Talk About Tennis 2.0

I was in serious danger,' Paul Pelosi tells trial

By Bernd Debusmann Jr & Matt Murphy
BBC News, Washington
Paul Pelosi, husband of former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has testified against a man accused of attacking him in his San Francisco home last year.

The alleged assailant, David DePape, faces two charges including attempted kidnapping of a federal official. He has pleaded not guilty.

Mr DePape was motivated by conspiracies about Mrs Pelosi, his lawyer has said.

Mr Pelosi said Mr DePape had been looking for his wife, whom he said he "had to take out" during the attack.

"He said, she was the leader of the pack, he had to take her out, he was going to wait for her," Mr Pelosi told the court. "He was going to tie me up and wait for her."

The 83-year-old also recalled waking up to find Mr DePape "standing in the doorway".

"It was a tremendous shock, looking at him, looking at the hammer and the ties," he added. "I recognised I was in serious danger. I tried to stay as calm as possible."

Mr DePape is facing up to 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping charge, as well as an additional 30 years for assault on a federal official's family member.

After the incident, Mr Pelosi spent six days in hospital. In addition to a fractured skull, he also suffered injuries to his arm and hand.

According to court documents, Mr DePape broke into the Pelosi home with a hammer on 28 October last year. Once inside, he asked for Mrs Pelosi, who was not home at the time.

Officers responding to a 911 call from Mr Pelosi found both men gripping a hammer.

When asked to drop the weapon, Mr DePape abruptly swung the hammer at Mr Pelosi before being subdued by officers. The entire encounter was caught on body camera footage played in court on Monday.

Mr Pelosi told the court that he had attempted to put the incident out of his mind ever since.

"I have not discussed this incident with anybody. And I have encouraged my family not to either," he said. "I have tried to put it out of my mind. It wasn't until [the prosecutor's] meeting with you and your associates that I talked about this. I've made the best effort that I possibly can to not relive this."

Earlier on Monday, jurors heard from several police officers who saw footage of the incident or collected the electronics Mr DePape was carrying. One of the witnesses, an FBI special agent, testified that the footage showed Mr DePape striking Mr Pelosi three times.

In court last week, Mr DePape's public defender, Jodi Linker, told jurors that his client believed conspiracy theories with "every ounce of his being" but had not been motivated by Mrs Pelosi's political status.

Prosecutors, however, have alleged that Mr DePape was looking for Mrs Pelosi as part of a "plan of violence". When he was arrested, he had zip ties and duct tape in his possession.

Following the incident, Mr DePape allegedly told investigators that he had a "target list" and planned to hold Mrs Pelosi captive and break "her kneecaps" if she did not reveal "the truth". He referred to her as the "leader of the pack of lies".

Mr DePape is also facing separate state charges stemming from the incident, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and residential burglary.

He could face life in prison if convicted of the more serious charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67408955

Bodycam footage at the link if you want.

Roger Parloff
@rparloff
JUST IN: Colo state judge finds Trump ENGAGED IN INSURRECTION but WAS NOT an “officer of the United States” within meaning of § 3 of 14th Amendment. Thus, DENIES effort to keep him off ballot.

Ryan Goodman
@rgoodlaw
·
6m
Wow on this part of the Colorado court ruling:

"The Court finds that Petitioners have established that Trump engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 through incitement, and that the First Amendment does not protect Trump’s speech."

https://courts.state.co.us/userfiles/fi ... 0Order.pdf

Mueller, She Wrote
@MuellerSheWrote
·
1m
BREAKING: My preliminary reading is that the Colorado court found that Trump DID incite the insurrection, but that the president as an officer of the United States under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, so he will be on the ballot.

GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump

By Rachel Weiner
November 17, 2022 at 4:01 p.m. EST


Jesse Benton at a federal courthouse in Des Moines in 2016. (David Pitt/AP)

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

Elections “reflect the values and the priorities and the beliefs of American citizens,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Parikh said in her closing argument this week. “Jesse Benton by his actions did damage to those principles.”

