Tag: bernie kerik

CNN Exclusive: Special counsel election probe continues with focus on fundraising, voting equipment breaches | CNN Politics

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Special counsel Jack Smith is still pursuing his investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election a month after indicting Donald Trump for orchestrating a broad conspiracy to remain in power, a widening of the probe that raises the possibility others could still face legal peril.

Questions asked of two recent witnesses indicate Smith is focusing on how money raised off baseless claims of voter fraud was used to fund attempts to breach voting equipment in several states won by Joe Biden, according to multiple sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

In both interviews, prosecutors have focused their questions on the role of former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

According to invoices obtained by CNN, Powell’s non-profit, Defending the Republic, hired forensics firms that ultimately accessed voting equipment in four swing states won by Biden: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona.

Powell faces criminal charges in Georgia after she was indicted last month by Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis, who alleges that Powell helped coordinate and fund a multi-state plot to illegally access voting systems after the 2020 election.

Powell pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Those charges center around a voting system breach in Coffee County, Georgia, a rural, Republican district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020. Willis’ indictment describes the breach, and Powell’s alleged involvement, as central to the broader conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Powell has also been identified by CNN as one of Trump’s un-indicted co-conspirators listed in Smith’s federal election indictment.

New details about Smith’s ongoing investigation indicate federal prosecutors are scrutinizing a series of voting breaches following the 2020 election that state investigators have been probing for more than a year.

Exactly how this recent line of inquiry fits into Smith’s ongoing criminal investigation remains unclear. Smith’s grand jury in Washington, DC, is set to expire on Sept. 15 but it can be extended beyond then.

The special counsel’s office declined to comment.

According to sources, witnesses interviewed by Smith’s prosecutors in recent weeks were asked about Powell’s role in the hunt for evidence of voter fraud after the 2020 election, including how her nonprofit group, Defending the Republic, provided money to fund those efforts.

Powell promoted Defending the Republic as a non-profit focused on funding post-election legal challenges by Trump’s team as it disputed results in key states Biden had won. Those challenges and fundraising efforts underpinning them were all based on the premise that evidence of widespread voter fraud was already in hand.

But according to documents reviewed by CNN and witness testimony obtained by the House select committee that investigated January, 6, 2021, the group was used to fund a desperate search to retroactively back-up baseless claims that Trump’s lawyers had already put forward in failed lawsuits challenging the results in several states.

A series of invoices and communications obtained by election integrity groups including The Coalition for Good Governance and American Oversight show Defending the Republic contributed millions of dollars toward the push to access voting equipment in key states.

In a court filing after her indictment in Georgia, Powell denied involvement in the Coffee County breach but acknowledged that “a non-profit she founded” paid the forensics firm hired to examine voting systems there.

Powell did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Smith’s team has specifically asked witnesses about certain conspiracy theories pushed by Powell including that Dominion Voting Systems had ties to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and featured software he used to rig his own election. The software company has previously said the turnout in those Venezuelan elections, not the voting system, was manuipulated.

One witness who met with Smith’s team earlier last month, former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, spoke at length about how Trump allies accessed voting systems in Antrim County, Michigan, shortly after Election Day. Kerik also discussed the origins of a theory that voting machines could switch votes from one candidate to another, according to his lawyer Tim Parlatore.

Kerik also acknowledged the breach of voting systems in Coffee County during his interview with federal prosecutors, Parlatore told CNN, adding that while his client raised the topic, the conversation did not delve into specifics.

Kerik and another witness who met with Smith’s team in recent weeks were both asked if Powell was ever able to back-up her various claims of fraud, including conspiracy theories that foreign countries had hacked voting equipment.

Both were also asked about Defending the Republic and how it was used as a source of funding efforts to find evidence of voter fraud, sources told CNN.

In addition, special counsel prosecutors have also heard from other witnesses about efforts to breach voting equipment in other states.

In April, an FBI agent and a prosecutor from Smith’s special counsel’s office interviewed a Pennsylvania resident named Mike Ryan, who used to work for a wealthy Pennsylvania Republican donor named Bill Bachenberg.

Inside the election office involved in latest Trump indictment

During his interview, which Ryan described to CNN, Ryan says he told federal investigators that Bachenberg worked with Powell and other Trump lawyers to access voting systems in Pennsylvania and other states after the 2020 election.

