Georgia election workers defamed by Rudy Giuliani are asking the judge to hold him in contempt amid new legal threats


CNN

Two Georgia election officials who won a massive verdict against Rudy Giuliani for defaming them after the 2020 election are asking a federal judge to find him in contempt of court.

Their Wednesday morning filing opens up new court troubles that Donald Trump's former attorney must now grapple with as fallout continues for his efforts to spread voter fraud myths.

The couple, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, say Trump continues to repeat damaging lies about them on his nightly show, defying court orders.

“In his latest act of defying court orders and continuing to defame plaintiffs, defendant Rudolph W. Giuliani has clearly violated a permanent injunction – an injunction he agreed to less than a year ago – prohibiting him from publishing his false and repeating defamatory statements and lies about plaintiffs. Accordingly, the court should find him in contempt and impose civil penalties for contempt,” attorneys for Freeman and Moss wrote to DC District Court Judge Beryl Howell.

The judge has not yet responded and any penalties are up to her.

Lawyers for Moss and Freeman pointed to two segments of Giuliani's show in which he said people were quadruple-counting ballots and passing around hard drives to manipulate vote-counting machines. These insinuations are false, and there was no conspiracy to change the votes against Trump in Georgia in 2020, a state where he narrowly lost the election.

“These statements repeat the very same lies for which Mr. Giuliani has already been held responsible and for which he was required by a court order not to repeat them again. “They constitute clear violations of the consent injunction,” the lawyers wrote by Freeman and Moss.

Giuliani acknowledged in his Nov. 12 broadcast that he could face further consequences for his statements in court that day.

“I'm sorry they're going to sue me again for saying that, but what else can I do but tell the truth,” he said.

A lawyer for Giuliani, Joseph R. Cammarata, also held a news conference Wednesday morning outside the Manhattan law office of Moss and Freeman.

“They are doing everything they can to prevent me and Giuliani from having a formidable defense. We won't allow it. That won't happen in the United States. We’re not,” Cammarata said.

Howell on Wednesday afternoon gave Giuliani until Dec. 2 to respond to the request to hold him in contempt and asked him to “describe the appropriate sanction recommended to compel him now to comply with the agreement,” which he said had agreed to six months ago.

She scheduled a hearing for December 12 and said Giuliani must appear in person in her courtroom in Washington, DC.

Howell presided over the trial in which a jury found that Giuliani had defamed Freeman and Moss so badly that he should pay them $150 million. She had previously agreed to a deal to prevent Giuliani from continuing to repeat lies about stealing votes during the Georgia vote count in 2020 and from talking about Moss and Freeman, something he already did during the trial a year ago.

In that agreement, reached shortly after the jury's verdict, Giuliani agreed that he could be found in contempt of court if he publicly suggested again that they had stolen votes.

'It's pathetic': Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin discuss Giuliani's legal woes

The settlement agreement said Giuliani would be “permanently prohibited from publishing, causing others to publish, and/or assisting in the publication of any statements that suggest, whether directly, indirectly or by implication, any statements made by Plaintiffs in connection therewith.” committed misconduct in the 2020 presidential election.”

Over the next year, the women, a mother and a daughter, have accumulated some of Giuliani's luxury goods, such as a classic convertible and watches, to pay off those debts and are still working to gain control of his real estate assets and Yankees World Series rings take over .

Giuliani loses his $6 million New York apartment to the two women, but argues to keep the $3.5 million Florida condo where he currently lives and the championship rings that may be together Worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He has already lost his law license because of his work for the Trump campaign in 2020, which included his assignments in Georgia.

CNN's Max Rego and Emily Condon contributed to this report.