Citing his role in a “violent insurrectionary attack on the United States Capitol,” the chairman of the New York State Senate judiciary committee made a formal request on Monday to the state judicial system to begin the process of dismissing the president’s attorney. Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani, for his rightful license.
Senator Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat, said Giuliani appears to have committed several ethical violations in his efforts to support Trump’s unfounded allegations of fraud during the presidential election.
These efforts culminated on Wednesday when Giuliani addressed a crowd of Trump supporters, repeating the president’s unproven allegations of electoral fraud and appearing to incite people to violence. After hearing Giuliani and the president speak, members of the crowd marched to the Capitol and an angry mob looted the building.
“If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we are right, many of them will go to prison,” said Giuliani. “We are going to do a combat test”.
Mr. Hoylman, in a letter to the complaints department of the Appellate Division of the First Department, said the attack on the Capitol was “the foreseeable culmination of increasingly outrageous lies and disinformation being sold by Mr. Giuliani” and others.
“The codes of ethics that we, as lawyers, swear to uphold are intended to safeguard both the public and the reputation of the profession itself,” he wrote. “Failing to hold a member of our ranks responsible for seditious acts and exhortations of violence is the failure to provide this safeguard.”
The summons for Giuliani’s dismissal came just hours after the New York State Bar Association announced that it had launched a “historic” investigation into Giuliani, which could lead to his removal from the group.
In a prepared statement issued on Monday, Scott M. Karson, the association’s president, said his decision to initiate the investigation was prompted by hundreds of complaints the group received about Giuliani’s central role in Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election results.
The Bar Association has no power to remove Mr. Giuliani from his legal license. But if the highly unusual investigation by his colleagues leads to his removal from the group, it would be a black spot in a career that has spanned more than 40 years as a lawyer. A spokeswoman for the group said it had not removed anyone who had not yet been expelled since 1904.
The association’s statutes prohibit members from, among other things, defending “the overthrow of the government”, and in his statement Karson said Giuliani’s words in Washington last week were “clearly intended to encourage Trump supporters dissatisfied with the outcome election to resolve the problem on their own. ”
“The subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup,” wrote Karson, “with the intention of preventing the peaceful transition of power.”
Giuliani, who did not respond to requests for comment, addressed complaints against him on his radio show this afternoon.
“I was a prosecutor my whole life – I’m not stupid,” he said. “I don’t want to be in trouble. And I have a high sense of ethics, personally. I hate it when people attack my integrity. “
The investigation was just the latest example of efforts to react against the lawyers who supported Trump’s attempt to stay in power. Last week, for example, Dominion Voting Systems sued the president’s former lawyer, Sidney Powell, for defamation, alleging that she had been involved in “a viral disinformation campaign” over the role that her machines played in the election.