Giuliani Just Made His Legal Troubles Even Worse in Georgia Defamation Trial

Rudy Giuliani just can’t seem to stay out of trouble.

The former Trump attorney got grilled by a federal judge on Tuesday, who argued that Giuliani’s post-court tirade, during which he espoused more of the 2020 election lies that he’s on the stand for to begin with, could warrant more defamation charges.

America’s mayor is currently on trial to determine how many millions he owes a pair of Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Giuliani was already found liable in August for defaming them after he accused the duo of manipulating ballots—claims that transformed into months of harassment, death threats, and protesters at their doorsteps.

Outside the courthouse on Monday, the very first day after his trial, Giuliani told a gaggle of reporters that he still stands by those claims.

“Of course I don’t regret it, I told the truth,” Giuliani said. “They were engaged in changing votes.”

“When I testify, the whole story will be definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them—which is unfortunate about other people overreacting—everything I said about them is true,” he added.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell was incensed by the accusations, which flew in the face of part of Giuliani’s defense, which argued that Freeman and Moss were “good people” who did not deserve what happened to them. Even Giuliani’s attorney, Joe Sibley, had a hard time defending his client’s behavior, admitting that the two statements were not “reconcilable” before blaming Giuliani’s inflammatory comments on the 79-year-old’s age.

“Was Mr. Giuliani just playing for the cameras?” Howell asked Sibley on Tuesday, noting that his recent comments “could support another defamation claim.”

It may be a supernova blast in the limelight for America’s disgraced mayor, whose star is quickly dying amid a flurry of legal charges that have all but bankrupted him. After this expensive trial, Giuliani will be one of 19 co-defendants in the Fulton County election interference case in which he stands accused of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” in Georgia that pressured state officials to reverse Trump’s election loss.

But Giuliani may be undone even before he’s handed a sentence. In September, the criminal defendant was sued by his former legal representation for failing to pay his bill, allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses, after he claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

It should serve as a lesson to even the closest of Trump’s allies: There’s no thanks for helping the real estate mogul. Despite the bad blood, Giuliani apparently had no other option than to beg Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees, to which the stingy developer refused but offered to throw a couple of fundraisers for him instead.

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz was recently surprised with an award at an Ohio GOP event, congratulating him for his dedication to using Venmo to allegedly pay underage girls for sex.

On a livestream of the Strongsville Republican Party’s Christmas gathering, which took place Thursday, a man who introduced himself as “Mike with the Strongsville GOP” went on stage and invited Gaetz to join him. He then presented the 2023 Strongsville GOP award and offered the odd congratulations to Gaetz.

“Congratulations for your dedication to using Venmo to allegedly pay underage girls to have sex with you,” the presenter said, catching Gaetz off guard.

“Oh come on man, you’re so full of it,” Gaetz replied, as he continued to awkwardly hold the award in his hand. Police immediately escorted the presenter away.

The Department of Justice decided in February that it would not charge Gaetz after its sex-trafficking investigation. But since then, the House Ethics Committee has reopened its own investigation into Gaetz—looking at the Florida congressman’s alleged sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and other misconduct.

The Daily Beast reported in 2021 that the congressman had paid a 17-year-old girl as well as accused sex trafficker Joel Greenberg through Venmo. Greenberg, an associate of Gaetz’s and at the center of the DOJ investigation, pleaded guilty the next month on charges ranging from falsifying identification to the sex trafficking of a child. He was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison.

Two-thirds of Republicans apparently have no problem with reelecting someone who attempted to overthrow the government.

Just 31 percent of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he was convicted before Election Day 2024, according to a new Reuters/IPSOS poll.

That’s a drastically lower number than recorded in August, when nearly half of polled Republicans said that the vote for Trump was a no-go if the GOP front-runner was “convicted of a felony crime by a jury.” In that same poll, just 35 percent of Republicans said they would continue to support him even if he was found guilty of a crime, while the remaining 20 percent said they were undecided.

