Former New York City mayor and current Trump stooge Rudy Giuliani—the guy who people keep telling me is not the real-life inspiration for Batman’s Penguin, but I’m pretty sure they’re wrong—has been under fire for his part in spreading Trump-aganda regarding fictitious voter fraud in the 2020 election. It’s widely believed that the president’s post-election campaign to spread his delusions around the country led to the attack on the Capitol last week. The New York State Bar Association announced Monday that it’s planning to launch an investigation into one of Trump’s most infamous enablers and decide whether Giuliani’s membership should be revoked.
Giuliani—accompanied by his sentient teeth and runaway hair dye—has served as Trump’s personal attorney, been a relentless peddler of Trump’s bogus voter fraud claims and the leading pusher of doomed-to-fail lawsuits aimed at overturning the election results.
From CNBC:
The bar group said in a statement that the blame for the riot by thousands of the president’s supporters “lies first and foremost with” Trump, who has continued making false claims about his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden.
“But the president did not act alone,” the bar association noted.
“Hours before the angry mob stormed the Capitol walls, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, addressed a crowd of thousands at the White House, reiterating baseless claims of widespread election fraud in the presidential election and the Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs.”
At the rally near the White House shortly before the riot, Giuliani had said, “If we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right a lot of them will go to jail.”
“Let’s have trial by combat,” said Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, ex-Manhattan U.S. Attorney and former top Justice Department official.
Trial by combat? Either Giuliani was watching too much Game of Thrones that day, or the commander-in-rotting-teeth was advocating violence on behalf of the ousted president.
Now, the NYSBA is a voluntary membership group of New York-based attorneys and law students and not the same body that actually grants and revokes licenses to practice law, so whether Giuliani is disbarred or not isn’t the group’s decision to make. As CNBC noted, only the Grievance Committee of the Appellate Division of the NY court system can decide that Giuliani can no longer practice law in the state.
Still, the group pointed out in a statement that its bylaws make it clear that “no person who advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States, or of any state, territory or possession thereof, or of any political subdivision therein, by force or other illegal means, shall be a member of the Association.”
“We cannot stand idly by and allow those intent on rending the fabric of our democracy to go unchecked,” the group said. “Mr. Giuliani will be provided due process and have an opportunity—should he so choose—to explain and defend his words and actions.”
To be fair, if Giuliani had a real hand in planning the attack on the U.S. Capitol, it would have been the Four Seasons Landscaping fiasco all over again and he would have had the MAGA crowd storming a random Capital One Bank. All jokes aside, what makes his possible removal from the association significant is that it would be the first time the membership of anyone who wasn’t disbarred has been revoked in well over 100 years, according to the NYSBA.
“We believe the last time we removed a member who hadn’t been disbarred was 1904,” Susan DeSantis, an association spokesperson told NBC News. “We have had our current bylaws that set up the process for removing a member since the 1970s, and we have never used them to remove an attorney who hadn’t already been disbarred.”
So basically, another one of Trump’s minions might be making history for all the wrong reasons. Sad.