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Rudy Giuliani Exits The Practice Of Law: Not With A Bang, But With A Piddle

Maybe he can get a job jumping out of cakes at bachelor parties.

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Rudy Giuliani And Trump Legal Advisor Hold Press Conference At RNC HQ

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani got disbarred. Again. And in the most Rudy Giuliani way possible.

In a one-page order, the DC Court of Appeals noted that it had ordered him on July 25 “to show cause why reciprocal discipline should not be imposed” after America’s erstwhile Mayor was relieved of his license to practice law in the state of New York. Giuliani was apparently preoccupied stumbling into and out of bankruptcy and generally flopping around the federal docket like a beached orca as he desperately attempts to fend off the $148 million judgment in favor of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Atlanta poll workers he defamed. And so Rudy just didn’t both to respond to the show cause order.

Under local precedent, “The imposition of identical discipline when the respondent fails to object should be close to automatic, with minimum review by both the Board and this court.”

“[I]t appearing that respondent has not filed a response, it is ORDERED that Rudolph W. Giuliani is hereby disbarred from the practice of law in the District of Columbia, nunc pro tunc to August 9, 2021,” the three-judge panel wrote yesterday.

It’s an anticlimactic end for the once-storied US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Giuliani emerged from failed runs for senate and president with some shred of his dignity intact, and managed to eke out a living endorsing whichever reverse mortgage or gold futures advertisers would have him, before being “rescued” by Trump in his rise to the presidency. Giuliani hoped for a job in the Trump administration, perhaps as secretary of state or attorney general. Those posts never materialized, but his proximity to power did permit Giuliani to make a nice living for the the first three years of the Trump administration whoring himself  as a “security consultant” from cushy offices housed inside Greenberg Traurig. That association soured in 2018 after Giuliani admitted on air with Sean Hannity that Cohen had paid hush money to Stormy Daniels and “funneled” the reimbursement through his law firm — something he insisted was perfectly normal and routine. But Rudy was still able to rent himself out to overseas strongmen, and he got to go on TV as the president’s personal lawyer. So he didn’t seem to mind much.

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Things really went off the rails in year four when Rudy decided he’d “help” his benefactor by traipsing around Ukraine in pursuit of dirt on Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. After steering Trump into his first impeachment — “Do us a favor, though!” — Giuliani set about laying the seeds for the second as he strove to overturn Biden’s electoral victory.

This finally proved to the seed of his own professional undoing, as Giuliani flogged lies about fraud and pressured elected officials to steal Biden’s electoral votes or try to pass off fraudulent ones. Giuliani’s only outing in court on Trump’s behalf was an ignominious disaster, with the attorney seemingly flummoxed by basic legal questions from US District Judge Matthew Brann.

“Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by strict scrutiny,” he wondered, before deciding that he’d like “the normal one.”

The efforts to overturn democracy garnered him multiple bar complaints. He was suspended in New York in 2021 and permanently disbarred there in July. DC moved to disbar him reciprocally, and after initially resisting, he appears to have simply wandered off.

Ah well, we’ll always have Rudy Coffee, or at least until Freeman and Moss seize it anyway.

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