Rudy Giuilani’s Attacks on Democracy Are Attacks on People
To borrow a phrase from the man himself, Rudy Giuliani had a theory, but not a lot of evidence.
The lack of evidence—or more specifically, the failure to hand it over—caught up with him today, when a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Giuliani was liable for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who served as election workers in Fulton County, Georgia. Giuliani had accused the women of bringing suitcases full of fraudulent ballots and of passing USB drives like they were “vials of cocaine.” (They were actually ginger candies, Moss testified.) Trump then amplified the claims, naming Freeman in particular.
“I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor that they are engaged in surreptitious, illegal activity,” Giuliani said at the time. “And they’re still walking around Georgia. They should have been questioned already. Their homes should have been searched for evidence.”
Giuliani had sought to avoid handing over documents to the two women as part of the case, stipulating that he made false statements about them in the aftermath of the 2020 election but insisting that those statements were protected by the First Amendment.
But Judge Beryl Howell rejected his theory, saying that the “stipulations hold more holes than Swiss cheese” and were just an attempt to squirm out of producing the required documents. So she held him liable by default and ordered him to pay attorneys’ fees and other costs for the plaintiffs. A trial will still be held—not on the question of whether Giuliani defamed the women, but on the narrower question of whether and what damages he should pay. Howell once more instructed him to hand over the documents ahead of that trial.
The ruling is a legal and financial blow to Giuliani, but it should not come as news to anyone that he defamed Freeman and Moss. Indeed, Giuliani himself admitted as much in his July stipulation, saying his comments were “actionable” and “false.” This makes the case here a little like the question of whether Trump will be convicted for subverting the election: A verdict might be satisfying, it would set a marker for posterity, and it might have some political impact, but c’mon, no one should need a court to tell us what we all saw happen in real time.
The judgment does, however, serve as an important reminder of how the attempt by Trump and his allies to steal the election hurt actual, living people. Discussions of Trump’s chicanery tend to spin off in two directions: Either they become dissections of the absurdity and venality of the plot and the plotters, or they float into vague discussions of the damage done to democracy. But democracy can have an abstract quality, and grasping what an attack on it means can be difficult.
This case shows that the victims have names and faces. Giuliani wasn’t just attacking election results (another somewhat abstract idea) or proffering theories. Moss and Freeman weren’t the only individuals who were savagely attacked. Figures including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, and even Vice President Mike Pence were unfairly attacked. They were subject to threats and harassment. Some, such as Bowers, saw their political careers ended. Although there is no excuse, these people were men in the arena, who had sought prominent political positions.
Not Freeman and Moss. They were ordinary citizens who were just doing their job, and who did nothing wrong, as multiple investigations and a state report have found. They’d been working elections for years without incident. Then, suddenly, they found themselves in headlines and targeted by threats and bizarre schemes. They are also Black women, which made them perfect targets for Trump, whose movement has a long history of racism and who correctly viewed Black voters as central to his defeat in Georgia.
“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman told the House January 6 committee last year. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
The pair are the most unwillingly famous examples, but they are not the only ones. On Monday, a Trump supporter was sentenced in Arizona for violent threats against a chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who fulfilled a statutory duty to certify an election. Election officials around the country are quitting in droves, leaving jobs that usually don’t pay all that well but offered a sense of mission and public service. Now that they also bring a serious risk of threats and intimidation, the trade-off no longer seems worthwhile.
And that is where the lives of individuals and the abstraction of democracy connect. On a fundamental level, an attack on democracy is an attack on every citizen, but American government also depends on citizens who do the typically anonymous grunt work of making sure that elections function. The criminal cases against Trump and his allies are essential for protecting the rule of law and the systems of government, but justice for people like Freeman and Moss is just as integral to defending democracy.