Watching Rudy Giuliani Self-Destruct
By Charles Bethea
December 15, 2023
... Beginning on December 3, 2020, during a hearing before the Georgia State Senate, and continuing to the present day, Giuliani has claimed that Freeman and Moss—to quote just a few passages of the fable—participated in a “heist” of the 2020 Presidential election, “passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine,” which they used “to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.” As evidence, he shared edited surveillance footage from State Farm Arena, in Atlanta, where the two women counted Fulton County votes, purportedly showing them holding the devices. He called the two women “serial criminals” who’d stolen the election from Donald Trump using “suitcases” of ballots, a claim he repeated on podcasts and TV episodes, and on the Web site formerly known as Twitter. Later, Trump mentioned Freeman more than a dozen times in an infamous phone call with the Georgia secretary of state. Soon, millions of Americans were parroting the narrative, and not only from the remove of the Internet. A few showed up at Freeman’s home, threatening to make citizen’s arrests. She went into hiding ...
The opening statement from the defense was shorter. Sibley called Freeman and Moss “good people” and acknowledged that they had been harmed. But by whom? he asked. “What harm can we say he caused the plaintiffs?” Tens of millions in damages, he said, would be “the civil equivalent of the death penalty” and, effectively, “the end of Mr. Giuliani” ...
“Mr. Sibley has a hard job,” Howell said the next day, stating the obvious. Giuliani had acknowledged doubling down on his defamatory remarks the night before—“Yes, of course I did,” he said, matter-of-factly—which, the judge noted, could support another defamation claim against him. Sibley didn’t look pleased during a mid-morning recess, when Giuliani could be heard telling him “they’re lying,” in apparent reference to the morning’s witnesses for the prosecution. Sibley walked away, and Giuliani was approached by Ted Goodman, his spokesperson. “This is fucking malpractice,” Giuliani said to Goodman. “He’s not objecting!” ...
One of her attorneys, John Langford, from the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, asked Moss whether Giuliani had ever apologized. She shook her head, adding, “He was just spreading lies about us last night.” She’d found out about what Giuliani had said outside the courthouse after she’d made it back, in the company of bodyguards, to her hotel. “There was a huge TV . . . and I tried not to look,” she said. Back in her room, her curiosity got the best of her. She still can’t look away ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/watching-rudy-giuliani-self-destruct-at-a-defamation-trial-in-washington
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