Rachel Alexander’s campaign of complaining that right-wingers who lied about election fraud are facing consequences for those lies continued in her Jan. 1 WorldNetDaily column, in which she claimed that Rudy Giuliani is a victim of “lawfare” because he was held accountable for spreading lies about two Georgia election workers:
The left continues its growing trend of destroying the right through lawfare – prosecution on the criminal side and sanctions and defamation lawsuits on the civil side. Most people know the lawfare is groundless, but with the left now dominating the legal system, including the judiciary and state bars, it’s become easy to destroy the lives of vocal conservatives on the right, holding them up as warning examples to any other principled conservative who next dares to go against the fascism of progressivism. Anyone who bravely defends those targeted with defamation suits risks being sued for defamation themselves. It’s a perfect way to chill conservative speech, especially attempts to expose illegal election activity.
The latest victim is Rudy Giuliani, who lost a $148 million defamation case, forcing him to file for bankruptcy. He was sued over telling a Missouri House committee that a video posted on The Gateway Pundit “shows demonstrably the theft of about 40,000 ballots right in front of your eyes.” The site accused Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a mother and daughter who counted ballots at State Farm Arena, of producing and counting ballots from suitcases.
The video showed election workers grabbing rectangular black boxes that looked like suitcases from underneath tables – they even had pull-up handles to haul them around like suitcases – after workers had told poll watchers to go home for the evening due to a burst pipe. Election officials claimed later that they did not count ballots from the containers, but merely put ballots away in them, which was routine.
Alexander then took the revisionist-history route to make Giuliani look like a victim:
Giuliani tried to back out of his statements once he saw how bad his chances were in the lawsuit, saying three years later that he’d made false statements. However, he did not admit that his statements had damaged the two plaintiffs, an element required to prove defamation.
D.C. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, didn’t care that Giuliani said he was unable to adequately defend himself in responses because federal agents had seized many of his documents, and that he was buried with “seven or eight cases that had pending requests for discovery” including “not just civil but criminal investigations.” Howell entered a default judgment against him in August, concluding the proceedings in December as to the amount, which prompted Giuliani to file for bankruptcy.
By entering a default judgment against him, she ducked having to rule on the merits or have a jury decide the merits (granted, in Washington, D.C., it would be almost impossible to find a fair jury). The elements of defamation include proving that the defendant made a false statement and engaged in at least negligence.
Though Alexander linked to Howell’s ruling of default judgment against Giuliani, she failed to note the part where Howell called out Giuliani using the excuse that documents were “seized” as a reason for not complying with discovery, pointing out that “his devices were returned no later than August 19, 2022” yet he still continued to invoke the excuse: “Despite Giuliani’s repeated reliance on the FBI’s seizure of his electronic devices to excuse his discovery preservation and production failings, responsive information held in his email and other communications-related accounts could and should have been preserved since the contents of these accounts presumably remained accessible online and through alternative devices.”
Alexander then baselessly attacked all election workers for purportedly and deliberately ignoring evidence of fraud — while offering not a single example of this happening, let alone that Freeman and Moss did this — while also playing whataboutism in complaining that those pushing election fraud lies were also harassed:
Many of the election workers who were accused of wrongdoing in 2020 or 2022 fit a pattern of realizing monkey business was going on but preferred to pretend not to notice it, since they were lower-level employees who did not want to lose their jobs. Georgia election officials have repeatedly fought attempts to further investigate the occurrences on election night.
[…]The plaintiffs claimed that their lives had been turned upside down by the publicity. However, there are thousands of people who investigated the concerns of election fraud, both officials and private citizens, whose lives were turned upside down, receiving death threats and canceled, yet that’s treated as routine.
Alexander didn’t mention that the vast majority of those who have “investigated the concerns of election fraud” were found to be lying or misleading, much like Giuliani. Their goal was to deceive people, while Freeman and Moss were falsely attacked for doing their jobs.
Alexander concluded by lamenting: “There has been little pushback defending Giuliani, even on the right. If more people don’t start exposing the circumstances behind this lawfare, instead allowing the left to pile up victory after victory, election fraud will never be stopped.” Again, she didn’t explain why holding Giuliani accountable for his defamatory lies was “lawfare.”