Bachenberg, who helped organize Pennsylvania’s fake electors, was subpoenaed by the House select committee last year but there is no public indication he testified. Ryan says he told federal investigators that after the 2020 election Bachenberg was in direct contact with Trump and a host of the former president’s most prominent allies – including lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman – participating in strategy calls about efforts to overturn the election results in multiple states.

It is unclear if Bachenberg has been contacted by Smith’s team or the FBI. Bachenberg did not reply to requests for comments from CNN.

Breaches in Pennsylvania and Michigan

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also told CNN that she’s spoken to investigators at both the state and federal level about the push to access voting systems.

Benson says when she met with Smith’s team earlier this spring, she, like Kerik, was asked specifically about efforts related to Antrim County, Michigan, where Powell and a lawyer named Stefanie Lambert helped fund a team of pro-Trump operatives who accessed voting systems shortly after Election Day in 2020.

The operatives then produced a report claiming votes were flipped from Trump to Biden in Antrim County. That report was then used as supposed evidence to support the dozens of failed lawsuits that Powell filed on Trump’s behalf alleging voter fraud. The report was since debunked.

“I believe the investigation at the federal level is broad and is meticulous and is looking at all the ways in which democracy was attacked in 2020. And so I would expect everything is on the table, every law that was violated,” Benson told CNN last month referring to the special counsel’s interest in efforts to access voting systems.

Lambert was charged last month by state prosecutors in Michigan for her alleged involvement in a conspiracy to access voting machines there. Lambert is also linked to a breach in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, where she provided legal representation for the county itself after two Republican county officials secretly allowed a forensics firm to copy voting machine data in an effort to help Trump overturn his 2020 loss in the state.

The breach is currently the subject of an ongoing probe being conducted by a prosecutor selected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Lambert and Bachenberg both received copies of voting system data from Fulton County during the breach, according to the recent civil lawsuit that names both individuals.

Lambert has also been identified by CNN as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia indictment, which alleges she worked with Powell to secure voting system data that was copied from Coffee County and was tasked with helping collect invoices from the forensics firm hired through Defending the Republic.

In a statement to CNN, Lambert did not elaborate on her ties to Bachenberg but defended her election-related work, saying, “I am a zealous advocate for my clients. I haven’t broken any laws.”

Emails obtained by American Oversight indicate Bachenberg was involved in discussions about funding for the Arizona audit and helped facilitate a similar review in Pennsylvania.

In a September 2021 email containing a summary of the final report on the controversial election audit conducted in Arizona, Bachenberg wrote that “PA will be one of the next domino’s [sic] to fall.”

That same month, Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate launched a “forensic investigation” of the state’s 2020 election results.

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September 5, 2023
The identities behind the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s Georgia case | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Fulton County’s sweeping indictment against former President Donald Trump and 18 additional co-defendants also includes details involving 30 “unindicted co-conspirators” – people who Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis alleges took part in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Some of the co-conspirators are key Trump advisers, like Boris Epshteyn, while several others are likely Georgia officials who were the state’s fake electors for Donald Trump.

One of the unindicted co-conspirators who appears multiple times in the indictment is Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Willis was barred by a state judge from investigating Jones after she hosted a fundraiser last year for Jones’ Democratic opponent when he was a state senator running for lieutenant governor.

The 98-page document alleges the 30 unindicted co-conspirators, who are not named, “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities” across the 41 charges laid out in the indictment.

“Prosecutors use the ‘co-conspirator’ label for people who are not charged in the indictment but nonetheless were participants in the crime,” said Elie Honig, a CNN senior legal analyst and former federal and state prosecutor. “We do this to protect the identity and reputation of uncharged people – though they often are readily identifiable – and, at times, to turn up the pressure and try to flip them before a potential indictment drops.”

CNN was able to identify some of the co-conspirators by piecing together details included in the indictment. Documents reviewed from previous reporting also provide clues, especially the reams of emails and testimony from the House January 6 Committee’s report released late last year.

CNN has been able to identify or narrow down nearly all of the unindicted co-conspirators:

The indictment refers to Trump’s speech on November 4, 2020, “falsely declaring victory in the 2020 presidential election” and that Individual 1 discussed a draft of that speech approximately four days earlier, on October 31, 2020.

