Maybe this will be like a game of dominoes, and Lin Wood’s resignation will be the beginning of the entire chain of all of Trump’s lawyers dropping. The D.C. Bar Association rendered a preliminary finding that Rudy Giuliani “weaponized” his law license by pushing the Big Lie after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. This is the first step to disbarment in that jurisdiction. Bloomberg News:
Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton “Phil” Fox, whose office brought the ethics complaint against Giuliani, argued that the most severe sanction — losing his law license in Washington — was appropriate because Giuliani’s conduct in Pennsylvania was part of a broader effort to undermine the legitimacy of an election.
“It was a fundamental harm to the fabric of the country that could well be irreparable,” Fox said. “Any lawyer that engages in this kind of misconduct, harming the country as this has done, has at least got to realize that his or her law license is at risk.” […]
The three-person hearing committee shared its findings after hearing several days of testimony and arguments. Giuliani briefly presented character evidence that he believed weighed against sanctions, including his work on behalf of first responders following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. The disciplinary counsel then presented its case for disbarment, while Giuliani’s lawyer argued for the least serious sanction possible.
Well, things have not changed a bit. Joe Biden once said about Giuliani that, “Every sentence begins noun, verb, 9/11.” That’s all Giuliani has got, evidently, and I don’t see how that’s going to save him in this context.
If anybody deserves to get disbarred it is Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Their actions against this country were unconscionable. Powell was so far off the walls that even a Newsmax host asked her if she was really serious about her fraud allegations. Then of course there was Giuliani’s classic line to then-Speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, “We have lots of theories, we just don’t have any evidence.”
Lin Wood’s resignation was accepted by the Georgia Bar, so maybe that’s how these other cases will proceed. That’s pure speculation, but it might be a more dignified way for these situations to resolve.
Meanwhile, John Eastman is in disbarment hearings in California and Jeffrey Clark may soon be charged by the same D.C. Bar that just found against Giuliani, preliminarily. I’m keeping an eye out to see if Eastman tries to follow Lin Wood’s lead and resign, or even if that’s possible in California.
Stay tuned.
I’m not sure DC is the best place for Rudy to be invoking 9/11. (I won’t even get into his decisions that led to unecessary firefighter deaths, and his ignoring recomendations on command center placement, etc.) Not that anyone would know it from listening to Rudy and the GOP but NYC wasn’t the only target that day. A plane headed for the Capitol was brought down by passengers. The one that hit the Pentagon? It happened to hit the ONE wing that had been renovated and significantly reinforced. (The whole building was thrown up in haste when built and not intended to be permanent) Instead of 5k people being in that wing, only a few hundred were as the “punch out list” phase of construction was almost done. So there was that factor that led to comparitively low casualties compared to the twin towers.
Then there was the construction itself. In the rebuild a decision had been made to make the building STRONG. To last. So it had serious reinforcements in the support columns from the basement up. (Yes, there has always been a below ground level part) That’s why the plane disintigrated before making it all the way through the inner A-Ring. Had the plane struck any of the other four sides, it WOULD have made it all the way through. Worse, each wing being packed with 5k pluse people the combination of most of that old, non-reinforced structure collapsing and the fireball would have resulted in well over 3k deaths there alone. And a fireball in the courtyard as part of the inner A-Ring was breached would have killed one to two thousand more working in the offices that looked out on the courtyard.
Awful as it was, it was sheer luck that the deaths were measured in the hundreds instead of close to five thousand. Perhaps more.
Again, not that anyone would no ONE SINGLE PERSON died in DC that day! They didn’t matter to Rudy, or the whole f**king GOP and I cursed my TV over and over again listening to him bray about NYC, claiming the mantle of “America’s Mayor” and at the GOP convention in 2004 Rudy (and the others) milked NYC and 9/11 for all it was worth. And NO mention of DC!
As it happens, I buried two of the Pentagon victims in the cemetery I managed for the Town of Herndon. I got to know the widows and other family members pretty well, helping each design monuments and just seeing them on a regular basis until I left that job almost two years later. A couple of times, when the night before the news was filled with Rudy and NYC a comment to the effect of “it feels like we, and (insert name which I won’t do here) don’t count.”
There are a lot of folks in the DC area who know personally how lucky they or someone they love or at least know was that day, with one plane being crashed by the passengers in PA and the one that hit the Pentagon striking the one spot where it would kill the fewest people. When a memorial was finally dedicated on the lawn of the Pentagon outside where the plane hit it was barely a ripple in the news.
So Rudy can shove the twin towers. Sideways. One down his fat mouth and the other up his a$$!
His Mind is a lost cause, he didn’t think to use sweat proof hair coloring, and the sight was horrible, along with his bugging eyes and slack jaw discussions, hand-in-hand with the OTHER so-called-lawyer, they were SO SURE, they could deliver the goods for Trump, Rudy traveled the globe with Trump’s kind of poison, trying to spread the positive side of Trump … A serious problem, since there is NO positive record of actions in Trump’s putrid past …
Rudy should retire to some flea bag motel in the mountains, closed years ago, due to overwhelming cases of bed bug bites and rotten plumbing … Give him a gallon of Black Label Jack Daniels and a couple pacifiers to suck on … He will last a while, but If he does not have access to the web OR cell phone service, the gallon might tip off the table and the single candle light could ignite it … [Sweat], sweet dreams sucker …
Thanks, Denis.
