Amazing career arc.
The post Giuliani Bumstumbles Into Contempt And Sanctions In Freeman/Moss Case appeared first on Above the Law.
It’s hard to tell if Rudy Giuliani is playing dumb, or if he’s lost his everloving mind. How else to explain the guy who used to run the Southern District of New York telling a federal judge that he didn’t turn over his emails in discovery because he didn’t consider them “communications”?
Giuliani hoped to fend off sanctions and a contempt finding in the $148 million collection action filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Atlanta poll workers he defamed. He failed at both.
Last week his lawyer Joe Cammarata, Staten Island divorce lawyer to the stars, tried to convince Judge Lewis Liman to let Rudy appear remotely due to “medical issues with his left knee and breathing problems due to lung issues discovered last year attributable to Defendant Rudolph W. Giuliani being at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2001.” This request went over about as well as his November petition to postpone the January 16 trial so Rudy could spend that week in DC attending inauguration parties. Which is to say that the judge ordered him to get his ass into court last Friday and explain himself, although he was allowed to attend Monday’s hearing remotely.
Giuliani’s task was to persuade the court that he really did comply with his discovery obligations, as well as the turnover order obliging him to disgorge his worldly possessions to Freeman and Moss. The problem is that … he didn’t.
With respect to discovery, he turned over a handful of emails, while conceding that he refused to let his prior counsel look at his phone. He failed to object to interrogatories and instead simply refused to answer. And he said he had no record of his calendar — despite the issue for trial being his claim that he lives in Florida and is entitled to claim the homestead exception for his Palm Beach condo.
As for the turnover order, Giuliani admitted that he’d failed to clear the title for the New York co-op or his Mercedes, purporting to be flummoxed by the Florida DMV. His come-and-take-it stance on his bank accounts went over like a lead balloon. And he waved one of the watches he’d been ordered to hand over at the camera, claiming that he didn’t know how to get it to the plaintiffs because he didn’t want to put it in the mail.
From the bench, Judge Liman granted the plaintiffs’ motion for contempt of the turnover order, but said he needed time to craft an appropriate sanction. As for discovery, he ruled that Rudy was totally out of compliance and granted the request for an adverse inference as to two unanswered interrogatories.
Interrogatory No. 4: Identify any financial, medical, or legal professional or firm whom you have consulted during the period of January 1, 2020, through the present.
Interrogatory No. 8: Identify all email accounts, messaging accounts, and phone numbers that You have used during the period January 1, 2023, through the present.
Giuliani will now be barred from pointing to any communications or financial, medical, or legal appointments to bolster his claim that he actually lives in Florida. And while that’s not a default judgment on the homestead issue, it will be very hard for Giuliani to point to anything other than his [cough] indifferently credible testimony, since he’s offered up zero documents and his dimwit henchmen, whom he planned to call as witnesses, also failed to comply with discovery.
It’s not clear what will happen if Rudy loses the case next week and has to turn over the Florida condo. His prior counsel, who withdrew in November because their client refused to hand over his phone so they could search it for responsive emails, tried to build in a backdoor. They argued in the alternative that, if the Florida claim was rejected, Rudy should be able to shield his condo in Manhattan —or whatever portion of it New York law permits. But having testified that he affirmatively does not live there, and having handed the place over to Freeman and Moss, that ship seems to have already sailed.
Well … that’s a shame.
Freeman v. Giuliani [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
