Giuliani targeted in Trump election case. What role did he play?

Rudy Giuliani, a central figure in the investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, was among those charged Monday night in the case.

A former federal prosecutor and mayor of New York City, Giuliani served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer during the waning days of his presidency and led the legal efforts in several states to challenge Joe Biden’s victories and keep Trump in power.

Prosecutors have scrutinized false allegations of election fraud that Giuliani made before state legislative committees in December 2020, as well as his role in a plan to send a slate of electors who supported Trump to Congress – even though Georgia had already certified electors who supported Biden, who won the state by about 10,000 votes.

State prosecutors in Atlanta informed Giuliani last year that he was a target of their investigation, but he sought to avoid testifying to a special grand jury investigating the matter. He was ordered to do so in August of last year by a judge who told him to come to Atlanta “on a train, on a bus or Uber.”

Prosecutors have examined Giuliani’s testimony before three legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.

“There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them – dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he said to members of the state Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 3. None of those assertions turned out to be true, officials said.

In Georgia, it is illegal to make false statements “in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government or of the government of any county, city, or other political subdivision.”

Giuliani also denigrated two Black election workers after his team played footage of them counting votes, accusing them of fraud. “They look like they’re passing out dope, not just ballots,” he said, though he never provided evidence to substantiate his claims of wrongdoing.

While Giuliani told members of the state House, “You cannot possibly certify Georgia in good faith,” his own falsehoods in Georgia later played a major role in his law license being suspended in New York state.

He also participated in a scheme to create a bogus slate of Trump presidential electors to meet in mid-December 2020, after Biden had won three different counts of the vote and the state’s Republican leadership had declared him the winner of Georgia’s electoral votes.

Trump’s top campaign lawyers refused to participate in the plan, and some of the Trump electors designated before Election Day bowed out.

Giuliani declined to offer substantive comment on the courthouse steps last year before his testimony, saying: “We will not talk about this until it’s over.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.