Two Georgia poll workers who were attacked by 2020 election conspiracy theorists are picking up where the Jan. 6 congressional investigation left off—by trying to independently examine the private communications between two of the men behind the firestorm: Rudy Giuliani and former President Donald Trump.
Giuliani, who played a central role in the Republican attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election as Trump’s lawyer, refused to tell congressional investigators about their conversations, citing attorney-client privilege.
But now, a mother and daughter still reeling from the MAGA harassment are trying to pierce that veil.
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Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of Fulton County, Georgia, are turning their defamation lawsuit against Giuliani into a no-limits, fact-finding mission, according to an undisclosed letter from their attorneys reviewed exclusively by The Daily Beast.
In their Jan. 13 letter, the pair’s attorneys tell Giuliani’s defense lawyer that his objections to the Jan. 6 Committee’s questions about interactions with Trump “were improper,” warning that they intend to bulldoze right over them.
“Mr. Giuliani invoked privilege during January 6 testimony with respect to certain topics we expect to broach during his… deposition,” said the letter, which was written in anticipation of a closed-door questioning session.
Giuliani was deposed on Wednesday inside a midtown Manhattan skyscraper that serves as the headquarters of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, the high-end international law firm representing the women.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss said they want to know more about Giuliani’s interactions with Trump, as well as his “correspondence” with the Department of Justice regarding Trump’s mission to overturn the 2020 election, conservative state legislators who were coaxed into publicly doubting the ballot results that year, and fake Republican electors who tried to band together as alternate electoral college votes to supplant the real ones that went for Joe Biden.
The lawyers also want to explore Giuliani’s interactions with Sidney Powell, the kooky lawyer who led the conspiracy-laden “Kraken” lawsuits that spread their tentacles across the country in an unhinged attempt to keep Trump in the White House. The legal ploy failed miserably, and Powell was formally sanctioned by a federal judge who called it “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process” that “was about undermining the people’s faith in our democracy.”
In the legal world, attorneys are generally granted blanket protections for the interactions they have with clients. In this case, Giuliani is trying to keep private his conversations with his client, Trump, as they discussed the effort to overturn the election results.
Defamation lawyers for Freeman and Moss are trying to ram right past that blockade.
“They’re trying to get to Trump,” said one source, who’s familiar with the matter.
Giuliani’s Texas lawyer, Joseph D. Sibley, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Michael J. Gottlieb, a former Obama White House lawyer in Washington who represents the mother and daughter.
Under the surface, there’s some odd personal drama in this fight. That’s because Gottlieb has an unexpected connection to Giuliani himself.
Giuliani is the main driver of conservatives’ fixation with President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who still has not been prosecuted for lying about drug use on federal gun-buying paperwork. It was Giuliani who first obtained Hunter’s infamous discarded laptop, which contained troves of information about his business dealings in Ukraine and embarrassing photos of him doing hard drugs. And it was Giuliani who coordinated media coverage that has dogged Hunter Biden for years.
Gottlieb worked with Hunter Biden back in 2014, when both were lawyers at the prestigious law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner, where they handled business related to the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings until 2019, the same year that Gottlieb left to the law firm where he works now, Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
In their letter, the Georgia pair’s lawyers initially asked if Giuliani would appear for a deposition at the Fort Lauderdale offices of Gottlieb’s former employer, Boies Schiller, a move that puzzled Giuliani’s team, according to a source.
It’s unclear how that tenuous connection could come up in the case, if at all.
In December 2021, Freeman and Moss initially sued the company behind the right-wing propaganda channel One America News Network, its White House correspondent Chanel Rion, and Giuliani. But at this point, only Giuliani remains. The former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor tried to dismiss the lawsuit last year, but U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell refused, citing “ample circumstantial evidence of a civil conspiracy between Giuliani and members of the Trump Campaign.”
Freeman and Moss experienced some of the worst vitriol that came out of Trump’s refusal to cede power after losing his bid to remain in the White House. In the weeks after the November 2020 election, the Trump campaign desperately searched for any shred of evidence that would cast doubt on the results. Giuliani zeroed in on surveillance video of the women, who were serving as poll workers at a Fulton County vote tabulation center.
At the time, Giuliani told anyone that would listen—journalists, legislators, and the general public—that the women were illegally moving suitcases of fake ballots. That allegation has since been thoroughly disproven by federal investigators and Georgia’s state elections officials—who are Trump-supporting Republicans, no less.
The women also appeared before the House Jan. 6 Committee, where the daughter delivered heart-wrenching congressional testimony that moved some of those in attendance to tears when Moss described how being unfairly accused of fraud devastated her family.
“It’s turned my life upside down,” Moss said. “I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all. I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore.”
“There is nowhere I feel safe,” her mother told the Jan. 6 panel. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
Oddly, their current lawsuit against Giuliani may have a better chance of extracting answers from the former New York mayor than the closely followed Jan. 6 Committee.
While the panel was a well-funded and fully staffed congressional probe, it had one severe limitation: a tight schedule with a political deadline.
Every legal fight turned into a constitutional battle royale, which kept the committee from duking it out with the likes of Giuliani. And while resistant witnesses could be subpoenaed and dragged into court, the slow-moving federal judiciary made it impossible to pursue every person who refused to comply. Trump White House bureaucrat Peter Navarro still hasn’t begun his criminal trial over his refusal to appear before the panel, which has since expired. And the only witness to be successfully convicted of contempt of congress, the right wing podcaster Steve Bannon, still hasn’t spent a day in prison.
By contrast, Freeman and Moss have no hard deadline. Their lawyers can patiently litigate until a judge allows them to pierce that attorney-client privilege. And the judge on the case, who already found evidence of what she called a “civil conspiracy” between Giuliani and Team Trump, could greenlight that peek under the hood if she comes to the same conclusion that a federal judge in California did last year: that a crime potentially occurred.
The so-called crime-fraud exception is why the Jan. 6 Committee was able to get the damning communications between conservative lawyer John Eastman and Trump that showed the bad faith attempt to keep him in power in 2020. Freeman and Moss are aiming to do the same.