The January 6 committee obtained an email from Fitton sent on October 31 to Trump’s assistant Molly Michael and his communications adviser Dan Scavino, which says, “Please see below a draft statement as you requested.”

The statement Fitton wrote also says in part, “We had an election today – and I won.”

The indictment states that co-conspirator 3 appeared at the infamous November 19, 2020, press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, with Rudy Giuliani, one of the defendants in the case. Epshteyn was there.

The indictment also includes two emails between co-conspirator 3, John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, two lawyers who pushed the strategy of then-Vice President Mike Pence trying to overturn the election on January 6, 2021, including one with a draft memo for options of how to proceed on January 6.

According to emails released by the January 6 committee, Epshteyn was the third person on those emails.

Individual 4 received an email from co-defendant David Shafer, who was then Georgia’s Republican Party chair, on November 20, 2020, that said Scott Graham Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, “has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie,” according to the indictment.

CNN obtained court documents that show Shafer sent this email to Sinners in November 2020: “Scott Hall has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie. I know him.” Hall is one of the 19 defendants charged in the indictment.

The indictment notes an additional email from December 12, 2020, from Shafer to Individual 4 advising them to “touch base” with each of the Trump presidential elector nominees in Georgia in advance of the December 14, 2020, meeting to confirm their attendance.

CNN reporting from June 2022 reveals an email exchange between Sinners and David Shafer on December 13, 2020, 18 hours before the group of alternate electors gathered at the Georgia State Capitol.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” Sinners wrote. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result – a win in Georgia for President Trump – but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

Kerik’s attorney, Tim Parlatore, confirmed to CNN that his client is the unnamed individual listed in the indictment as co-conspirator 5. The indictment refers to co-conspirator 5 taking part in several meetings with lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Arizona, states Trump was contesting after the 2020 election.

That included the meeting Kerik attended at the White House on November 25, 2020, with a group of Pennsylvania legislators, along with Trump, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and individual 6.

Parlatore took issue with Willis’ definition of co-conspirator in the case of Kerik, saying that the indictment only refers to him in the context of receiving emails and attending meetings.

The indictment says on November 25, 2020, Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, Ellis, Individuals 5 and 6 met at the White House with a group of Pennsylvania legislators.

According to the January 6 committee report, Waldron was among the visitors who were at the White House that day, along with Kerik and attorney Katherine Freiss. Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Meadows, explained that their conversation with the president touched on holding a special session of the Pennsylvania state legislature to appoint Trump electors.

The indictment also says on December 21, 2020, Sidney Powell, a defendant in the case, sent an email to Individuals 6, 21 and 22 that they were to immediately “receive a copy of all data” from Dominion’s voting systems in Michigan.

The Washington Post reported last August that the email stated Waldron was among the three people to receive the data, along with Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders.

Waldron is the only person who was involved in both the White House meeting and received the Powell email.

The indictment says Giuliani re-tweeted a post from co-conspirator 8 on December 7, 2020, calling upon Georgia voters to contact their local representatives and ask them to sign a petition for a special session to ensure “every legal vote is counted.” The date and content of the tweet match a tweet posted by Jones, who was at the time a state senator.

Jones, who was elected lieutenant governor in November, appears more than a dozen times throughout the indictment as co-conspirator 8, including as a fake elector.

After the 2020 election, Jones was calling for a special session of the Georgia legislature, something Gov. Brian Kemp and former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan refused to do.

On Thursday, Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, told CNN that he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Jones’ role in the state’s 2020 election interference case, after a judge blocked Willis from investigating him last year.

The indictment lists several emails sent to co-conspirator 9 related to preparations for the fake electors who met on December 14, 2020, including an email from Chesebro “to help coordinate with the other 5 contested States, to help with logistics of the electors in other States hopefully joining in casting their votes on Monday.”

According to emails obtained by the January 6 committee, that email was sent to an account belong to the Georgia GOP treasurer, which at the time was Brannan.

Co-conspirator 9 is also included in the indictment as one of the 13 unindicted co-conspirators who served as fake electors.

Co-conspirators 10 and 11 are Georgia GOP officials Carolyn Fisher and Vikki Consiglio

The indictment says on December 10, 2020, Ken Chesebro sent an email to Georgia state Republican Chair David Shafer and Individuals 9, 10 and 11, with documents that were to be used by Trump electors to create fake certificates.

