Giuliani rats out witnesses involved in overturning Trump election

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Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is facing a Washington DC legal ethics prosecution for his involvement in former president Donald Trump's alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

His lawyers submitted a witness list on Friday that included Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, and attorney Christina Bobb, now entangled in Trump’s fight with the US DoJ over the retention of classified records.

Also among those named were former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, former Trump trade adviser charged with contempt of Congress in the January 6 investigation Peter Navarro, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Former army colonel turned bar owner Phil Waldron who pushed baseless electoral fraud claims is also included and so is Bernard Kerik, the former imprisoned NY police commissioner who Trump pardoned. Navarro would be the second Trump aide, after Steve Bannon, to be arrested after defying a legal summons from the House committee investigating the attack.

With the hearing due to take place in December, the complaint in DC states that two Pennsylvania rules were breached by Giuliani which prohibit attorneys from bringing baseless proceedings in law or fact. That would bar behavior or action prejudicial to the administration of justice. Charges for that can mean the suspension of a license to practice. 

On account of that, Giuliani is accused of mounting a baseless election challenge in Pennsylvania – one of four states, alongside Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, to overturn current US president Joe Biden’s presidential election and which Trump this week listed in an unwarranted response to a subpoena from the January 6 committee. 

Giuliani is due to be called as a witness by the DC office of disciplinary counsel, as he said he had a “good faith basis” for contesting mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, but as a result of his being Trump's lawyer put him in a legal whirlwind such as being caught in the middle of Trump’s first impeachment because of his approaches to Ukraine to hold dirt against Trump's opponents such as current US President Joe Biden. 

The second impeachment, a result of the January 6 Capitol riot, placed Giuliani as the target of a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the Georgia state elections. 

On top of that, he has been sued by Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election machinery in New York, causing his law license in the state to be suspended. 

Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe and former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut commented that Giuliani and law professor John Eastman were “the two chief ‘generals’ [who] orchestrat[ed] Trump’s abuse of the law to overturn the election”.

They continued adding: “In joining the bar, lawyers take an oath to support the US constitution much like the one that Article VI of the constitution requires of all public officials. Lawyers who betrayed that oath in ways that led to the deadly insurrection of January 6 are no better than a physician who violates the Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm’.”