Rudy Giuliani was hit with bad news in court on Tuesday. A federal judge rejected President Donald Trump’s former attorney’s bid to dismiss a defamation suit from two Georgia elections workers who appeared before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
According to The Hill, D.C. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani contributed to “increasingly outlandish paranoia” by pushing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“Defendant Rudolph Giuliani—a current media personality and former politician once dubbed ‘America’s mayor’—propagated and pushed that false narrative,” Howell wrote.
The suit comes from Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, two witnesses who appeared before the Jan. 6 panel to describe how false claims from Giuliani, including a video repeatedly shared by him accusing the two poll workers of counting fraudulent ballots, upended their lives.
Howell wrote that Giuliani “orchestrated and implemented a strategic plan” regarding faulty fraud claims and the allegations the campaign made against Moss, noting that the plan “provide[s] ample circumstantial evidence of a civil conspiracy between Giuliani and members of the Trump Campaign.”
Moss and Freeman claimed that though election interference claims were eventually debunked they still received death threats.
The judge’s ruling sends the lawsuit forward to its discovery phase, a process that will allow Moss and Freeman to demand more evidence from Giuliani.
Giuliani is facing a separate defamation lawsuit stemming from his comments regarding the 2020 election results’ legitimacy from voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.
