Rudy Giuliani admits to falsehoods in Georgia election fraud claims

Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer who was involved in Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 US presidential vote, has admitted to making false statements when he accused two electoral workers in Georgia of committing election fraud. 

In a court document filed on Tuesday, Giuliani conceded that following the 2020 vote, he made statements that “carry meaning that is defamatory per se” when he accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of activities including ballot-stuffing to help Joe Biden win Georgia.

He also did “not contest that . . . such actionable factual statements were false” nor the “factual elements of liability” regarding claims including “intentional infliction of emotional distress”.

The filing stems from a 2021 lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, two Georgia election workers who worked on the 2020 poll and who accused Giuliani of bearing “substantial and outsized responsibility” for their “character assassination”, according to the pair’s complaint. 

The workers argued Giuliani accused them of criminal acts such as excluding observers while ballots were being counted and adding suitcases stuffed with illegal ballots to benefit Biden. Their complaint describes Giuliani sharing a video of Freeman and Moss that Georgia election officials later debunked as “misinterpreted”, according to court filings. 

“And there you see it. Ruby Freeman and her crew getting everybody out of the centre, creating a false story that there was a — that there was a water main break,” Giuliani said on his video podcast in 2021, according to the complaint.

Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and pundit in rightwing media, has been accused of launching a scheme to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, an attempt that was revealed last year during public hearings of the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol. 

Moss testified before the committee, describing how she and her mother, Freeman, had become targets of rightwing conspiracy theories after being singled out by Giuliani. 

Giuliani was central to Trump’s legal efforts to overturn his election defeat, after which the then president called Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, urging him to “find 11,780 votes” that would have handed victory in the state to Trump. Raffensperger was not persuaded.

A special grand jury in Georgia has investigated alleged efforts by Trump and others to meddle with the 2020 election. If local prosecutors decide to bring charges in this case, they are likely to materialise later this summer. 

The US Department of Justice is also investigating Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 vote. Trump earlier this month said he had received a letter from the government saying he was the target of the federal investigation. The former president has said the criminal probe is politically motivated.