued election denialism ever-present in Trumpworld, even as penalties slowly mount. As he tries to regain the White House, the former president himself hasn’t accepted he lost it fairly in the first place. Now, he and his team are working to sow election distrust at all levels still in 2024, despite the legal repercussions from 2020.But a verdict of this size will still resonate, if not for the loudest voices, then at least for those with lesser platforms. It sends the clear message the plaintiffs hoped for.“Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful,” said Freeman, speaking at the court after the verdict. “Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work. More

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      Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay $148.1m in damages for lies about election workers

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      A Washington DC jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148.1m to two Atlanta election workers after he spread lies about them, one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.The verdict follows a four-day trial in which Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, her daughter, gave haunting details about the harassment and threats they faced after Giuliani falsely accused them of trying to steal the election in Georgia. The women, who are Black, described how they fled, are afraid to give their names in public, and still suffer severe emotional distress today. Their lawyers asked the jury to award them each at least $24m in damages.“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear,” Shaye Moss said on Tuesday in testimony that frequently turned tearful.In her testimony on Wednesday, Freeman said she had been “terrorized”.“I don’t have a name any more,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”Their lawyers had asked the eight-person jury to award them at least $48m in compensatory damages and to use their discretion to grant additional punitive damages.The case is the latest in a series of cases in which plaintiffs have used defamation law to push back on lies spread about them since the 2020 election. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787m earlier this year in a defamation case. Freeman and Moss also have a pending lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet. Last year, they also settled with One America News, another far-right outlet. Civil rights groups are turning to defamation law as a new tool to ward off misinformation.The lies about both women were a cornerstone of efforts by Giuliani and Trump to try to overturn the election results in Georgia. On 3 December 2020, Giuliani tweeted a selectively edited video that he claimed showed Freeman and Moss wheeling suitcases full of ballots out from under a table after counting had concluded for the night. The accusation was quickly debunked by Georgia officials, but Giuliani continued to spread the lie. He also accused them of “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”, when Freeman was passing Moss a ginger mint.Almost immediately, Freeman and Moss started to receive death threats through the mail, email, social media and voicemail. Many of those racist messages were displayed and played in court this week.Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. US district judge Beryl Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.Giuliani did not do himself any favors when it came to his defense. After proceedings concluded on Monday, he spoke to reporters on the courthouse steps, where he insisted that what he had said about Freeman and Moss was true. Sibley said earlier this week that Giuliani intended to take the witness stand in his own defense, but he reversed on Thursday and decided not to.From the outset, lawyers for Freeman and Moss made it clear that the case was about repairing the reputations of their clients and sending a message to other powerful figures that they could not make similar false claims without consequences.“Send a message. Send it to Mr Giuliani and to any other powerful figure who is considering taking this chance,” Michael Gottlieb, one of the attorneys for Moss and Freeman, said in closing arguments.It was a message Moss herself emphasized in her testimony on Tuesday.“We need to make a statement. We need to ensure that the election workers that are still there don’t have to go through this. Hopefully by hitting someone in their pockets, for someone whose whole career has been about their pockets, we will send a message,” she said. More

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      Appeals court skeptical of Meadows’ bid to move Georgia election case

