The disbarred Rudy Giuliani on Monday said he should be allowed to practice law again after receiving a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin included the former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer in a laundry list of more than 70 Trump allies accused of scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting a slate of fake electors to receive a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon, which Martin announced via a post on X.
In a statement, Giuliani’s rep, Ted Goodman, framed the pardon as an exoneration and said it should earn him back his bar license.
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani stands by his work following the 2020 presidential election, when he responded to the legitimate concerns of thousands of everyday Americans,” Goodman said.
“This action further highlights the years of unjust attacks against the mayor and so many others, and reinforces what should now be clear to everyone—Mayor Giuliani deserves to have his bar license immediately reinstated without delay.”
Monday’s pardons were essentially symbolic, with no federal case ever brought in relation to the alleged fake electors plot that sought to overturn former President Joe Biden’s victory against Trump — a Justice Department case alleging Trump and others illegally conspired to thwart the election results died after Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
And the pardons have no bearing on the state charges Giuliani and others face in Arizona for allegedly pressuring state and county officials to award Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Trump, despite him losing the state. Giuliani, 81, has pleaded not guilty in the case, which is set to go on trial in January. A Michigan court dismissed a related case brought in that state in September.
Long ago a respected lawman, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s and later became known as “America’s Mayor” for his leadership at City Hall following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Giuliani was stripped of his ability to practice law is his home state in July 2024 after losing his appeal of the New York State Bar Association’s decision to disbar him.
As he continued to spread the debunked claim that Trump had actually won the 2020 election, the state bar association in 2021 said it was immediately removing Giuliani from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law in the Empire State “because of his suspension from the practice of law.”
His law license was suspended in Washington, D.C., the same year, with a disciplinary board recommending that he be permanently disbarred from practicing law in the nation’s capital in 2024.
The only client Giuliani has represented since then is himself in lawsuits against him, in which he couldn’t afford a lawyer and went pro se.
“It is appropriate that Rudy Giuliani takes an utterly meaningless statement by the president of the United States and seeks to bootstrap that back into a law license that he lost for making stuff up,” Ron Kuby, the veteran New York City defense attorney and civil rights lawyer who’s gone up against Giuliani in court, told the Daily News Monday.
“Now, he’s making up an exoneration,” Kuby quipped. “I mean, at some point, even for Rudy, it stops being silly and stupid and faceplanting, and it just becomes a pathetic need for attention.”
Amid losing his law license and respected legacy, Giuliani has straddled the brink of bankruptcy in recent years, facing countless lawsuits, including an ongoing sexual assault and harassment case in Manhattan brought by Noelle Dunphy, who claims Giuliani never paid her for working as his assistant and subjected her to sexual misconduct. Giuliani denies the allegations.
Litigation stemming from a case against Giuliani by a mother and daughter who volunteered during the 2020 election, whom he was ordered to pay $148 million for falsely accusing them of ballot fraud, concluded with a settlement for an undisclosed sum and a promise to stop slandering them in January.