As a native New Yorker, and one who worked as a contractor in an office on the SW corner of the North Tower’s 83rd floor a year before that awful day (and think often about 11 former coworkers lost in the initial blast), I was unaware of just how bad the Pentagon attack could have been.
My observations on and feelings about Rudy have been posted here on PZ in the past, and agree with comments expressed in this article. It’s gratifying that this POS is getting some of what he deserves, but he’s due a LOT more, considering that he and then EPA head Christine Todd Whitman repeatedly assured first responders who worked the WTC site for months searching to recover remains that the air they were breathing was NOT toxic – leading to I-don’t-know-how-many cancer cases and deaths among the FR ranks, as well as an undetermined number of ordinary workers who passed by the site daily on the way to and from work, and now may be dealing with medical issues that they’ll never know the cause of. Congress finally gave the affected first responders the Zadroga bill, and their cases have been accurately counted and documented; their numbers should rightfully be included in the 9/11 toll, as should any FR death related to cleanup after the Pentagon attack. We’ll never know how many of the everyday people I described should be included, so we’ll never have a truly accurate total for our losses in that attack. The fact remains that the these loses would have been lower had Rudy kept his big fat mount shut (Ms. Whitman decided to leave public life. Last time her name was in the news, she was urging the GOP to renounce Trumpism).
When I was on active duty I stood duty in the Pentagon for a while. HQMC was in the Navy Annex in Arlington (up the hill from the Pentagon) in those days. The 0100s (Admin types) were oh so too important to have to stints of mess duty in the chow hall so the practice was to ship in a group of grunts like me for six weeks or so to do it. It sucked but what can you do? At any rate it was recognized that we had gotten screwed and deserved a reward so we could at least put down a set of choices for our next duty assignment which included a number “Barracks” postings in various spots around the world. Several went for Subic Bay, mainly because all they ever thought about was getting laid and they were obsessed by thoughts of liberty across that dirty strip of a stream into Po City. I actually put down Marine Barracks London, and also Iceland (being an outdoors type I thought it would be awesome to get out into the countryside there) and also PMO at Henderson Hall, right across the street from the Annex and where I’d stood that stint of mess duty because the SecNav and CNO wanted grunts guarding their spaces and the Navy Command Center. ARMED Marines. As it happens the Command Center sat in the middle of the wing the plane hit, at least back then. Also, when on night duty I’d accompany Petty Officers from the OpNav Security Office on security sweeps of classified office spaces (looking for unsecured materials, something I’ve written about here) which is how I got a look at the basement. At which point I realized just how old that place was and that the stuff I’d heard and read about it not being intended to be permanent were real. They did consider moving things somewhere else but the design of the building is rather more functional than you’d think. It’s surprising how in such a large building how little time it can take to get from one place to another. In the end it was decided back during that time to rebuild the place one side at a time. It being a govt./DOD contract that had to be handed out it took a good long while to get started but as I noted phase was was almost complete when the attack happened. To those not familiar with the term, in contruction “punch out” means a list of minor stuff that needs to be done like some electrical outlet not working, or some loose tile in the floor that needs to be secured – stuff that can be fixed before the day is out. One of my victims had just moved back into is office, the rest of the people in his unit hadn’t had the chance yet. The other would have moved into a nearby office (that performed a different function) the next week BUT as fate would have it he was sent west to meet with a defense contractor and was on the plane that turned around and crashed into the office he was moving back into! He was about my age at the time with two young daughters just starting school. Heartbreaking. The other was a retired Navy Captain who turned down an Admiral’s Flag because it would have meant an immediate year long unaccompanied tour to a less than friendly spot down in central America. His kids were in college and he decided he’d missed enough of their lives. As “luck” would have it the civilian counterpart who ran the office that tended to that place/those matters was retiring and he basically wound up doing the job as a civilian that he would have done had he stayed in the Navy. Only he now got to be home with his family – for less than six months as it turned out. Again, heartbreaking.
I’m sure so many of those who died in NYC had heartbreaking stories. But we were incredibly lucky that the death toll at the Pentagon wasn’t well in excess of that in NYC. I should also note that there were many, mostly military folks who ran INTO the flames to rescue people. A few of the deaths happened that way. But had it not been for regular men and women wearing our nation’s uniform (and some civilian workers too) another eighy to a a hundred would have died there that day. Not that this country has ever given much of a f**k about all of THEM, both the dead and the survivors. If I seem bitter it’s because I am. I can personally relate to where that plane struck and easily imagine being at my post and my life ending there. It’s easy for me to imagine the scene in that side of the Pentagon that day from the inside. And the people in other wings running TO the danger to try and help instead of away from it. And I don’t have to wonder about the effects on the families of the victims. I saw it firsthand and had the honor of helping two of the families through their grief.
I don’t think 9/11 is remotely relevant to why he is facing disbarment. I guess it’s his biggest success he can point to. (in his mind)
From observation of him, I strongly suspect Rudy might not be worried about being disbarred as long as he still has access to all those other bars.