Rudy Giuliani violated professional rules of conduct by helping former President Donald Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a disciplinary panel for the Washington, D.C., bar decided Thursday.
The D.C. Bar’s disciplinary counsel, Hamilton “Phil” Fox, said during the hearing that Giuliani should face the most serious penalty available: losing his license to practice law in Washington.
“I think the seriousness of misconduct calls for only one sanction, and that is the sanction of disbarment,” Fox said.
“What Mr. Giuliani did was use his law license to undermine the legitimacy of a presidential election, and by doing so to undermine the basic premise of the democratic system that we all live in, enshrined in our Constitution, which is that when an election is over and the results are determined, the losers concede and the winner governs, [a] principle that was established in 1800,” Fox said.
The panel declined to specify which rule Giuliani broke by falsely alleging election fraud had taken place in Pennsylvania, but it determined he violated at least one of them. The organization’s board will now take up the issue, with the ultimate decision resting with the Washington appellate court. Lesser potential penalties include a three-year suspension or a reprimand by the Board on Professional Responsibility.
The former New York City mayor’s law license was suspended in the state of New York in the summer of 2021 following the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Giuliani, flanked by his lawyers, argued Thursday that his reasons for believing Trump’s fraud claims during the 2020 presidential election were legitimate. He said he would have been able to show more evidence for the claims had the lawsuit he filed gone to the discovery phase. Instead, it was dismissed with a scathing order by a federal judge. There is no evidence that widespread fraud occurred in the 2020 election.
Fox said that in the 35 years he has been involved in the attorney disciplinary system, he could not “think of another case that approaches this in terms of the seriousness of the misconduct.”
“In the future, any lawyer that engages in this kind of misconduct, harming the country as this has done, has at least got to realize that his or her law license is at risk,” Fox said.