While lacking nearly a third of the Republican vote could be enough to sink Trump, the shrinking figure paints a foreboding picture ahead of next November.

Trump currently faces 91 charges across four criminal cases: the federal election interference case, the Georgia election interference case, the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and the Stormy Daniels case in which Trump is accused of using his fixer Michael Cohen to falsify business documents to quietly pay off the porn actress ahead of the 2016 election.

And while Republicans’ preference for Trump seems to fly in the face of his criminal trials, there’s a reason for their madness—fewer than a quarter actually believe the accusations.

And yet the presidential race is currently neck and neck. In a general election Morning Consult poll published Sunday, Trump pulled 43 percent of the vote while Biden lagged slightly behind at 41 percent.

Some of that dwindling support behind the incumbent is due to Biden’s recent policy decisions at home and abroad. On Friday, the Biden administration signaled to Republicans that it was open to a swath of Democrat-opposed border policies, including some that were previously tried by Donald Trump, for instance adding 12,000 beds to detention centers in an apparent attempt to compromise on a Republican proposal to detain asylum-seekers instead of releasing them with a court date.

Biden has also upset young voters and people of color—who clinched his 2020 win—with his unwavering support of Israel amid the escalating conflict between the Middle Eastern country and Gaza, where at least 18,412 Palestinians have been killed and 1.7 million people (or 81 percent of the total population) have been displaced since the war began on October 7, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was left flabbergasted when asked to back up his wild claim that Democrats used fake electors in the 2020 election.

Johnson shared the unsubstantiated claim in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday evening. Collins asked the Republican senator if Bob Spindell, who acted as a fake elector in favor of Donald Trump during the 2020 election, should be suspended from his role on the Wisconsin Election Commission.

Spindell was one of 10 Wisconsin Republicans who posed as fake electors in the 2020 election and agreed last week to settle a civil lawsuit acknowledging that President Joe Biden won that election—three years later. Spindell and the nine other fake electors agreed not to serve in next year’s election or any other election that Trump runs in—but Spindell has still not been removed from the state’s Election Commission.

Johnson, for his part, still thinks Spindell and his allies did nothing wrong.

“These folks did nothing different than what many Democrats have done in many states,” Johnson said on CNN. “It has happened repeatedly.”

The senator told Collins to “just check the books” for instances of fake Democrat electors but deflected when Collins asked, “Which books?”

Johnson is right that fake elector schemes have been found across the country—but they were all backing Trump. In addition to Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, and Georgia have all charged fake electors in their states. There is yet another investigation into a similar scheme in Arizona. Meanwhile, Trump faces separate charges in Georgia for the whole plot.

The prosecution in Donald Trump’s federal election subversion trial has an apparent bombshell on the horizon.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed legal documents on Monday indicating that he will call three (currently unnamed) witnesses to speak to a trove of data extracted from Trump’s cell phone in use during his years at the White House.

The first two witnesses will translate geographic location data logged on the device by Google into a visual representation of the “movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse,” according to the document.

The third witness will use the data to explain how Trump used Twitter on January 6, revealing images and websites visited, determining the “usage of these phones throughout the post-election period,” and identifying the “periods of time during which the defendant’s phone was unlocked and the Twitter application was open on January 6.”

The data on Trump’s phone could provide a tick-tock of Trump’s behavior on January 6 and the days immediately preceding and following it, as well as supply additional information about who had access to his accounts and devices.

It could also explain whether Trump personally approved the January 6 tweet assailing Vice President Mike Pence for not having the “courage” to overturn the election results, issued a mere two minutes before Pence was whisked out of the Capitol by a security detail as storming rioters chanted, “Hang Pence.”

Monday’s filing is the latest indication of what Smith intends to do with a trove of data collected via search warrant back in January.

The trial, in which Trump faces four federal charges related to his attempt to thwart the presidential transfer of power, is set to begin in March—though the former president’s team is still fighting to delay it.