The evidence at trial showed that Benton bought a $25,000 ticket to a September 2016 Republican National Committee (RNC) event on behalf of Roman Vasilenko, a Russian naval officer turned multilevel marketer. (Vasilenko is under investigation in Russia for allegedly running a pyramid scheme, according to the Kommersant newspaper; he could not be reached for comment.) The donation got Vasilenko a picture with Trump and entrance to a “business roundtable” with the future president.

Vasilenko connected with Benton through Doug Wead, an evangelical ally of the Bush family who was also involved in multilevel marketing. Vasilenko sent $100,000 to Benton, who was working for a pro-Trump super PAC at the time, supposedly for consulting services. Benton subsequently donated $25,000 to the RNC by credit card to cover the ticket.

Witnesses from the RNC and the firm hired to organize the event said they weren’t told Vasilenko was a Russian citizen. Benton said in an email to his RNC contact that Vasilenko was “a friend who spends most of his time in the Caribbean”; he described Vasilenko’s interpreter as “a body gal.” In fact, according to the testimony, Benton and Vasilenko had never met.

Benton argued that he followed the advice of his previous counsel, David A. Warrington, who has also represented Trump. Warrington testified that Benton contacted him at the time to ask if he could give a ticket to a political fundraiser to a Russian citizen. Warrington said he told Benton “there is no prohibition on a Russian citizen receiving a ticket to an event” and that “you can give your ticket that you purchased to a fundraiser to anybody.”

Prosecutors said Benton failed to tell Warrington that he was getting reimbursed by the Russian citizen for the donation. Benton asked for the advice only “to cover his tracks,” Parikh said.

Benton also claimed that he earned the $100,000 acting as a tour guide in Washington for Vasilenko, whose interest was not politics but self-promotion.

Wead — who died at age 75 last December after he was indicted with Benton — had previously discussed with Vasilenko the possibility of a photograph with Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama or Steven Seagal before suggesting Trump.

“If Oprah was available,” defense attorney Brian Stolarz said in his closing argument, “we wouldn’t even be here.”

Vasilenko posted the photograph of himself with Trump on Instagram with a banner that said “Two Presidents” and advertised his own company. He said Benton “delivered on what he was asked to do,” which was “get him in a picture with a celebrity” so Vasilenko “could brag on Instagram.” To Vasilenko, he said, Trump was not a politician but “the guy who used to be on ‘The Apprentice.’ ” At the roundtable, he said Trump appeared only briefly and “just talked about polls.”

Stolarz emphasized that there was no evidence Vasilenko ever engaged with Trump outside the single event, and no evidence the RNC ever returned the donation. Witnesses from the RNC said they were in the dark about the origin of the funds.

“He wants to be an influencer,” Stolarz said. “This is just shameless self-promotion from a guy who can afford to take this picture.”

But prosecutors said that once it was offered, Vasilenko saw the value of an introduction to Trump. He was running for parliament in Russia at the time, according to the Justice Department, and after Trump’s election was invited on Russian television.

“He’s sophisticated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Wasserman told jurors. “He got access to someone he helped elect.”

Benton’s defense downplayed the $25,000 as “nothing” in an election that cost billions.

“This is not some nefarious backroom scheme to funnel millions of dollars from Russia,” he said.

Prosecutors argued that every dollar counted in a race where Democrat Hillary Clinton was far ahead in fundraising, and that Benton knew Trump needed money at the time.

Stolarz said Benton was also paid to organize a charity dinner Vasilenko attended on his U.S. trip, which prosecutors dismissed as a cheap meal at a chain restaurant.

“They may try to downplay it, but Maggiano’s is good,” Stolarz said.

Benton began his career on the GOP’s libertarian fringe as an aide to former congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.), whose granddaughter is Benton’s wife. He gained mainstream credibility helping Paul’s son, Rand Paul (R-Ky.), win a Senate seat in 2010 and was hired by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) 2014 reelection campaign.

But Benton resigned before that election amid an investigation into whether an Iowa state senator was bribed to support Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential race. Benton was convicted in May 2016 of conspiracy and involvement in filing of false campaign finance reports — not long before the new scheme began.

“He knew the law,” Wasserman said. “He knew the rules.”

After the verdict, Stolarz said Benton “maintains his innocence and plans to appeal.”

Robyn Dixon contributed to this report.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va ... ko-guilty/

This could go under "World News" as well. 40 years this man was at it.