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      A federal appeals court on Friday appeared skeptical of former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ attempt to transfer his 2020 election interference case in Georgia to federal court, expressing doubt that he was acting as a federal official in trying to reverse Donald Trump’s defeat.The court also questioned, in a particularly ominous development for Meadows, whether he was even entitled to remove his case from state to federal court given he was no longer a federal official.Meadows was charged with violating the state racketeering statute alongside Trump and other co-defendants by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, over their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.The indictment also included a charge against Meadows for his role in setting up Trump’s infamous recorded phone call on 2 January 2021 asking the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the battleground state.Meadows filed to transfer his case to federal court – a move that would allow him to seek dismissal of the charges on federal immunity grounds – but had the motion rejected by the US district judge Steve Jones. Meadows then appealed to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit.The issue for Meadows has long been whether his involvement in the call or his involvement in the so-called fake electors scheme were within the scope of his official duties as a White House chief of staff, as he argued, or whether he was engaged in campaign activity, as prosecutors have argued.At a roughly 50-minute hearing before circuit judges William Pryor, Robin Rosenbaum and Nancy Abudu – George W Bush, Obama and Biden appointees, respectively – the court expressed deep skepticism that Meadows could declare all of his actions as White House chief of staff were related to his official duties.“That just cannot be right,” Rosenbaum said at one stage, saying “electioneering on behalf of a specific political candidate” or becoming involved in “an alleged effort to unlawfully change the outcome of the election” might be examples of actions not covered by a federal official’s job.The skepticism of Meadows’ sweeping position that there were no limits to the scope of his duties was joined by Abudu, who noted that other federal laws like the Hatch Act prohibits government officials from engaging in political activity as part of their federal duties.Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger responded that Meadows only needed, under the federal officer removal statute, to “establish a nexus” to the duties of his federal job. It would make “no sense”, Terwilliger said, to have a state judge decide at trial matters relating to federal laws.The hearing took a negative turn for Meadows when Pryor, the chief judge known to be a staunch conservative, suggested he did not think Meadows was entitled to have his case moved to federal court at all because Meadows was no longer a federal official.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPryor suggested it might be reasonable to infer that Congress intended the removal statute to apply only to current federal officials to make sure that state charges did not interfere with “ongoing operations of the federal government”.Still, the three-judge panel also expressed concern to Donald Wakeford, a prosecutor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office, about the “chilling effect” on federal officials to enact policy if they felt they could be indicted by state authorities once they left the government.That opening was seized upon by Terwilliger, who claimed he would have done his job differently when he was deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration.Wakeford responded that it might be a good thing if some federal officials felt chilled from engaging in certain conduct – a reference to an opinion in a recent ruling by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan rejecting Trump’s attempt to dismiss his federal election interference case in Washington. More

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      Mark Meadows’s Lawyer Pressed on Bid to Move Georgia Election Case to Federal Court

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      A panel of appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the arguments on Friday on behalf of Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff.A lawyer for Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff under former President Donald J. Trump, faced tough questions from a panel of judges on Friday as Mr. Meadows renewed his bid to move a Georgia election interference case from state court to federal court.The panel of three appeals court judges heard brief oral arguments from a Georgia prosecutor and a lawyer for Mr. Meadows over the jurisdiction of the case, in which Mr. Meadows is accused of working with a group of people to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.The judges asked sharp questions of both sides but seemed particularly skeptical of the arguments advanced by Mr. Meadows, who claims that the allegations against him concern actions he took as a federal officer and thus should be dealt with in federal court.Moving the case to federal court would give Mr. Meadows advantages, including a jury pool drawn from a wider geographic area with moderately more support for Mr. Trump. But in September, a federal judge sided with the prosecutors, writing that Mr. Meadows’s conduct, as outlined in the indictment, was “not related to his role as White House chief of staff or his executive branch authority.”Mr. Meadows appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where the three-judge panel — consisting of two Democrat-appointed judges and one Republican-appointed judge — peppered lawyers with questions on Friday in an ornate courtroom in downtown Atlanta.In her questioning of Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, Judge Nancy Abudu, an appointee of President Biden, said that Mr. Meadows’s own testimony, in August, had seemed to broadly define what actions were part of his official duties as chief of staff.“The testimony that was provided essentially didn’t provide any outer limits to what his duties were,” Judge Abudu said. “So it’s almost as if he could do anything, in that capacity, as long as he could say it was on behalf of the president.”But Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, countered that Mr. Meadows did not need to establish those limits, but rather only had to “establish a nexus” to the duties of his federal job. Mr. Terwilliger’s argument focused on the idea that keeping the case in state court would be inappropriate because it would require a state judge to decide important matters relating to federal law, such as what the role of White House chief of staff entails.“That makes no sense,” Mr. Terwilliger said. “Those are federal questions that need to be resolved in federal court.”In addition to Judge Abudu, the panel included Chief Circuit Judge William Pryor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, and Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of President Barack Obama. The case concerns the concept of “removal,” which means essentially transferring a case from state to federal court; if the case was removed, Mr. Meadows would continue to face the same charges.The case against Mr. Meadows stems from a lengthy investigation by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, that led to her charging 19 people — including Mr. Trump — with racketeering and other charges related to their attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Four of those defendants have reached plea agreements with Ms. Willis’s office, and another four besides Mr. Meadows are seeking to have their cases moved to federal courts, including Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official. Mr. Meadows, Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark have pleaded not guilty.To move his case to federal court, Mr. Meadows’s lawyers must show that his actions — as alleged in the indictment — were within the scope of his job duties as chief of staff, and that Mr. Meadows still counts as a federal officer even though he no longer holds that position.Lawyers with Ms. Willis’s office have argued that Mr. Meadows was taking political actions in service of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, rather than operating in his role as chief of staff. Donald Wakeford, a top prosecutor in Ms. Willis’s office, also argued on Friday that Mr. Meadows no longer has the ability to move his case to federal court because he is no longer a federal officer.The judges posed several hypotheticals to Mr. Wakeford about whether that interpretation might allow states to charge unpopular federal officials shortly after they left office. Mr. Wakeford argued that regardless of such concerns, the relevant federal law does not indicate that former federal officials can move their cases out of state court.Among the criminal acts alleged in the indictment of Mr. Meadows is a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 more Trump votes, enough to reverse his defeat. Mr. Meadows testified in August that Mr. Trump had directed him to set up that phone call. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows also made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., accompanied by Secret Service agents, intending to view an audit that was in progress there. Local officials declined to let him do so because it was not open to the public.No matter what the appeals court decides, lawyers for either side could ask the Supreme Court to take up the case, potentially enmeshing the nation’s top court in a contentious political case during an election year.The challenge Mr. Meadows faces was summed up by Judge Rosenbaum. “According to him, it seems like everything was within his official duties,” she said during the proceeding. “And that just cannot be right.” More

