Broke Giuliani Must Pay Up $148 Million for Defaming Georgia Election

Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay nearly $150 million in damages on Friday to a pair of Georgia poll workers he defamed.

America’s mayor had already been found liable in August for defaming election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, after he accused the duo of manipulating ballots—claims that transformed into months of harassment, death threats, and protesters at their doorsteps.

The pair originally sought $24 million each in damages. Instead, the jury decided they deserve far more.

In total, the mother-daughter duo received $16 million each in damages for defamation, $20 million each for emotional distress, and another $75 million in punitive damages.

This week’s court appearances saw a flurry of drama after Giuliani continued to repeat election lies that he had previously admitted were untrue, resulting in a wrist slap by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who noted that it could result in more defamation charges for the broke fixer. Giuliani also refused to take the stand in his own defense after spending weeks claiming that his testimony would make “definitively clear” that what he said about the pair of workers was true.

The judgment adds to a seismic fall from grace for the once beloved New York mayor, who is staring down a storm of legal and financial woes for shopping Trump’s 2020 election conspiracy theories, landing him several 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.

It’s not clear how Giuliani will pay off this new judgment or any others in the future—the former attorney is almost certainly penniless.

In September, the criminal defendant was sued by his own legal representation for failing to pay his bills, 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.

That resulted in an embarrassing show in which Giuliani 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.

Now Giuliani faces a weighty nine-figure legal consequence. At this rate, there may be many more fundraisers down the line.

This story has been updated.

Even many Republicans in Florida don’t want the state’s restrictive abortion ban, with thousands of conservative voters signing on in support of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the right to abortion in the Sunshine State.

The petition proposes ensuring abortion access until the point of viability—roughly 24 weeks into pregnancy. That’s four and a half months longer than the state’s impending six-week abortion ban. So far, the petition has garnered 753,305 valid signatures, according to the Florida Division of Elections website, up from 687,000 last week. And more than 150,000 of those signatures come from Republicans.

The measure must receive at least 891,523 valid signatures within the state before a February 1 deadline to get on the November 2024 ballot.

“The vast majority of Floridians don’t support an abortion ban,” Anna Hochkammer, executive director of the bipartisan Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, told The Guardian. “In the past, we’ve been protected by the explicit right to privacy contained in the state constitution, but we want specific language in the constitution that prohibits government interference with access to abortion.”

The Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion reads, in part, that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

“How can my party be so vigorous in its defense of the right to bear arms yet not defend a woman’s right to make decisions about her own health care?” one Florida Republican, Carlos Lacasa, told the outlet. “I believe in small government, and morality cannot be legislated without an overwhelming consensus of the governed—and there is no such consensus on this issue.”

It’s another sign that Republican officials are out of touch with their bases. On Thursday, several Republican legislators slammed the Supreme Court for picking up a case threatening access to a drug called mifepristone, which comprises one-half of the abortion pill, fearing that a prohibitive ruling could put them at risk in the next election.

From the perspective of his supporters, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman entered Congress as a staunch progressive. He curried the endorsement of one of the leaders of the contemporary progressive movement, Senator Bernie Sanders, and stacked his own staff with former Bernie aides. Fetterman also championed progressive causes, including shifts toward renewable energy, implementing wealth taxes, single-payer health care, and raising the federal minimum wage.

But on Friday, Fetterman officially divorced himself from the progressive movement.

“I’m not a progressive,” Fetterman told NBC News. “I just think I’m a Democrat that is very committed to choice and other things. But with Israel, I’m going to be on the right side of that. And immigration is something near and dear to me, and I think we do have to effectively address it as well.”

The announcement comes after weeks spent disagreeing with other congressional progressives like the Squad over his unwavering support for Israel in its conflict with Hamas and his calls for tougher immigration laws.

But if you asked Fetterman during the campaign season where he stood, his words were more than a little different.

After losing his first Senate run in 2016, Fetterman touted that he had started a progressive movement in the Coal State.

“It’s not going away. We’re not going away. This isn’t over. This is not how our story ends,” he added in an additional post.

Two years later, Fetterman was still using the label to ask for donations during his run for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania.

“Chip in whatever you can to help us take this progressive momentum all the way to the ballot box on May 15,” Fetterman posted.

