WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani should lose his law license in Washington for directing former President Donald Trump’s failed legal challenge to the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania, an attorney ethics review panel has recommended.
A District of Columbia Bar committee that heard evidence in the case last year concluded in a report released on Friday that Giuliani, a close ally and adviser to Trump, committed misconduct in pressing a “frivolous” contest to President Joe Biden’s win. The bar’s Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton “Phil” Fox, who pursued the complaint, had argued the former New York City mayor and U.S. attorney “weaponized his law license” to try to undermine the U.S. Constitution.
“Respondent’s frivolous lawsuit attempted unjustifiably and without precedent to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania voters, and ultimately sought to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the three-member hearing committee wrote in their report. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it.”
The panel concluded that “by prosecuting that destructive case,” Giuliani forfeited his right to practice law and should be disbarred.
Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani who serves as his spokesperson, denounced the report in a statement, saying the hearing committee is “nothing more than an arm of the permanent regime in Washington” and urging local attorneys “to speak out against this great injustice.”
“This is also part of an effort to deny President Trump effective counsel by persecuting Rudy Giuliani — objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history,” Goodman said.
Fox declined to comment.
The hearing committee’s findings and disbarment recommendation are the latest setback for Giuliani, but the panel doesn’t have the final say. Giuliani can challenge the report before the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility, a separate body of lawyers who will decide whether to adopt the committee’s report and recommendations.
If Giuliani loses again before the board, he could take the fight to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the city’s equivalent of a state supreme court. His law license in New York has been suspended since 2021.
Giuliani oversaw Trump’s litigation strategy in battleground states following the 2020 election. Working with local attorneys, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of Trump’s campaign in federal court in Pennsylvania arguing the state’s election process was unconstitutional. They urged a judge to toss out a significant number of ballots or to order a new election.
The district court judge dismissed the case and a federal appeals court upheld that ruling.
In response to the ethics complaint in Washington, Giuliani and his lawyers defended his pursuit of the 2020 fight. He testified before the D.C. Bar hearing committee that he vetted tips coming into the campaign claiming suspicious activity in Pennsylvania. His lawyers argued that he had reasonable grounds to challenge how the state handled allowing Republican observers to watch ballot counting and county-by-county differences dealing with defective mail-in ballots.
The disciplinary counsel’s office countered that the lawsuit featured information about election practices in Pennsylvania that wasn’t relevant to the campaign’s claims, failed to show how limits on observers undermined voting rights, and had no fact-based grounds to contend that different procedures across counties should disqualify potentially hundreds of thousands of votes across the state.
The hearing committee had made a tentative recommendation of disbarment after hearing testimony and arguments late last year. Friday’s report makes that finding official.
The committee members wrote that the disciplinary counsel’s office had proved that Giuliani based the Pennsylvania litigation “only on speculation, mistrust, and suspicion” and that his “utter disregard for facts denigrates the legal profession.” They noted Giuliani’s record of public service as the mayor of New York City and at the Justice Department but found that the “misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments.”
“His frivolous claims impacted not only the court and parties involved but threatened irreparable harm to the entire nation,” the panel wrote.
