The left continues its growing trend of destroying the right through lawfare; prosecution on the criminal side and sanctions and defamation lawsuits on the civil side. Most people know the lawfare is groundless, but with the left now dominating the legal system, including the judiciary and state bars, it’s become easy to destroy the lives of vocal conservatives, holding them up as warning examples to any other principled conservative who next dares to go against the fascism of progressivism. Anyone who bravely defends those targeted with defamation suits risks being sued for defamation themselves. It’s a perfect way to chill conservative speech, especially attempts to expose illegal election activity.
The latest victim is Rudy Giuliani, who lost a $148 million defamation case, forcing him to file for bankruptcy. He was sued over telling a Missouri House committee that a video posted on The Gateway Pundit “shows demonstrably the theft of about 40,000 ballots right in front of your eyes.” The site accused Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a mother and daughter who counted ballots at State Farm Arena, of producing and counting ballots from suitcases.
The video showed election workers grabbing rectangular black boxes that looked like suitcases from underneath tables — they even had pull-up handles to haul them around like suitcases — after workers had told poll watchers to go home for the evening due to a burst pipe. Election officials claimed later that they did not count ballots from the containers, but merely put ballots away in them which was routine.
Giuliani tried to back out of his statements once he saw how bad his chances were in the lawsuit, saying three years later that he’d made false statements. However, he did not admit that his statements had damaged the two plaintiffs, an element required to prove defamation.
D.C. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, didn’t care that Giuliani said he was unable to adequately defend himself in responses because federal agents had seized many of his documents, and was buried with “seven or eight cases that had pending requests for discovery” including “not just civil but criminal investigations.” Howell entered a default judgment against him in August, concluding the proceedings in December as to the amount, which prompted Giuliani to file for bankruptcy.
By entering a default judgment against him, she ducked having to rule on the merits or have a jury decide the merits (granted, in Washington D.C., it would be almost impossible to find a fair jury). The elements of defamation include proving that the defendant made a false statement and engaged in at least negligence.
Based on recent defamation law regarding private figures like the two women, it wasn’t a slam dunk case against Giuliani. A landmark ruling in 2022 by the Arizona Supreme Court held that there was no defamation committed against a modeling agency owner by State Sen. Wendy Rogers when she referred to her primary race opponent as “a slimy character whose modeling agency specializes in underage girls and advertises on websites linked to sex trafficking.”
Writing for the majority, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick said, “[T]he First Amendment necessarily protects both the profound and the profane, not only conscientious candidates and civil discourse but unscrupulous politicians and negative campaigns as well.”
He concluded citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which found that “in public debate [we] must tolerate insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide ‘adequate breathing space to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.””
Many of the election workers who were accused of wrongdoing in 2020 or 2022 fit a pattern of realizing monkey business was going on but preferred to pretend not to notice it, since they were lower level employees who did not want to lose their jobs. Georgia election officials have repeatedly fought attempts to further investigate the occurrences on election night.
Howell rules in favor of free speech when it benefits progressives. When an activist stood outside the U.S. Supreme Court wearing a sign that protested the government's treatment of black and Hispanic people, violating a criminal law, Howell struck down the law — and was overturned by the D.C. Court of Appeals. In 2019, she ruled against Trump administration officials and in favor of House Democrats, requiring the administration to turn over grand jury materials from the Mueller investigation to aid in their impeachment attempts.
When she received an award in November for advancing opportunities for women in the white collar field, she referred to those protesting election fraud as “the big lie.” Despite statements like this, she is still allowed to decide cases like Giuliani’s. Rep. Elise Stefanik filed a judicial complaint against her.
The plaintiffs claimed that their lives had been turned upside down by the publicity. However, there are thousands of people who investigated the concerns of election fraud, both officials and private citizens, whose lives were turned upside down, receiving death threats and canceled, yet that’s treated as routine.
The plaintiffs are represented by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic MFIA at Yale Law School, known for taking on progressive causes, the progressive law firm Dowd Bennett and the progressive United to Protect Democracy. United to Protect Democracy is part of The Democracy Project, which was started to stop Donald Trump from becoming president, exposed in a viral TIME article called “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Dowd Bennett is run by trial lawyers, who are one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party, and boasts politicians like former Democratic Governor Jay Nixon and John Danforth, former RINO U.S. Senator from Missouri who has become active in election fraud denying work in recent years.
There has been little pushback defending Giuliani, even on the right. If more people don’t start exposing the circumstances behind this lawfare, instead allowing the left to pile up victory after victory, election fraud will never be stopped.