The District of Columbia Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility recommended Friday that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani be stripped of his license to practice law in Washington.
The board cited claims Giuliani made about election fraud in a Pennsylvania lawsuit after Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Among the allegations he made was that some county boards of elections “[stuffed] the ballot box” with illegal votes for Biden, who won the state by just over 80,000 votes.
Giuliani “proffered no facts to support the claims he made and his opinion that election impropriety occurred does not meet the requirements for filing a lawsuit,” according to the board. “Given this, after an objective appraisal of the merits, a reasonable lawyer would have concluded that there was not a faint hope of success of prevailing on the argument that the Defendants engaged in a scheme to steal the Pennsylvania election by counting defective ballots, or that the observational barriers were used to avoid detection of the alleged scheme.”
Board members agreed with an ad hoc hearing committee that recommended Giuliani’s disbarment last year. That committee determined that he “forfeited his right to practice law” by prosecuting that “destructive case.”
“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,” board members wrote.
Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman said in a statement that disbarring the former New York mayor is “meant to discourage lawyers from representing clients like President Donald Trump or anyone else who is willing to take on the prevailing political establishment.”