"Newly unsealed court papers allege that Manuel Rocha engaged in 'clandestine activity' on Cuba’s behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to U.S. government officials."

1981!

Pete Strzok @petestrzok
I read through the complaint, and it's bad - very bad.

It's a 3 count complaint:
- 18 USC 371 (conspiracy to act as foreign agent/defraud the US)
- 18 USC 951 (acting as illegal agent of foreign govt
- 18 USC 1542 (use of passport obtained via false statement)

1/

This is a big big deal.

"ROCHA consistently referred to the [US] as 'the enemy,' and used the term 'we' to describe himself and Cuba. ROCHA additionally praised Fidel Castro as the 'Comandante'"

FBI used a false flag UC posing as a Cuban DGI officer.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/ ... harges.pdf

Cuba has several intelligence and counterintelligence entities; the complaint identifies the Directorate of Intelligence/Dirección General de Inteligencia (commonly known as the DGI) as the entity Rocha allegedly worked for.

2/

Rocha worked for Dept of State from 1981-2002 - the entire time also allegedly working for the DGI.

He was the NSC Director of Inter-American Affairs (the FBI even traveled down to Santo Domingo to update his clearance), later at the US Interests Section in Havana.

3/

The complaint is vague as to when the FBI became aware of Rocha - "Prior to Nov 2022, FBI received information that Rocha was a covert agent of the DGI" - but on Nov 15, an FBI undercover employee contacted him on WhatsApp pretending to be a DGI representative.

4/

The UC established his bona fides with Rocha in part by noting "I know that you have been a great friend of ours since your time in Chile," with a footnote explaining Rocha lived in Chile in 1973 - 8 years before he joined State and the beginning of the alleged activity.

5/

The complaint doesn't say what happened in Chile in 1973, or what the FBI knows about it - but it set Rocha's mind at ease about the UC being DGI, or at least needing to play along in case the DGI had a mole:

"They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile"

6/

Rocha had 3 mtgs with the UC, conducting surveillance detection routes (SDRs) going to mtgs w/ the UC and telling the UC about his tradecraft training, including "I have always...received sufficient training to know that you must be on the alert to - to provocations."

Oops.

7/

Rocha helpfully notes his last contact with DGI was in 2016 or 2017 in Havana, and that he entered Cuba using a Dominican rather than US passport.

8/

And proceeds to lay out his various views about the ongoing Cuban revolution and glorious aspects of the socialist workers paradise.

9/
Rocha told the UC that “since the Dirección asked me…to lead a normal life…I have - have created the legend of a right-wing person.”

Good thing no intel service would ever think of using that legend to get someone onto the Mar-a-Lago grounds.

10/

In perhaps the most chilling part of the complaint, Rocha notes,

“They [the US] underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought…What we have done…it’s enormous…More than a grand slam.”

11/



The complaint raises several troubling questions:

- did the DGI direct Rocha to join the State Department? It certainly appears so: “I knew exactly how to do it and obviously the Dirección accompanied me”

12/


- did Rocha pass classified to the DGI? The complaint doesn’t allege it, but given the depth of his devotion to Cuba, and the span of his access - he had “special responsibility” for Cuba while on the NSC, and later advised the Southcom Cdr - the USIC has to assume he did.

13/
- why did it take so long to discover Rocha, and what does that say about the reliability of other past and current sources? Great Cuban compartmentation, but this also wouldn’t be the first time Cuba played a variety of double agents against the US.

https://washingtonpost.com/archive/poli ... 7a6d0c407/

14/
I doubt we’ll ever know the extent of the damage caused by Rocha.

But it sure looks like Cuba planted an applicant into the State Department, nurtured him into the NSC, and eventually had a US Ambassador as an agent.

And ran him and kept it quiet for more than 40 years.

15/end

I had to delete some of the links due to our limit. In case you don't know who Peter Strzok is. Reading between the lines tells you what you need to know about him.

