Giuliani’s no-show prevents courtroom confrontation with Georgia election workers

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers who have been tormented by harassment and threats since 2020, were prepared Tuesday to confront the man they view as the chief instigator of their suffering: Rudy Giuliani.

But Giuliani was a no-show at a federal court hearing in the duo’s defamation lawsuit, prompting a lashing for his attorney by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who had ordered Giuliani to be present.

“How could you have missed that?” Howell asked Giuliani’s attorney, Joe Sibley, incredulously, when he took the blame for Giuliani’s absence.

“My mistake,” Sibley replied, prompting Howell to ask whether he was “falling on his sword” for the former mayor. Sibley insisted he wasn’t but rather that he simply had misunderstood Howell’s order requiring Giuliani’s presence at the hearing, the final session before the civil damages case goes before a jury next week.

Freeman and Moss have become outsized figures in the investigations into former President Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to subvert the 2020 election. The threats targeting Moss and Freeman were featured in a sprawling racketeering indictment brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis against Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators, including several charged specifically with targeting the election workers. Giuliani’s charges include falsely telling Georgia legislators that Freeman and Moss were “quite obviously” passing around USB drives to manipulate voting machines.

Giuliani identified the pair in surveillance video from Atlanta’s State Farm Arena and accused them of manipulating thousands of ballots, allegations that have been widely debunked and discredited. But his accusation in the final, chaotic weeks of Trump’s presidency became kindling for conspiracy theories about election fraud, and they were supercharged by Trump himself, who echoed them publicly and raised them in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani, along with some of his allies in conservative media, in 2021. The pair settled with One America News’ parent company, Herring Networks, last year, leaving Giuliani as the last remaining defendant. Earlier this year, Howell found that Giuliani had repeatedly defied orders to preserve and produce evidence in the lawsuit and found him liable for defaming them. A trial scheduled to begin Monday will focus on how much Moss and Freeman will receive in damages.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Howell pressed Sibley on whether Giuliani would plead the Fifth, considering he’s facing his own criminal charges in Georgia and has been identified as a Trump co-conspirator in the criminal charges Trump is facing in Washington, D.C. She noted that several witnesses pleaded the Fifth hundreds of times in depositions conducted by Freeman and Moss’ lawyers, including Jenna Ellis 448 times and Ray Smith, Jr. 309 times. Sibley said Giuliani did not intend to plead the Fifth.

The election workers found some measure of redemption in their public testimony before the House Jan. 6 select committee, where they described the relentless attacks and threats they faced in the aftermath of Giuliani and Trump’s comments about them. On Tuesday, they traveled into and out of the courthouse via non-public corridors and were not available to comment on the hearing.

Just minutes after their departure, federal prosecutors who have charged Trump with seeking to subvert the 2020 election indicated their intention to cite Trump and Giuliani’s attacks on Moss and Freeman during the former president’s Washington, D.C. criminal trial that is scheduled to begin March 4.

“Long after the charged conduct, the defendant continued to falsely attack two Georgia election workers despite being on notice that his claims about them in 2020 were false and had subjected them to vile, racist, and violent threats and harassment,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in a nine-page court filing.

Gaston referenced Moss and Freeman’s testimony to the Jan. 6 select committee, describing their “graphic testimony about the threats and harassment they endured after the defendant and his agents falsely accused them.”

“In apparent response, the defendant then doubled down and recommenced his attacks on the election workers in posts on Truth Social,” Gaston wrote. “He even zeroed in on one of the election workers, falsely writing that she was an election fraudster, a liar, and one of the ‘treacher[ous] ... monsters’ who stole the country, and that she would be in legal trouble.”