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Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani leaves the federal courthouse in Washington, Monday, Dec. 11, 2023 (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana).
Just one day after being held in contempt for repeatedly flouting court orders, Rudy Giuliani missed yet another crucial filing deadline as the two Georgia election workers he defamed continue litigating collection of the $148 million judgment they were awarded.
As a result, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis J. Liman threatened to prohibit Giuliani from submitting evidentiary exhibits in connection with next week’s proceedings over the ownership of the former New York City mayor’s three Yankees World Series rings.
Liman in a brief two-page order on Tuesday called out Giuliani and his attorney, Joseph Cammarata, for failing to properly work with the attorneys for plaintiffs Rudy Freeman and Shay Moss in filing joint pretrial orders.
Joint pretrial orders are critical documents that dictate the course of a trial by laying out the legal and factual issues before the court. They are typically prepared by plaintiff’s counsel with input from the defense and include the parties’ positions on the court’s jurisdiction, claim summaries, and exhibit lists — as well as objections to the opposing party’s exhibit list.
The filing was due at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. While attorneys for the plaintiffs as well as Andrew Giuliani, the intervenor in the case, followed the procedures clearly outlined by the court, Giuliani and Cammarata appeared to go their own way.
“Plaintiff timely filed a proposed pretrial order reflecting the participation of intervenor. The proposed pretrial orders reflect that counsel for the Defendant failed to make himself available to meet and confer,” Liman wrote. “Instead, at 4:50 p.m., counsel for Defendant emailed Chambers his exhibit list, and at 4:57 p.m., counsel for Defendant emailed Chambers what he represented were joint pretrial orders agreed to by all parties in both matters. The emailed joint pretrial orders make reference to an attached joint exhibit list but do not attach the exhibit list. Nothing was filed on the docket. The Court would be within its prerogative to preclude Defendant from offering exhibits that are not contained in the joint pretrial orders filed by Plaintiff.”
Stating that the court “cannot go to trial with two competing pretrial orders,” Liman ordered Giuliani to fix the situation by emailing his exhibit list and any proposed edits to plaintiffs’ filing by 9:30 p.m. Tuesday evening or face consequences.
“Failure to do so will result in waiver of the right to submit exhibits not otherwise included in the filed joint pretrial orders,” Liman wrote.
The judge appears to be fed up with Giuliani and his antics, particularly in light of his latest mishap occurring only a day after Liman held the onetime U.S. attorney in contempt and granted a request for sanctions.
Liman last month ordered the contempt hearing following numerous requests from Freeman and Moss regarding Giuliani’s “consistent pattern of willful defiance” of court orders directing him to turn over of his personal property and provide information to plaintiffs for discovery.
Following the two-day hearing, Liman on Monday ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, reportedly saying of his decision, “It was not even close
Back in December, Liman signaled that he was likely to punish Giuliani for his repeated failures to follow court orders and called out the former U.S. attorney for filing court documents explaining his shortcomings with assertions Giuliani knew “to be untrue.”
Giuliani’s legal woes are far from over, as he is scheduled to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday for a separate contempt hearing before U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who presided over Freeman and Moss’ defamation trial just over a year ago.
The second contempt hearing stems from Freeman and Moss seeking to punish Giuliani for allegedly violating an order barring him from repeating the defamatory claims he made about the duo. The election workers in November filed a motion claiming his defamatory campaign against them continued even after they were awarded the astronomical judgment and Giuliani declared bankruptcy.
According to the filing, the former personal attorney for Donald Trump had been “brazenly violating that consent injunction” by repeating “the exact same lies” that resulted in the initial defamation judgment against Giuliani.