Rudy Giuliani disbarred in DC over 2020 election lies

Donald Trump’s top ally and attorney Rudy Giuliani was disbarred from practicing law in Washington DC on Thursday, months after a similar decision in his home state of New York left his reputation in tatters.

The former New York City mayor was Trump’s lead attorney in 2020 and early 2021 as the ex-president launched a series of increasingly desperate schemes to hold on to power. It began in Ukraine, where Giuliani was Trump’s man on the ground as part of efforts to coerce that country’s government into opening a criminal investigation into Joe Biden, with the purpose of damaging Biden politically.

After Giuliani’s shenanigans abroad lead to the first impeachment of Trump that year, the ex-mayor would go on to represent Trump at home during the 2020 election and in the days following. In the weeks after his defeat by Biden, Trump leaned on Giuliani and other members of his legal team like Jenna Ellis and Jon Eastman to file legal challenges aimed at halting or reversing the certification of the election results in states including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.

Those efforts failed across the board, and Giuliani himself was forced to admit in one instance that the Trump campaign never had the hard evidence of massive numbers of fraudulent ballots which Trump himself was claiming to have obtained.

On Thursday, the consequences of that admission — and his overall scheme to undo the election, which culminated in January 6 — were laid bare once again in the nation’s capital. Giuliani will be permanently banned from practicing law in the District of Columbia.

His spokesman Ted Goodman told NBC News that the decision was “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice" and called on top legal minds to