WASHINGTON — An order made Thursday by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia says that Rudy Giuliani can no longer work as a lawyer in Washington, D.C. He used to be mayor of New York City.
Giuliani used to be a lawyer for former President Donald Trump. In July 2021, he was suspended from the bar in D.C., and two boards had already said that his law license should be taken away forever because he tried to change the results of the 2020 election.
Both groups said Giuliani tried to get thousands of votes for Vice President Joe Biden thrown out in Pennsylvania that year, which was a key battleground state.
A report from June by the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility said that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that Giuliani “violated Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct” and that he “should be disbarred.”
A disciplinary board for the D.C. Bar Association wrote in a long decision last year that Giuliani “claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it.” This is a similar point of view. The board said, “His complete lack of regard for facts makes the legal profession look bad.”
“Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy,” the board said. “His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.”
Giuliani’s spokesman, Ted Goodman, told NBC News on Thursday that the appeals court’s decision is “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice.” He also said that lawyers “should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision.”
“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,” he said.
Giuliani also lost his law license in New York in July because he spread lies about voting fraud in the 2020 election. He is also being charged in Arizona and Georgia for trying to change the results of the 2020 elections in those states.