Rudy Giuliani facing possible disbarment after a finding that his efforts to overturn Pa. election violated ethics rules

Rudy Giuliani violated rules governing attorney conduct through his efforts to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election while representing former President Donald Trump, a disciplinary panel of the Washington, D.C. bar found Thursday.

The preliminary, nonbinding determination is the first step in a process that could result in Giuliani’s disbarment. And as a lawyer for the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel urged the panel to revoke his license to practice law in Washington, the former New York mayor-turned-Trump surrogate lashed out.

Speaking over his attorneys as they urged him to remain silent, Giuliani rejected accusations that his conduct in court on behalf of Trump amounted to an unprecedented lapse of legal ethics.

“I consider it to be an outrage,” he said before launching into a litany of grievances including FBI investigations and the loss of “a $6 million law practice” because of his work for Trump.

But disciplinary counsel Hamilton “Phil” Fox III argued disbarment was the only appropriate remedy in response to what he described as “the most serious violation [of attorney ethics rules] that this country is ever going to experience.”

“What Mr. Giuliani did was use his law license to undermine the legitimacy of a presidential election, and by doing so, undermined the basic premise of the democratic system we all live in,” he said. “You cannot be oblivious to what has gone on in this country since Nov. 3, 2020 — the harm Mr. Giuliani initiated.”

» READ MORE: Trump and his allies tried to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results for two months. Here are the highlights.

The preliminary finding comes after a week of testimony in which regulators scrutinized the role Giuliani played in the Trump campaign’s frenzied efforts to reverse the election outcome through the Pennsylvania courts. The New York bar suspended his law license last year for making similar “false and misleading” misrepresentations to courts in the months after the 2020 vote.

Giuliani personally argued the Trump campaign’s primary legal challenge in the state, which contained no specific allegations — let alone evidence — of fraud, yet asked a judge to take the extraordinary step of setting aside millions of votes based on supposition.

During a wildly stumbling November 2020 hearing before U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Giuliani lobbed unsupported conspiracy theories of a nationwide Democratic plot to steal the election that bore little relation to anything campaign lawyers had previously laid out in their filings.

Brann ultimately dismissed the case as one built on “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by the evidence” — a decision that was later upheld on appeal.

But throughout his disciplinary proceedings, Giuliani did not back off his false narrative of election fraud.

Much of the testimony over the last two weeks focused on whether he had made any effort to vet a series of affidavits from Pennsylvania voters and election observers that the campaign submitted to back up its fraud claims to the court.

They included a declaration from a woman who, while staying in Philadelphia, reported that her Uber driver had told her it was “common knowledge” that Black Lives Matter groups came from out of town to vote illegally in the city. She later claimed she saw a large group wearing what she described as “Black Lives Matter gear” at her hotel.

“Is this reliable evidence of fraud?” Fox, the disciplinary counsel, asked incredulously last week.

Giuliani insisted he’d joined the lawsuit late with little time to prepare after attorneys who had been representing the campaign withdrew. Still, he maintained he and his team had vetted all the accounts they submitted to the court.

“It would be unfair to say we just took every piece of crap that came in,” he said. “We threw a lot of stuff out.”

The preliminary finding by the disciplinary committee Thursday triggers a process that will eventually determine what sanctions Giuliani, 78, will face. In the coming weeks, the panel will make a final determination and recommendation on punishment, which must then be approved by the full bar disciplinary board and the D.C. Court of Appeals before it takes effect.

Giuliani’s lawyer, retired New York judge John Leventhal, urged the panel to recommend nothing more than a letter of reprimand or a private admonishment.

He argued that revoking his client’s law license ran the risk of chilling the willingness of attorneys to file legitimate election challenges in court. He maintained Giuliani’s record as a former mob-busting federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the mayor who led New York City through 9/11 should mitigate any need for punishment now.

“Politics should not play any part, we hope, we trust, in this committee’s final recommendation,” he said.

Fox balked at the accusation that politics was motivating his office’s push to disbar Giuliani now.

“There is no question that his conduct in the events of 9/11 was admirable, more than admirable,” said Fox. “But … that was more than 20 years ago. I don’t know whether something’s happened to Mr. Giuliani in the interim.”