Courts

Rudy Guiliani’s Legal Strategy Is Performance Art

Are we sure Andy Kaufman is really dead?

By Liz Dye on January 10, 2025 3:32 pm
Jury Orders Rudy Giuliani To Pay 148 Million Dollars To Two Former Georgia Election Workers In Defamation Trial Verdict

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani spent the afternoon trying to convince Judge Beryl Howell in DC not to hold him in contempt for continuing to defame the Atlanta poll workers to whom he owes $148 million. His theory is that he was not referring to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss on November 19 when he said on his podcast:

You know the tapes in at the Arena…at the State Arena in Atlanta…uh they threw out all the people that were observing the vote count, uh closed the doors. All of a sudden um these two ladies and several others shoo everybody out. Everybody’s gone. Close down the Arena.…They make one more casing of the joint, now this is not on the tape anymore, used to be, casing of the joint and then all of a sudden they have a covered over table that uh hadn’t been used all day to take any ballots out and when nobody was around they pull up, pull up the and they take five bins out and turn them over to the people counting and you can see them quadruple counting.

It seems to be going great.

Rudy has thoughts. And he appears to be sharing them from the courtroom.

This is not to be confused with the collection action in New York, where he was found in contempt of Judge Lewis Liman’s turnover order and for failing to comply with discovery.

And yet America’s decrepit Mayor is still inventing new ways to piss off the court. This time, he registered his Florida homestead claim with the Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller, in direct contravention of the court’s order.

On January 16, the issue of Rudy’s disputed Florida homestead claim is set for trial in Judge Liman’s courtroom. He says he lives there, and is thus entitled to take advantage of the state’s unlimited homestead allowance, despite attesting to US Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane this summer that he lived in New York.

On October 31, Judge Liman issued an order barring Rudy from encumbering the Palm Beach condo. And yet, on December 30, the former head of SDNY wandered into the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office and filed an affidavit attesting that Freeman and Moss’s registered judgment “does not constitute a valid lien on the described property.”

The plaintiffs now have 45 days to institute a local civil action in Palm Beach County Court seeking a declaratory judgment that the homestead affidavit is false and to record a lis pendens with the county registrar. They are — unsurprisingly! — apoplectic.

In a letter to Judge Liman, plaintiffs’ Willkie Farr counsel, Aaron Nathan, noted that the homestead affirmation doesn’t even conform to the state law it was filed under:

The Notice purports to invoke Mr. Giuliani’s rights under Fla. Stat. § 222.01(2), which provides that “a person who is entitled to the benefit of the provisions of the State Constitution exempting real property as homestead and who has a contract to sell or a commitment from a lender for a mortgage on the homestead may file a notice of homestead in the public records of the county in which the homestead property is located.”

Clearly, Rudy has no intention of selling this property, since the proceeds would be immediately confiscated by Freeman and Moss, so it’s pretty ballsy that he used this particular statute to throw up yet another roadblock. But ballsy — or perhaps FUCKING NUTS — has been his litigation strategy thus far.

It’s unclear whether Rudy’s bada-bing divorce lawyer Joe Cammarata was aware of his Florida shenanigans. Cammarata was already in dutch with Judge Liman, most recently for refusing to meet and confer on a joint pretrial order, then emailing chambers ex parte what he claimed were joint pretrial orders, replete with referrences to exhibits which were not attached.

Judge Liman was hella impressed:

The Court cannot go to trial with two competing joint pretrial orders, and it is not required to go to the effort of reconciling the competing submissions. Before 9:30 p.m. tonight, Defendant is ordered to serve Plaintiffs and Intervenor, by email to all counsel appearing for Plaintiffs and Intervenor, his proposed exhibit list in each of these matters, as well as any edits to the joint pretrial orders submitted by Plaintiffs. Failure to do so will result in waiver of the right to submit exhibits not otherwise included in the filed joint pretrial orders. Defendant’s counsel is also ordered to meet and confer with Plaintiffs’ counsel tomorrow morning at a time before 11:30 a.m. selected by Plaintiffs’ counsel (which Plaintiffs’ counsel should provide by 9:30 pm tonight). Plaintiffs shall file revised joint pretrial orders on the dockets of each of these cases by 2 p.m. tomorrow. No other pretrial submissions will be received by the Court (except for the response to Plaintiffs’ motions in limine), the time period for any other such submissions having expired.

And meanwhile, back in DC, it appears to be going swimmingly.

Freeman v. Giuliani [DC Docket via Court Listener
Freeman v. Giuliani [New York Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.