The January 6 committee obtained as part of its evidence an email from Chesebro sent on December 10 sent to Shafer and three other email addresses. One is for Carolyn Fisher, the former Georgia GOP first vice chair, one is for the Georgia Republican Party treasurer and one is for the Georgia GOP assistant treasurer, the role Consiglio was serving in 2020.

The email contains attachments of memos and certificates that could be used to help swap out the Biden electors with a slate of electors for Trump.

Both co-conspirators 10 and 11 also served as fake electors in Georgia.

Co-conspirators 2 and 8-19 are the fake electors

Of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators, 13 are listed as the fake electors for Donald Trump, who signed papers “unlawfully falsely holding themselves out as the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from the State of Georgia,” according to the indictment.

Three of the 16 Georgia fake electors were charged in the indictment: David Shafer, Shawn Still and Cathleen Alston Latham.

The other 13 fake electors, according to the fake electors certificate published by the National Archives, are Jones (co-conspirator 8), Joseph Brannan (co-conspirator 9), James “Ken” Carroll, Gloria Godwin, David Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Mark Amick, John Downey, Daryl Moody, Brad Carver, CB Yadav and two others who appear to be Individuals 10 and 11.

Several of the fake electors who were not charged are only listed in the indictment for their role signing on as electors for Trump, while others, like Jones, appear in other parts of the indictment as being more actively involved with the alleged conspiracy.

The indictment says Individual 20 was part of a meeting at the White House on December 18, 2020, with Trump, Giuliani and Powell, known to have discussed the possibility of seizing voting machines.

The December 18 meeting featured prominently during some of the hearings from the January 6 committee. All but two of the outside advisers who attended have been named as co-defendants in the indictment already: former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

The meeting featured fiery exchanges between Trump’s White House lawyers and his team of outside advisers, including on whether to appoint Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud, according to the indictment and previous details that have been disclosed about the meeting.

The outside advisers famously got into a screaming match with Trump’s White House lawyers – Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann – at the Oval Office meeting. Cipollone and Herschmann, along with Meadows, pushed back intensely on the proposals, Cipollone and Herschmann testified to the January 6 committee.

Co-conspirators 21 and 22 are Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders

Co-conspirators 21 and 22 are Conan Hayes and Todd Sanders – who are both affiliated with Byrne’s America Project, a conservative advocacy group that contributed funding to Arizona’s Republican ballot audit. Hayes was a former surfer from Hawaii and Sanders has a cybersecurity background in the private sector.

The indictment says on Dec. 21, 2020, Sidney Powell sent an email to the chief operations officer of SullivanStrickler, saying that individual 6, who CNN identified as Waldron, along with individuals 21 and 22, were to immediately “receive a copy of all data” from Dominion’s voting systems in Michigan.

According to the Washington Post, Conan and Todd were the other two people listed on the email to receive the data.

The final eight co-conspirators listed in the indictment are connected to the effort to access voting machines in Georgia’s Coffee County.

Co-conspirator 25 and 29 are a Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and analyst Jeffrey Lenberg

The indictment says that Misty Hampton allowed co-conspirators 25 and 29 to access non-public areas of the Coffee County elections office on January 18, 2021. Logan and Lenberg were the two outsiders granted access to the elections office that day by Hampton, according to surveillance video previously obtained by CNN. No one else was given access to the office that day, according to a CNN review of the footage.

The indictment also notes that co-conspirator 25 downloaded Coffee County election data that SullivanStrickler then had uploaded to a separate server. Documents previously obtained by CNN show five accounts that downloaded the data – one account belongs to Logan and none of them belong to Lenberg. Still, CNN could not definitively determine who exactly downloaded the data.

Logan and his company conducted the so-called Republican audit of the 2020 ballots cast in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

The indictment says that co-conspirator 28 “sent an e-mail to the Chief Operations Officer of SullivanStrickler LLC” directing him to transmit data copied from Coffee County to co-conspirator 30 and Powell. CNN has previously reported on emails Penrose and Powell arranged upfront payment to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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August 2, 2023
Special counsel received documents from Giuliani team that tried to find fraud after 2020 election | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Among the materials turned over to special counsel Jack Smith about supposed fraud in the 2020 election are documents that touch on many of the debunked conspiracies and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud peddled by former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The documents had been withheld by former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who claimed they were privileged, only to be handed over to Smith on Sunday at what appears to be the late stages of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The files include affidavits claiming there were widespread “irregularities,” shoddy statistical analyses supposedly revealing “fraudulent activities,” and opposition research about a senior employee from Dominion Voting Systems that are central to civil litigation and a federal criminal probe stemming from a voting systems breach in Colorado.

