After the two Atlanta poll workers who won a $148 million defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani on Friday filed another one Monday, citing the Trump ally’s comments last week on Newsmax, among other statements, Giuliani stubbornly went right back to the right-wing channel to insist that his false assertions that have got him in so much trouble are right.
Host Rob Schmitt, like his colleague Friday, said prior to the interview that the jury’s determination in the initial lawsuit was “absurd.” Giuliani himself, unsurprisingly, used similar language when speaking to the press outside the courthouse last week.
On Monday night, Schmitt asked Giuliani about the second lawsuit by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, which seeks not monetary damages but an injunction on Giuliani to prohibit him “from making or publishing, or causing to be made or published, further statements repeating any and all false claims” about the women’s role in the 2020 election.
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“You know, that sounds kind of un-American, doesn’t it?” Giuliani said. “That’s prior restraint. Are they actually going to put a gag on me when I walk around? I mean, this bears no relationship to my learning in law school about the First Amendment, the right of free speech.”
Giuliani went on to whine about supposedly not being allowed to defend himself during last week’s trial, when in fact he was ruled liable for defamation in a “default” judgment in August because he couldn’t even produce documents and electronic evidence—including about his finances—during the discovery process.
Schmitt then asked the indicted former New York mayor about what brought about these legal woes.
“Your initial allegations—do you still believe them to be true?” Schmitt asked.
Last week, Giuliani said outside the courthouse that “everything I said about them is true,” adding: “Of course I don’t regret it. … I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes.” And on Monday, it was more of the same.
“Yeah. Well of course they’ll sue me again for it when I say that. But yeah, I do,” he replied.
“But they want me to lie. They basically—they are suing me in order to lie to them. I’m sorry. I can’t do it,” he said with a chuckle.
“If I showed you the evidence right now—and I think you’ve played it on your air—people would see that what I said was absolutely true and there’s support for it.”
Giuliani alleged in December 2020, for instance, that during a ballot-counting operation, Freeman and Moss were adding bogus votes by “quite obviously, surreptitiously, passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.”
But the pair both testified that Moss was simply giving her daughter a ginger mint.
After the interview wrapped, Schmitt encouraged viewers to open their wallets for the man with severe money troubles.
“If you’d like to help Mayor Giuliani fight what is an utterly ridiculous verdict, and specifically the damages—$148 million—donate to the Giuliani Legal Defense Fund,” he said, as a phone number and website address showed on screen. “President Trump has endorsed this fund, urges you to support it. We’d like you to donate.”
