Rudy Giuliani tries to block defamed election workers from going after money Trump owes him
Rudy Giuliani told a federal bankruptcy court in February that he believes Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee owe him $2 million for his failed legal efforts to overturn election results in 2020.
His bankruptcy case was dissolved in August, and now a pair of election workers Giuliani defamed during his 2020 crusade are hoping to recover the $148 million that a jury said they are owed.
But Giuliani does not want those women touching the Trump campaign.
His attorneys urged a federal judge in New York on Tuesday to block Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss from targeting Giuliani’s “alleged claim against the Trump Campaign” to avoid a “media frenzy” before Election Day.
But Giuliani himself told a federal bankruptcy court in February that he believes Trump’s campaign owes him roughly $2 million because it “never paid the legal fees” surrounding his efforts to challenge election results.
In August, Freeman and Moss asked a federal court in New York to force Giuliani to begin seizing his assets — including money owed from the Trump campaign, as well as Giuliani’s 1980 Mercedes-Benz, World Series rings and luxury apartments in Manhattan and Florida — to collect on their multi-million dollar defamation verdict.
His attorneys want to postpone the election workers’ claims against Trump until after Election Day.
“Otherwise, Plaintiffs will or may use this assignment for an improper, political (or, at least, collateral) purpose, creating the confusing, and inaccurate, appearance that Defendant is now somehow suing candidate Trump, thereby generating an accompanying, and unnecessary, media frenzy,” according to the filing.
“Plainly, the value of this claim will not depreciate between now and November 6, 2024,” attorneys wrote.
Giuliani’s son Andrew also has asked the court to block Freeman and Moss from going after his father’s World Series rings.
A jury trial in Washington, DC, last year determined that Giuliani repeatedly defamed Freeman and Moss with bogus statements to Georgia lawmakers and on television and podcast appearances where he falsely suggested they manipulated the outcome of the election.
The threats and pressure campaign that followed have also been used as evidence in a sprawling criminal case in Georgia, where Giuliani is a criminal defendant alongside the former president, who is charged with leading a criminal enterprise to unlawfully overturn the state’s election results.
Trump is also charged with conspiring to subvert the election’s outcome in a parallel federal case. Giuliani is among the unindicted co-conspirators in that case, and he was separately criminally indicted under a similar case in Arizona. He has pleaded not guilty in all cases.
Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman told The Independent in August that he believes the $148 million verdict is “objectively unreasonable” and that Freeman and Moss are trying to “harass and intimidate” the former New York City mayor.
“This lawsuit has always been designed to censor and bully the mayor, and to deter others from exercising their right to speak up and to speak out,” according to Goodman.