From the Washington Post:
An arm of the D.C. Bar found Thursday that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump, violated the terms of his license to practice law in the nation’s capital when he filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania trying to block certification of the results in the 2020 presidential election.
Pennsylvania, you say?
Tell me more.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has a bit more:
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.
Judge Brann, you say?
Yes. And Judge Brann's decision can be found here.
And this is what Judge Brann had to say about Trump's lawsuit:
In this action, the Trump Campaign and the Individual Plaintiffs (collectively, the “Plaintiffs”) seek to discard millions of votes legally cast by Pennsylvanians from all corners – from Greene County to Pike County, and everywhere in between. In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.
And so on.
You'll note the "unsupported by evidence" part.
And yet that's what Giuliani asserted in the lawsuit. From CNN:
The ethics charges that were brought by Fox focused on a lawsuit brought by the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania that sought to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes in the battleground state.
Giuliani testified that, at first, he played only a limited role in crafting the lawsuit, contributing a few sentences aimed at setting the case up to be potentially consolidated with other lawsuits across the country that the Trump campaign was contemplating bringing. However, after other attorneys on the case sought to withdraw from it, Giuliani ultimately argued the case in front of a federal judge, claiming there there was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud” and that Democrats had plotted to steal the election in Pennsylvania.
To which Judge Brann said, "Unsupported by evidence."
And let's not forget what was going on in Pennsylvania when Judge Brann was filed this case on November 21, 2020.
That was a Friday.
And from York Dispatch we learn:
On Wednesday, [PA State Sen. Doug] Mastriano spearheaded a state Senate hearing during which Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, repeated unfounded claims that President-elect Biden won only because of widespread voting fraud in urban counties.
On Friday, a federal appeals court tossed the Trump campaign's lawsuit alleging fraud, and in its opinion, the panel of judges said the campaign's lawsuit offers neither "specific allegations" of wrongdoing nor "evidence."
In the story of Trump's attempted coup, where ever you look in Pennsylvania eventually you find Doug Mastriano.
