Rudy Giuliani Menaces Lincoln Project With His Wizened Chram

Make it stop.

Rudy Giuliani will not dignify the Lincoln Project with a response. He refuses to sully himself by answering their preservation demand and threat of an imminent defamation suit. The president’s lawyer would never stoop so low.

“I’m writing them a letter back telling them that I will not respond to their letter because they make this one rather sketchy, defamatory allegation about a tort that I committed,” he told Steve Bannon.

That’s … never mind.

During Giuliani’s last appearance on Bannon’s talk show, he accused the Lincoln Project of planning the January 6 Capitol Riot, disguising themselves as Trump supporters to stoke violence. That’s the very accusation which precipitated that nastygram from the group’s lawyer, Caplin & Drysdale’s Matthew Sanderson, warning that “You have until Wednesday, February 3rd to retract your statement fully and to apologize publicly to The Lincoln Project. Refuse at your peril.”

So it’s only fitting that Giuliani would return to the scene of the crime to defend himself.

“So I wrote back to him, ‘You know, son, I’ve represented Dow Jones, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News. I did this for a living. And you’ve made a classic mistake,'” he blustered.

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Oh, sorry, we meant, never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!

Just kidding.

“At the very end of the letter, you claimed that I defamed the Lincoln Project. Except in the first seven paragraphs of the letter, you defamed me at least four or five times,” is what he really said.

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Which is better than “I know you are, but what am I?” But only marginally.

To the extent this claim is rooted in objective reality (always a dicey proposition with our Roodles), he’s probably talking about this description of his part in the riot:

You told your zealots what to do. They listened. They vandalized. They terrorized. They injured. They killed.

You are responsible for an armed occupation of the U.S. Capitol and an insurrection against the United States. You are responsible for our nation’s first non-peaceful transfer of power since the Civil War. You are responsible for 140 injured Capitol Police. You are responsible for five dead Americans. You incited a riot on January 6th and then stood back to watch. Your immediate reaction to the dreadful scene that day was to phone fleeing Senators to request that they further extend the vote-counting delay that you helped manufacture, which is a treacherous act the public knows about only because you cannot operate a smartphone.

Well. There is that.

Because we are in the fourteenth month of 2020, we will now be subjected to months of grandstanding motions by a pack of aging silverbacks, at the conclusion of which the court will tell everyone to go away and think about their sins.

Credit to the profession!

Rudy Giuliani Responds to Lincoln Project’s Litigation Threat: ‘I’m Writing Them a Letter Back Telling Them I Will Not Respond to Their Letter’ [Law & Crime]


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.