Loss of law license sought for Giuliani
Speech before Capitol attack cited
The chairman of the New York state Senate’s judiciary committee made a formal request Monday to the state court system to begin the process of stripping Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer, of his law license, citing Giuliani’s role in a “violent insurrectionist attack on the United States Capitol.”
Democratic state Sen. Brad Hoylman said Giuliani appeared to have committed several ethical violations in his efforts to support Trump’s claims of fraud during the presidential election.
Those efforts culminated Wednesday when Giuliani addressed a crowd of Trump’s supporters, repeating the president’s unproven claims of election fraud and talking of “trial by combat.” After hearing Giuliani and the president speak, members of the crowd marched to the Capitol, and a mob ransacked the building.
“If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail,” Giuliani said of the election-fraud allegations. “Let’s have trial by combat.”
Hoylman, in a letter to the grievance committee of the 1st Department Appellate Division, said the assault on the Capitol was “the foreseeable culmination of increasingly outrageous lies and disinformation being peddled by Mr. Giuliani” and others.
“The codes of ethics we as attorneys swear to uphold are intended to safeguard both the public and the reputation of the profession itself,” he wrote. “A failure to hold a member of our ranks accountable for seditious acts and exhortations of violence is a failure to provide that safeguard.”
The call for Giuliani’s disbarment came only hours after the New York State Bar Association announced that it had launched an investigation into Giuliani, which could lead to his removal from the group.
In a statement issued Monday, Scott Karson, the association’s president, said his decision to begin the inquiry was prompted by hundreds of complaints the group had received about Giuliani’s central role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election.
The bar association has no power to strip Giuliani of his law license. But should the investigation by his peers lead to his removal from the group, it would mark a stain on a career that has spanned more than 40 years in the law. A spokeswoman for the group said it had not since 1904 removed someone who had not already been disbarred.
The association’s bylaws forbid members from, among other things, advocating “the overthrow of the government,” and in his statement Karson said that Giuliani’s words in Washington last week were “clearly intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election’s outcome to take matters into their own hands.”
“The subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup,” Karson wrote, “intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power.”
Giuliani, who did not respond to requests for comment, addressed the complaints against him on his radio show Monday afternoon.
“I was a prosecutor all my life — I’m not stupid,” he said. “I don’t want to get in trouble. And I have a high sense of ethics, personally. I hate it when people attack my integrity.”
The investigation was only the latest example of efforts to push back against lawyers who have supported Trump’s attempts to remain in power. Last week, Dominion Voting Systems sued the president’s onetime lawyer, Sidney Powell, on defamation claims, saying she had engaged in “a viral disinformation campaign” about the role the company’s machines played in the election.