The documents turned over by Kerik also connect him and other members of the Trump legal team to the efforts to smear a Dominion Voting Systems executive – efforts that are now the subject of both civil litigation and the Colorado state criminal investigation.

The tranche includes a 29-page dossier on the executive, Eric Coomer, detailing his anti-Trump rhetoric on social media, as well as his background working for the voting machine company. The header of the document describes it as written by a lawyer in North Carolina for the “Hon. Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Trump Legal Team, and Other Associated Attorneys Combatting Election Fraud, 2020 Presidential Election.”

Coomer has brought a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Giuliani and others who promoted claims that he was connected to a plot to rig the 2020 election.

The documents turned over by Kerik also include a 105-page report from after the 2020 election compiled by the Trump campaign and Giuliani that contained the campaign’s unfounded allegations of fraud, including witness statements and false allegations of over-votes and illegal votes.

They also include communications between investigators hired by Giuliani – including Kerik – about the debunked report about irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan, that Trump was repeatedly told was bogus but continued to tout up to and on January 6, 2021.

One example is a memo titled “Briefing materials for Senate members” sent by Katherine Friess – a former Trump lawyer – to Kerik, Steve Bannon and an email address known to belong to Giuliani on January 4, 2021.

For months, Kerik had tried to shield some of the documents from investigators in Congress and the Justice Department, citing privilege. Then, in recent weeks, Kerik gave the documents to Trump’s 2024 campaign to review. After that review, the campaign declined to assert privilege, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who then turned over the documents to the Smith’s office on Sunday.

“I have shared all of these documents, appropriately 600MB, mostly pdfs, with the Special Counsel and look forward to sitting down with them in about two weeks to discuss,” Parlatore said.

That interview with federal investigators in Smith’s office has now been set for early August.

This tranche of documents turned over to Smith further illustrates the scope of unproven fraud claims that were being circulated to high-level Trump allies at the time.

One of the research documents turned over by Kerik was a report on so-called U-Voters, a theory that there is “an army of phantom voters,” who have accumulated on the voter rolls over the last several years, “who can be deployed at will.”

The report was referenced in late December 2020 letters sent to the Justice Department and to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a top promoter of Trump’s election reversal gambits who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022. The letter to McConnell, signed by other Pennsylvania Republicans as well, asked him to dispute the election’s certification.

The Kerik documents also include several versions of a research memo purporting to analyze the Pennsylvania election and claiming to find an “indication” of fraud. The Trump team’s focus on Pennsylvania, and how its bogus claims of fraud there affected election officials in the state, has been the subject of scrutiny by Smith.

In addition, the internal communications handed over by Kerik suggest Trump’s team attempted to seize on an earlier Government Accountability Office report about the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm to undercut what Trump was told – and embraced – during a February 2020 Oval Office meeting about election security.

They include the GAO report and what appears to be a memo highlighting the fact that “DHS Critical Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) failed to fully execute multiple strategies to secure the 2020 Presidential elections.”

The memo seeks to counter CISA’s public statement that the election was “the most secure in American history,” based on security programs officials presented to Trump during the February 2020 briefing. Trump had seemed to embrace the programs in early 2020, to the point of suggesting the agencies hold a press conference so he could take credit for their work, CNN reported Monday.

This headline and story have been updated with additional reporting.

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July 25, 2023
Giuliani and election fraud promoters didn’t vet claims, new court documents show | CNN Politics

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New court filings in a defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani show the promoters of the election fraud narrative after Donald Trump lost the presidency failed to do basic vetting of the claims they were touting – and didn’t see such vetting as necessary.

For instance, in a December 2020 text cited in Tuesday’s filing, Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn said that the president wanted simple examples of election fraud, which didn’t need to be proven.

“Urgent POTUS request need best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain,” Epshteyn wrote, according to evidence attached to the filing. “Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand. Is there any sort of ‘greatest hits’ clearinghouse that anyone has for best examples?”

