Rudy Giuliani permanently disbarred in Washington, DC

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani had his law license permanently revoked in the nation’s capital, following similar action by a New York court earlier this year over Giuliani’s role in former President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election.

In a one-page order Thursday, the D.C. Court of Appeals did not directly address a bar committee’s recommendation in May that Giuliani be disbarred for pressing a legal challenge to the election results in Pennsylvania without factual support for the claims.

Instead, a three-judge panel of the D.C. court found that Giuliani failed to respond to an order requiring him to explain why he shouldn’t face “reciprocal” disbarment after a New York appeals court’s decision to strip him of his law license in that state. The D.C. court temporarily suspended Giuliani in July 2021 after being notified of a similar suspension in New York.

A disciplinary panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility in 2022 recommended Giuliani’s disbarment, triggering the indefinite suspension of his law license. Giuliani had been fighting that proposal when the appeals court made its decision Thursday.

“This is an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice,” said Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani. “Members of the legal community who want to protect the integrity of our justice system should immediately speak out against this partisan, politically motivated decision.”

It was not immediately clear why Giuliani was unresponsive to the D.C. court while aggressively battling for more than two years the separate case brought against him by D.C. bar authorities in 2022. Lawyers handling the bar proceedings for Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Though the court’s decision did not turn on the D.C. Bar panel’s findings of misconduct, it is the culmination of a process that began with disciplinary investigations in both New York and Washington, D.C. Bar investigators accused Giuliani of unethical conduct over inaccurate and unsupported claims he made to a federal court in Pennsylvania as part of an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

A panel of judges in New York found similar misconduct when it disbarred Giuliani there, in the state where he rose to fame as a federal prosecutor and tough-on-crime Republican politician, before leading the city through the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Giuliani “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election, in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process,” the five-judge appellate panel said.