Pete Strzok
@petestrzok
26 year FBI and Army veteran. Georgetown School of Foreign Service adjunct professor and alum. NYT/WP bestseller: Compromised

Former FBI official in N.Y. sentenced to more than four years in prison

By Shayna Jacobs
December 14, 2023 at 4:19 p.m. EST

NEW YORK — Former FBI official Charles McGonigal, who served as chief of counterintelligence in the bureau’s New York City office, on Thursday was sentenced to more than four years in prison for his illicit work for a Russian oligarch.

U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer Rearden said McGonigal’s actions put the country in jeopardy of terrible consequences. In addition to the 50-month prison sentence, which McGonigal is to begin serving Feb. 26, the judge fined McGonigal $40,000.

McGonigal’s involvement with the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska took place over several months in 2021, three years after his 2018 retirement from the FBI, according to prosecutors.

In an August statement, McGonigal told the court he knew his investigative work benefited Deripaska and was illegal because he was being paid with money that originated in Cyprus and was filtered through local shell companies. He also participated in a plan to try to get Deripaska removed from the U.S. sanctions list, a status that prevents Deripaska from doing business with U.S. banks and entities.

McGonigal’s employment in 2019 by a law firm trying to reverse Deripaska’s sanctions was considered legal under U.S. law but subsequent assignments on behalf of Deripaska were not, which McGonigal admitted in court.

“If nations such as Russia can avoid and influence these sanctions through conduct like [McGonigal’s] than the sanctions would be ineffective, increasing the chance of war,” Rearden said Thursday before handing down the sentence.

McGonigal, when given a chance to speak, fought to keep his composure and expressed remorse for his conduct.

“I recognize more than ever that I betrayed the confidence and trust of those close to me,” he said. “For the rest of my life I will be fighting to regain that trust and becoming a better person.”

His lawyers sought a sentence that would not include serving time in prison, citing years of public service for the United States. McGonigal was part of the cleanup effort at Ground Zero after Sept. 11 and he helped to prevent a terrorist attack on a New York City subway, they said.

Manhattan Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten said in court that McGonigal was driven by greed, using his position, before the end of his FBI career to make international contacts who could set him up for lucrative work upon his retirement from the bureau.

“He was not content to serve only the country that trusted him with one of the most important counter-espionage jobs,” Scotten argued.

In August, McGonigal pleaded guilty to conspiring to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and money laundering. The laundering count relates to his efforts in 2021 to remove Deripaska from the U.S. sanctions list.

He was charged separately in Washington, where he was accused of hiding $225,000 that he received from a former Albanian intelligence agent. He also pleaded guilty in that case and is scheduled for sentencing Feb. 16.

McGonigal’s federal indictments in January surprised the law enforcement and intelligence communities. He was highly-regarded in his career and rose in the ranks to a revered leadership role in New York’s FBI field office. Because of his ties to that office, FBI agents from other cities handled the investigation of his suspected wrongdoing.

McGonigal worked at the FBI in New York for 22 years. His responsibilities through the years included heading the counterintelligence division tasked with investigating foreign spies.

Deripaska, a known ally to Russian president Vladimir Putin, is under federal indictment in New York for sanctions evasion and obstruction of justice. He has been on the sanctions list since April 2018 but his indictment in Sept. 2022 was part of an effort by the U.S. government to curtail the economic pursuits of wealthy Putin associates.

Deripaska has not been apprehended.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... al-russia/

Giuliani’s words used against him in election worker defamation trial
By Rachel Weiner, Tom Jackman and Spencer S. Hsu
Updated December 14, 2023 at 2:30 p.m. EST|Published December 14, 2023 at 10:40 a.m. EST

Rudy Giuliani repeatedly promised that he would use his defamation trial to explain why he falsely claimed two Georgia poll workers helped steal the 2020 election. Instead, he was silent in court. But jurors still heard the words of the former personal attorney for Donald Trump, dating back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and extending to as recently as this week.

“Never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully,” said Michael Gottlieb, an attorney for the plaintiffs who quoted from a memoir the former New York mayor wrote after the World Trade Center attacks. It’s a lesson Giuliani said he learned from his father.

“Those are wise words,” Gottlieb said. “If only Mr. Giuliani had listened.”

Instead, Gottlieb said, Giuliani continued to lie about Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, mother and daughter election workers who testified that they were inundated with vicious threats and racist insults after he falsely accused them of helping fake the Georgia election results to the detriment of Republican incumbent Trump.