The documents were among a trove of evidence presented by two Georgia election workers suing Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer, for allegedly smearing them after the 2020 election. They are now asking a federal court to hold Giuliani liable for possibly losing crucial evidence after he pulled out of settlement talks.

Giuliani is feeling legal pressure related to his work for Trump to contest the election in 2020, after he sat for interviews with the special counsel’s criminal investigation in June and faces possible disbarment as an attorney. The evidence in the lawsuit from Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of Georgia, who were at the center of Giuliani’s claims that vote-counting was fraudulent in the state, includes documents that could be pursued by criminal investigators as well.

Freeman and Moss’s attorneys allege Giuliani never took necessary steps to preserve his electronic data after the election. They say Giuliani testified in a deposition that he had used multiple cell phones, email addresses and other communications applications after the election, but hadn’t looked thoroughly through those records in the course of the lawsuit. Instead, he said his phones had been “wiped out” after the FBI seized them in April 2021 as part of a separate criminal investigation.

“Sanctions exist to remedy the precise situation here—a sophisticated party’s abuse of judicial process designed to avoid accountability, at enormous expense to the parties and this Court. Defendant Giuliani should know better. His conduct warrants severe sanctions,” Moss and Freeman’s attorneys wrote to the federal court on Tuesday night.

Giuliani already was fined $90,000 to reimburse the Georgia workers’ attorneys for a previous dispute they had over evidence gathering.

In recent days, Giuliani’s attorney approached Freeman and Moss’ lawyers to discuss an “agreement,” or at least a partial settlement, according to court filings. On Monday, however, Giuliani told them he couldn’t agree to “key principles” both sides had negotiated, keeping the lawsuit alive, according to the latest filing.

In a statement, Giuliani adviser Ted Goodman said the plaintiffs are attempting to “embarrass” the former mayor.

“The requests by these lawyers were deliberately overly burdensome, and sought information well beyond the scope of this case—including divorce records—in an effort to harass, intimidate and embarrass Mayor Rudy Giuliani,” Goodman said. “It’s part of a larger effort to smear and silence Mayor Giuliani for daring to ask questions, and for challenging the accepted narrative. They can’t take away the fact that Giuliani is objectively one of the most effective prosecutors in American history who took down the Mafia, cleaned up New York City and comforted the nation following 9/11.”

The plaintiffs’ lawyers have deposed key players like Bernie Kerik, who was tasked with helping Giuliani to collect supposed fraud evidence; Christina Bobb, the then-OANN correspondent who moonlighted as a legal adviser to the Trump team; and Giuliani himself.

In excerpts of a deposition Giuliani gave in the case, the former New York mayor says that he cannot recall running a criminal background check to firm up a claim he made that Freeman had an arrest record and a history of voter fraud.

“You didn’t think it was important to do that before you accused them of having a criminal background?” the plaintiffs’ lawyer asked Giuliani, referring to his clients.

“I just repeated what I was told,” Giuliani said.

In the litigation, his attorneys have acknowledged that she had no such criminal record, but Giuliani said in the March 1 deposition that he had only in recent days asked Kerik to run a criminal background check on her.

Giuliani was also questioned about a strategic plan – partially tweeted out by Kerik in late December 2020 – that laid out several claims of voter fraud across the country. According to evidence obtained by the plaintiffs described in the Giuliani deposition, Giuliani had noted that the communications plan needed “confirmation of arrest and evidence.”

Giuliani testified that he believed that, before the allegations were handed to the White House, they should be confirmed. But Giuliani could not say for sure whether the uncorroborated version of the claims was ultimately shared with the White House.

“This is so confusing, I don’t know what they told the White House,” Giuliani said in the deposition, adding that “I was not at the meeting, by design.”

In the deposition excerpts, Giuliani goes to great lengths to distance himself from the so-called “Strategic Communications Plan of the Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team.” Kerik, meanwhile, testified in his deposition for the lawsuit that Giuliani was aware of the strategic communications plan, which was focused on getting allegations of election fraud in front of state legislators. According to Kerik, the plan and allegations were continually discussed over six weeks.

The plaintiffs are also touting examples of when Giuliani, according to what they have collected, was made aware that some of the allegations he was making about supposed election fraud in Georgia were false.

In one email they obtained that was sent to his assistant in December 2020, a Fox News reporter asked Giuliani for comment on statements by an investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office that debunked the claims Trump allies were making about the Georgia election workers.

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July 12, 2023