Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial got off to a rocky start Monday, after he left the courtroom at the end of the day to repeat to reporters the exact same claims that got him in trouble in the first place.
“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former election lawyer, told reporters outside the Washington, D.C., courthouse, doubling down on the very election lies he’s already conceded were false.
“I told the truth,” the former New York City mayor said, while claiming he has no regrets. “They were engaged in changing votes.”
When a reporter reminded him that he has no proof to support his claims, Giuliani baselessly responded: “Oh, you’re damn right there is. Stay tuned.”
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell reprimanded Giuliani for the remarks Tuesday, noting that they directly contradicted his own lawyer’s opening statements about Giuliani earlier that day.
“How are we supposed to reconcile that?” Howell asked Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley.
Sibley said he discussed it with Giuliani, but confessed that he “can’t control everything he does.”
Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, are asking for tens of millions of dollars in damages after Giuliani repeatedly lied about the two Georgia election workers in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.
Seth Wenig via Associated Press
Giuliani already has been found liable for defamation. Earlier this year he conceded in a court filing that he’d made false statements about the pair, and then refused to turn over key documents during discovery, leading to a default judgment.
Freeman and Moss sued the lawyer in 2021 after he accused the two, who are Black, of “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” to alter the vote count on tabulation machines in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.
An investigation found that the purported USB device Freeman handed her daughter was, in fact, a ginger mint. That didn’t stop Giuliani and others in Trump’s orbit, including Trump himself, from doubling down on the baseless conspiracy.
In an interview with the Jan. 6 congressional committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Freeman said the attacks turned her and her daughter’s lives into a Trump-fueled nightmare.
“I have lost my name and I have lost my reputation,” Freeman said in the interview, which was presented to Congress last year. “I have lost my sense of security. All because a group of people, starting with Number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.”
“There is nowhere I feel safe,” she added. “Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”