Gottlieb was giving a closing statement Thursday in the trial after Giuliani, who had repeatedly said he planned to testify in his defamation damages trial, declined to take the stand.

Outside court Monday, Giuliani told reporters that “everything I said about them is true.” He agreed before trial not to contest that his claims about the two women were false; Judge Beryl A. Howell found in August that his comments were defamatory. The jury is being asked only how much Giuliani owes Freeman and Moss for the avalanche of vitriol that derailed their lives. The pair are asking a federal jury in D.C. to award them up to $47 million in damages.

“Day after day, Mr. Giuliani reminds you who he is,” Gottlieb told the jury. He said Giuliani’s defense strategy was to convince jurors he was more important than the women he defamed: “Rich famous people have valuable reputations, and ordinary people are irrelevant, replaceable, worthless. Mr. Giuliani’s defense is his reputation, his comfort and his goals are more important than those of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. That is a fiction, and it ends today.”

Gottlieb said that when Giuliani wrote his memoir, the onetime U.S. attorney “appreciated that civil servants are by and large decent people who work to make our country better.” Now, Gottlieb said, Giuliani only cares about himself, continuing to profit off election lies with appearances on right-wing media.

In response, defense attorney Joseph D. Sibley IV said Giuliani did not take the stand out of respect for two women who “have been through enough.” He said that “of course” nothing untoward happened during the Georgia vote count. But Sibley argued that Giuliani shouldn’t have to pay a “catastrophic” amount of money to them because other figures were as or more responsible for disseminating the false claims. And he said no greater good would come from forcing Giuliani to pay a hefty penalty.

“People who believe this stuff are still going to believe it no matter what,” Sibley said. He argued that Giuliani was one of those people.

“Mr. Giuliani is a good man” he said, while conceding that “he hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that happened in the past few days.”

Sibley added, “I have no doubt that Mr. Giuliani’s statements caused harm. No question about it.” But he said the true “Patient Zero” was the far-right website Gateway Pundit, which identified Freeman and Moss by name in the hours after Giuliani and Trump’s campaign disseminated deceptively edited video of the two women counting votes. Gateway Pundit also faces a defamation suit, and Gottlieb told jurors that the website and others who piled on were all taking cues from the Trump legal team led by Giuliani. Lawyers for publisher Jim Hoft have said in court filings that the site “fairly and accurately reported on the claims made by third parties, such as Trump’s legal team.”

“Rudy Giuliani could have stopped all of this,” Gottleib said. He called his clients “heroes” who stood up to a bully, adding, “Unlike some other people, they testified.”

Defendants very rarely risk testifying at trial. In Giuliani’s specific situation, he is already facing criminal indictment in a Georgia 2020 election case and identified as an uncharged “Co-Conspirator 1” in Trump’s federal election obstruction case, meaning he could have had to repeatedly assert his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in cross-examination.

The trial started Monday, and both women gave tearful testimony before the plaintiffs rested their case Wednesday night. Jurors began deliberating over lunch Thursday at about 1:30 p.m.

Earlier in the week, Freeman described her comfortable life as an independent business executive, in a house she’d lived in for 20 years, until Dec. 4, 2020, when nasty, racist messages began streaming in after Giuliani said she submitted thousands of false ballots for Joe Biden in the presidential election.

She went to a police station and handed her phone to a lieutenant, who answered some of the threatening calls. Then it got worse.

“They started coming to the house with bullhorns,” Freeman said. “Now you’re actually coming to the house? I was scared. I was scared because I didn’t know, now they’re coming to kill me. I was just scared.”

Freeman had to abandon her longtime home, and in subsequent months, she moved from place to place with her belongings in her car. She wept as she described feeling homeless.

Freeman said the false claims ruined her reputation and quashed her dreams of expanding her clothing boutique, “Ruby’s Unique Treasures.” She was wearing a “Lady Ruby” T-shirt while working as an election official in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2020, which was how she was easily tracked down once Giuliani shared the video of her.

The threats came through voice mails, emails, text messages, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. “You are dead,” one person wrote. “Your family and you are now criminals and traitors to the union. BLM wants the cops to go away, good they are in the way of my ropes and your tree.”

