Rudy Giuliani is having lawyer trouble. Two of the lawyers defending him against criminal charges for efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia are asking the court to be allowed to withdraw from representing him. He’s being sued for nonpayment by a law firm that represented him in other matters. So what does Giuliani do? He’s planning to rack up more hours of legal representation he can’t pay for—by suing President Joe Biden.
Giuliani is suing Biden for defamation over comments Biden made in an October 2020 presidential debate against Donald Trump. Talking about election interference by Russia, China, and Iran, as well as Trump’s failure to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin on the issue, Biden said:
But the point is this, folks. We are in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to interfere in the outcome of our election. His own national security advisor told him that what is happening with his buddy — well, I won’t, I shouldn’t — I will — his buddy Rudy Giuliani. He’s being used as a Russian pawn. He’s being fed information that is Russian, that is not true. And then what happens? Nothing happens.
Three years later, Giuliani is suing. He claims it’s not retaliation for Hunter Biden suing him for allegedly “hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from” the younger Biden’s devices. It’s purely coincidental that this lawsuit over three-year-old comments comes just over a week later.
It’s not clear how Giuliani thinks he’s going to meet the extremely high bar for defamation. Since he’s a public figure, that would require the statement to have involved “actual malice,” which is not malice in the ordinary sense, but instead “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Since the debate and Joe Biden’s comments came just a week after The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had warned the Trump White House that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation, the president should have no trouble defending himself—but by suing, Giuliani invites another airing of all the evidence that “Russian pawn” was an accurate characterization.
But how will Giuliani pay his lawyers on this lawsuit when he’s already in so much trouble with all his other lawyers? “That is the furthest thing from my mind,” one of the lawyers in question told reporters. “When I say he’s my friend, he is my friend. And he’s the friend of the country. He is America’s mayor.” Unless they’re purely in it for the publicity, we’ll see how these lawyers feel after Giuliani racks up another $1.4 million in unpaid bills.