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      Jury in Rudy Giuliani defamation trial urged to send message: ‘Don’t do it’

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      A Washington DC jury should “send a message” to other powerful people by issuing substantial damages against Rudy Giuliani for spreading lies about two Georgia election workers, a lawyer for the pair said.“The message is don’t do it,” Michael Gottlieb, a lawyer representing Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, said in his closing statement to eight jurors on the fourth day of the defamation case. “They say when someone shows you who they are, believe them. Mr Giuliani has shown us over and over and over again that he will not take our clients names out of his mouth. Facts do not and will not stop him.“He’s telegraphing that he will do this again. Believe him,” he said.Gottlieb asked the jury to award Freeman and Moss each at least $24m in damages to repair the damage to their reputation Giuliani caused by spreading lies about them after the 2020 election. He urged the jury to use their best judgment to determine how much to award in additional punitive damages to award as well as damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress.“Rudy Giuliani used his power to scapegoat Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss,” Gottlieb said. “He didn’t see them as human beings.”“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” he added.In a reversal, Giuliani’s attorney announced he would not take the witness stand on Thursday. “We feel like these women have been through enough,” Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, said in court.In his closing statement, Sibley sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment Freeman and Moss endured. Instead, he laid the blame at the far-right news outlet The Gateway Pundit which he said was the first place Freeman and Moss were identified by name and urged readers to harass them. Freeman and Moss are separately suing the outlet for defamation in a Missouri court.“More likely than not, this is the party that sort of doxxed these women,” he said.Sibley acknowledged Giuliani had wronged Moss and Freeman, but urged the jury to judge the former New York City based on the context of his whole career.“Rudy Giuliani is a good man. I know that some of you may not think that. He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” he said. “The idea of him being a racist, or him encouraging racist activity, that’s really a low blow. That’s not who he is.”Invoking Abraham Lincoln’s call of “malice towards none and charity for all” he said that the jury should issue more moderate damages to send a message of compassion to the country during a moment of political divisiveness. Unmentioned, of course, was that Giuliani and Donald Trump have played a key role in creating that divisiveness with vitriolic rhetoric.Todays closing arguments mark the end of a closely watched trial that is seen as another key test of the ability of defamation law to police election misinformation.Throughout the week, Moss and Freeman, gave harrowing testimony about how Giuliani’s lies upended their lives. Among other things, Moss said she was afraid to go anywhere alone and Freeman said she was afraid to give anyone her name and still wears a mask and sunglasses in public so she will not be recognized.Beryl Howell, the US district judge, has already found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy. The only question for the eight-member jury is how much to award in damages.Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, has sought to undercut claims that Freeman and Moss need millions of dollars to repair their reputation and that they suffered harm that amounts to such a high sum.Giuliani was twice reprimanded by Howell this week for statements he made outside the courthouse. On Monday, he said he would prove what he said about Moss and Freeman was true. On Tuesday, he attacked lawyers representing Moss and Freeman.“When I testify, you’ll get the whole story and it will be definitively clear what I said was true and that whatever happened to them, which was unfortunate if other people overreacted, but everything I said about them is true,” he had said on Monday. “Of course I don’t regret it, I told the truth.”That never came to fruition. Gottlieb made sure the jury noticed.“Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, it turns out are miles and miles away from ordinary. They are heroes. After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more,” Gottlieb said in his closing statement. “They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath.” More