She testified that she had hoped to open a brick-and-mortar store but can’t use her name or advertise anymore.

“I don’t have my name anymore,” Freeman said through tears. “That’s the only thing in life. The only thing you have is your name. My life is just messed up, all because of somebody putting me out there on blast, tweeting my name out.”

On Wednesday, a marketing professor at Northwestern University testified that a group of 16 defamatory online and media mentions of Freeman and Moss, beginning in December 2020, were seen about 35 million times. To repair the women’s reputations with a campaign across the same media platforms, with each message repeated five times for impact, would cost $47 million, Ashlee Humphreys testified.

Sibley argued in closing arguments that there was no way for Giuliani to anticipate that the reaction to his claims would be violent and racist. Gottleib disputed that in his rebuttal argument, the final words jurors heard before receiving instructions from Howell on how to render a verdict. “He called them drug dealers and criminals,” Gottleib reminded jurors. Giuliani repeatedly said the two women appeared to be passing around both USB sticks that could alter the election results and vials of drugs. Moss testified that the item her mother handed her during the vote count was a ginger mint.

The reaction to Giuliani’s words from Trump supporters “was foreseeable,” Gottleib said. “It was inevitable.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va ... n-workers/

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
THE DECISION:

Defamation
Moss awarded: $16,998,000
Freeman awarded: $16,171,000

Emotional distress
Moss awarded: $20 million
Freeman awarded: $20 million

Punitive damages
Total: $75 million

GRAND TOTAL: Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay about $148 million in damages to Ruby FREEMAN and Shaye MOSS.

To the jury:

I didn't post the testimony of Ms Freeman and Ms Moss but if you get a chance read it. It's horrific and the abuse is ongoing.

I will always advocate doing jury duty no matter how onerous and disruptive to your life. Once you've done it you will understand why people like this don't want to face a real one.

I hope they find a good financial advisor so that even after taxes, wherever they choose to relocate, they can live in peace.

Laffy
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social
Wow.

#RudyGiuliani is still making baseless claims about 2020 election. STFU Rudy Colludey. You're toast.

Via Acyn:

Reporter: Do you still believe what you said about these two women was truthful?

Giuliani: I have no doubt that my comments were made and they were supportable & they are supportable today

Via Emptywheel:

This is really not the kind of speech you give after you YOURSELF default on discovery in a case before Beryl Howell.

YMMV, but holy hell she will not be happy about this.

2/ Via Kyle Cheney:

Rudy: “I don’t regret a damn thing.”

[Narrator: Oh you will, you will, just wait]

More:

GIULIANI says the judgment is “absurd.” He says he didn’t testify because he was afraid Howell would hold him in contempt and says he’s appealing.

He said it’s not his fault others threatened and harassed Freeman/Moss.

3/ Compare and contrast.

Via Acyn:

Moss: As we move forward, and continue to seek justice, our greatest wish is that no one, no election worker or voter or school board member or anyone else ever experiences anything like we went through. You all matter. You are all important.

+ "The lies Rudy Giuliani told about me and my mommy after the 2020 election have changed our lives. The past few years have been devastating."

4/ Freeman: Money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back into the house that I called home.I miss my home. I miss my neighbors. And I miss my name.

Ga. poll worker describes harrowing threats in Giuliani defamation trial
Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss said her life has never been the same since Rudy Giuliani, the former Trump lawyer, falsely accused her of stealing the Georgia election on behalf of Democrats
By Spencer S. Hsu and Amy Gardner
Updated December 12, 2023 at 6:28 p.m. EST|Published December 12, 2023 at 11:21 a.m. EST

A former election worker in Fulton County, Ga., described in harrowing detail on Tuesday the way her life was turned upside down after Rudy Giuliani falsely accused her and her mother of stealing the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump while processing absentee ballots in Atlanta.

It began on Dec. 4, 2020, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss testified — the day after Giuliani, the former Trump lawyer and mayor of New York City, tweeted surveillance video from a ballot-counting operation in Atlanta and falsely accused “supervisors” of pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under a table after poll workers had gone home.

“That was the day that everything changed, everything in my life changed. … Everything just flipped upside down. … On that day, lies were spread about me and my mom … crazy lies,” Moss said at a federal courthouse in Washington.

