Federal judge wants Giuliani to clarify ‘incongruous’ and ‘puzzling’ court filing in Georgia defamation case

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} A federal judge has asked Rudy Giuliani to clarify his “seemingly incongruous and certainly puzzling caveats” in a recent filing in which he appears to admit he made false and defamatory statements about two Georgia election workers in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. During a committee hearing in Georgia’s House of Representatives on 10 December 2020, Mr Giuliani baselessly accused the women of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine” and suggested that they were criminals whose “places of work, their homes, should have been searched for evidence of ballots, for evidence of USB ports, for evidence of voter fraud,” according to the indictment. A late-night federal court filing from Mr Giuliani’s attorneys on 25 July states that he “concedes solely for the purposes of this litigation” that he made false statements about Ms Freeman and Ms Moss, published those statements to third parties, and that they “carry meaning that is defamatory per se”. He must submit another filing by 8 August that concedes “all factual allegations” of the case against him “as to his liability for plaintiffs’ defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy claims, and his liability as to plaintiffs’ claim for punitive damages.” The judge also notes that Mr Giuliani may concede that “entry of default judgment on liability is appropriate in this case”.