“Progressive. Simple. Sacred. The union way of life,” Fetterman said in another.

“Progressive values have been the heart of my campaign,” Fetterman wrote in a 2018 post aligning himself with Sanders.

And despite emerging rhetoric from the senator claiming that the United States needs harsher immigration reform, one of Fetterman’s recurring campaign mantras on the issue circles back to his wife, who lived in the U.S. “undocumented for years” after escaping violence in Brazil. Time and time again, Fetterman has insisted that “immigration makes America, America.”

A 10-inch-thick binder of highly classified raw data regarding Russian election interference went missing in the final days of the Trump administration, a new report reveals.

The loss of the massive binder, which has yet to be found two years after it was first reported missing, included details on Russian agents that informed the government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had worked to help Trump win the 2016 election, according to a sprawling CNN investigation.

The information inside was so sensitive that lawmakers and congressional aides looking to review the materials had to do so under top secret security clearances and only inside a locked safe at CIA headquarters.

The binder included a GOP report on Russian intelligence, foreign intelligence surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign adviser from 2017, interview notes with Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele, internal FBI and DOJ communications, and FBI reports from a confidential source related to FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, among other documents, according to the outlet.

It was last seen at the White House.

In the waning hours of the administration, Trump ordered a host of documents, including the binder, to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for mass declassification in a scheme to prove that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation into his 2016 campaign ties was a hoax.

Republican aides spent days scrubbing the binder, redacting the most sensitive details so that an abridged version could be released to the public, even against the behest of other top Trump administration officials who repeatedly attempted to block the former president from releasing its contents, according to the outlet.

A day before his term was set to end, Trump issued an order to preemptively declassify most of the binder’s contents well before it was ready and regardless of some of the redactions. Multiple copies of the redacted version had been created inside the White House, with plans to hand them off to Republicans and right-wing journalists. But that’s not what happened. Instead, White House lawyers scrambled, forcing an immediate retrieval of some documents that had already been sent off, and demanding that the documents be stripped down more.

“The Crossfire Hurricane binders are a complete disaster. They’re still full of classified information,” White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson recalled a White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, telling her. “Those binders need to come back to the White House. Like, now.”

With minutes to spare before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows hand-delivered a redacted copy of the binder to the Justice Department for a final review.

“I personally went through every page, to make sure that the President’s declassification would not inadvertently disclose sources and methods,” he wrote in his book detailing his time as Trump’s chief.

Meanwhile, the original, unredacted version had gone missing.

But Hutchinson believed she had a clue as to its location. In a closed-door testimony before the January 6 committee, Hutchinson pointed a finger directly at her old boss in relation to the possible whereabouts of the original binder.

“I am almost positive it went home with Mr. Meadows,” Hutchinson said, according to transcripts.

Meadows’s legal team has vehemently denied that he mishandled any classified or sensitive documents.

Apart from Meadows, there seem to be no obvious leads for the location of the binder, which could expose some of America’s most closely guarded national security secrets. Somehow, it was not one of the 11,000 documents discovered at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Donald Trump’s former lawyers and co-defendants in the Fulton County, Georgia, case wrote single-sentence letters apologizing to Georgia voters for their role in trying to overthrow the 2020 election.

As part of their plea agreements in the 2020 election interference case, bail bondsman Scott Hall as well as ex-Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell were required to write letters, as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis demanded that “there needs to be real contrition.”

However, the one-line apology letters failed to walk back any of the baseless conspiracies spouted and did not include any acknowledgment of President Biden’s win in the state. In fact, they barely mentioned the crimes they were charged with at all.

“I apologize to the citizens of the State of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” was all Chesebro wrote in his apology letter, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Sidney Powell also kept it insanely brief. “I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” she wrote in her October 19 letter.

Hall, the bail bondsman, issued the longest apology of the three—and still, it was only eight sentences.

While Willis said the apology would not have to be long, she expects some level of sincerity.

“It doesn’t have to be pages and pages,” she told the Constitution earlier this week. “Sometimes you just need ‘I’m sorry.’ And if you get ‘I’m sorry,’ then we can move on and move past (it) if it’s a sincere apology.”