Moss described being afraid as she walked three blocks to the parking lot that night, crying as she read messages, including one that called her a “dirty f---ing n----r b---h,” and scheduling a special trip to the salon to have her hair cut and dyed to change her appearance.

The impact was lasting, too, Moss, 39, said. She started to suffer panic attacks and eventually was diagnosed with acute stress disorder and major depressive disorder. She quit her $39,000-a-year position with the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections in April 2022, despite her love of a job that she compared to winning one of Willie Wonka’s golden tickets.

“I wanted to retire a county worker like my grandmother and make her proud and my mom proud. But I didn’t make it,” Moss said, verging on tears.

Moss’s testimony came during the second day of a damages trial against Giuliani, whom Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, sued for defamation in federal court in the District. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell issued a default judgment against Giuliani in August based on his admissions and failure to turn over evidence in the case. The jury’s task in this week’s trial is limited to establishing what damages Giuliani must pay. Moss and Freeman are seeking up to $47 million in damages.

Throughout Moss’s testimony, Giuliani sat motionless at the defense table, watching. He occasionally took notes with thick colored markers. Moss cried repeatedly and often hung her head as she spoke. She said that in addition to the emotional toll, the lasting impact of the whole experience has been disbelief that someone of Giuliani’s stature could so recklessly destroy her life.

“How can someone with so much power go public and talk about things that he obviously has no clue about?” Moss said. “It’s just obvious that it’s lies, and my reaction is that it’s hurtful, it’s untrue, and it’s unfair.”

The effects, she said, reverberated within her family. Her then-14-year-old son, who received racist texts and phone calls on a cellphone that used to belong to his mom, failed all his final exams that semester, she said. Her grandmother, with whom Moss lived at the time, received pizza deliveries from harassers that she was expected to pay for. One pizza was ordered for a person whose first and last name sounded like the racial epithet that sounds like the n-word. Texts, voice mails and emails accused her of treason and threatened to hang her.

“They kept telling me it was punishable by death and they could hang me and they could hang my mom. That was my concern,” Moss testified. “I was afraid for my life. I literally felt someone would be coming to hang me, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.”

Cross-examining Moss, Giuliani attorney Joseph D. Sibley IV attempted to ask about the vote-counting process on Election Day and whether outsiders or the public might have misinterpreted video or been excluded from observing the Atlanta counting site at State Farm Arena, where the women worked. But her attorneys objected, asserting that Sibley’s questioning sought to establish Giuliani’s statements could have been fair — something Howell said was inadmissible. Giuliani had already conceded liability for false statements.

Sibley suggested that people other than Giuliani were responsible for some of the harm suffered by the two workers. “Do you have any reason to believe Mr. Giuliani intended for people to act on his statements about you and your mother and make racist statements to you?” he asked. He later asked, “Do you have any evidence that Mr. Giuliani intended violent threats to you or your mom as a result of his statements?”

Moss replied that she believed Giuliani assumed and led others to think that because election workers were Black, they must be Democrats. “He doesn’t know who I vote for,” Moss said.

“He wanted people to search our home and arrest us. He didn’t say who should do that, so the world responded to him,” Moss continued. “Trump and his allies including Mr. Giuliani and his crew lit the torch, and they started it, and a whole lot of media spread their lies.”

Howell began the day with an admonishment for Giuliani for making comments that could have freshly defamed two Georgia state elections workers as he left the courthouse the previous day.

In a court filing late Monday, Freeman’s and Moss’s lawyers asked Howell to step in after Giuliani, who wants to testify at some point, repeated to reporters outside the federal courthouse the debunked allegations that the women tampered with the 2020 vote counting process.

“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani told reporters, according to an ABC News report cited by Freeman and Moss’s attorneys. He added: “Of course I don’t regret it. … I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes.”

Howell scolded Giuliani for the remarks, saying his comments could support another defamation claim and noted that Sibley told jurors in his opening statement that the plaintiffs were good people. Sibley had said, “There’s no question these claimants were harmed. They didn’t deserve what happened to them,” while contesting how much Giuliani was to blame.

Sibley told Howell he was not sure the comments were reconcilable but that he had not been present and could not control all his client’s comments out of court. He also suggested Giuliani’s age might be at issue.

The case has taken “a toll on him,” Sibley said, adding that Giuliani is almost 80 years old.

Howell on Tuesday afternoon granted the request by lawyers for Freeman and Moss to bar Giuliani from arguing in his defense that he hadn’t defamed the workers, after withholding evidence from them in the case.

Freeman and Moss’s attorneys also put on two witnesses who described the Georgia Secretary of State’s investigation and findings that debunked the allegations against Freeman and Moss. They also showed video of sworn statements by Giuliani adviser Bernie Kerik and lawyers Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb indicating that Giuliani led the Trump legal team’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results that launched an avalanche of misinformation on social media based partly on the false Georgia claims.

Kerik acknowledged that in a last-ditch plan to pressure Republicans in Congress to block the certification of the election results, a strategic communications plan by Giuliani on Dec. 27, 2020, listed top allegations of fraud in several swing states, including the No. 1 claim in Georgia of “Suitcase Gate.”

Kerik admitted tweeting three weeks earlier that Freeman had handed over a USB drive to Moss to flip the vote count. “Now what can possibly be on that thumb drive? What’s so secret that they must act like it’s a drug deal? Or is it just my imagination?”

Moss and Freeman said the mother gave her daughter a ginger mint.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs played video of Ellis repeatedly invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked questions about statements she or Giuliani made concerning whether the 2020 election was stolen. Ellis pleaded guilty in October to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, admitting to making several false statements to state senators, including one alleging misconduct about election workers in State Farm Arena.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va ... s-testify/

Judge Orders Immediate Enforcement of Georgia Election Workers’ $146 Million Verdict Against Giuliani
Wednesday's decision cited Giuliani's history as an 'uncooperative litigant,' his mounting debts from other cases, and concerns that he will 'conceal his assets'
Published 12/20/23 06:33 PM ET|Updated 2 hr ago
Aneeta Mathur-Ashton

ormer Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss won their bid Wednesday night to immediately enforce a $146 million judgment against Rudy Giuliani.

In the new filing, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, a Barack Obama appointee, lifted an automatic stay of 30 days she'd imposed on the verdict that allows Freeman and Moss to try to seek the money Giuliani owes them.

Howell cites Giuliani's history as an "uncooperative litigant," his mounting debts from other court cases, and concerns that he will "conceal his assets" within the 30-day period as reasons to justify ordering the ending of the automatic stay.

The federal judge found that Moss and Freeman “correctly explain” that Giuliani has “proven himself to be an unwilling and uncooperative litigant.”

Howell also said that the former New York mayor's failure to “satisfy even more modest monetary awards entered earlier in this case” provides good cause to believe that he will seek to dissipate or conceal his assets during the 30-day period…”

Despite Giuliani saying “there is no evidence in the record of any attempt by [him] to dissipate assets,” Howell found that his comments ignore his history of attempting to conceal and hide his assets by “failing to comply with discovery requests, including “plaintiffs’ requests for financial information.”

Moss and Freeman requested the 30-day period be dissolved for several reasons, citing that Giuliani “has demonstrated an unwillingness to comply with judicial process, including orders to pay attorney’s fees and costs,” and “appears to have no assets in the District of Columbia but substantial assets in—at least—both New York and Florida.”

They added that because he ignored “several prior court orders to reimburse attorney’s fees,” his conduct in the matter “presents “a substantial risk” that “Giuliani will find a way to dissipate those assets before Plaintiffs are able to recover.”

The filing comes shortly after a D.C. jury awarded more than $16 million in compensatory damages, $20 million for intentional infliction of emotional distress and another $75 million in punitive damages to the mother and daughter after Giuliani spread lies about the duo that they committed election fraud and inserted a USB drive into voting machines.

Earlier this week, the parties agreed to lower the amount of compensatory damages that Giuliani owes by more than $2 million, bringing the total to $145,969,000, plus post-judgment interest and costs.

Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani again on Monday, this time seeking to "permanently bar" him from "persisting in his defamatory campaign against the plaintiffs."

https://themessenger.com/politics/giuli ... nt-verdict

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