Rudy Giuliani has had a shaky relationship with Newsmax in recent months — it has apparently canceled his TV show on its streaming channel, though it still has him on its regular TV channel to opine about things occasionally. However, it has also discontinued its promotion of a legal defense fund for Giuliani — the link to it now goes to a promotion for Newsmax magazine. Newsmax did have Giuliani on a few times during the election season to promote Trump and denounce the opposition:
- Giuliani to Newsmax: Tim Walz’s China Ties, Socialist Views Problematic
- Rudy Giuliani to Newsmax: Would Dems Side With Terrorists on Another 9/11?
- Giuliani to Newsmax: Would-Be Shooter Had to Study Trump International
- Rudy Giuliani to Newsmax: Questions Remain on First Trump Assassination Try
- Giuliani to Newsmax: Trump Will Keep His Promises (though it appears Trump broke his promise to pay Giuliani $2 million for his work after the 2020 election)
Newsmax also noted that Giuliani would be among “invited guest speakers” at a Trump-related fundraiser for “people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack at the U.S. Capitol.”
On top of that, Newsmax made a couple of attempts at defending Giuliani. A paywalled Oct. 25 article by Sandy Fitzgerald carried the headline “Rudy Giuliani: A Victim of Lawfare, Not Law?” It’s unclear why Fitzgerald would think that given how Giuliani’s false defamation of two Georgia election workers was indisputably proven in court.
Michael Dorstewitz took his own stab at defending Giuliani in his Oct. 28 column, starting things off by muddying the waters:
Last week a federal judge ordered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — “America’s Mayor” — to hand over the bulk of his property to two Georgia election tabulators to partially satisfy a nearly $150 million judgment in a defamation lawsuit.
To put this in perspective, the owner and manager of the ship that caused the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse earlier this year agreed to pay $102 million in cleanup costs.
The lawsuit against Giuliani was based on statements that the longtime Trump supporter made after viewing surveillance footage taken from an Atlanta-area vote tabulating center.
The footage appears to depict news media and independent poll watchers being ushered out of the counting room in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.
After all but two workers have left, they appear to pull suitcases of ballots out from a table, and run them through tabulating machines.
And as Florida-based attorney and Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told Newsmax, it wasn’t just Georgia where discrepancies were discovered after the 2020 presidential election.
Dorstewiz is essentially defending Giuliani’s laziness in repeating claims he refused to verify the contents of the video. And given that the Georgia story turned out to be false, shouldn’t Giuliani have been more careful about advancing other claims of election fraud that were also likely bogus? Instead, he chose to play the victim card on Giuliani’s behalf:
Accordingly, Giuliani may have had every right to believe something wasn’t quite kosher in Georgia — and when the surveillance footage became public, the clanging from his BS detectors must have been deafening.
“We just got [the footage] at 1 a.m., a big team watched it, and we were shocked at what we saw,” Jack Pick, a volunteer attorney in Georgia who presented the evidence to the state Senate afterwards, told Newsmax TV at the time.
In December, after the trial judge found Giuliani responsible for making defamatory statements against the Georgia poll workers, the eight-person jury awarded each plaintiff $20 million for defamation and $16 million for emotional distress.
The jury also awarded $75 million in punitive damages to be split between them.
They had initially asked for damages between $15 million and $43 million.
[…]O’Connell thought it was a bit much for watching a video and coming to the same conclusion many others had.
He told Newsmax that “Given Giuliani’s financial situation, the actions taken seem excessively punitive and politically motivated, intended as a warning to others and potentially suppressing free speech.”
Both Dorstewitz and O’Connell – who was apparently quoted in the paywalled article — are absolving Giuliani from responsibility of fact-checking his claims before going public with them. The election workers were harassed and threatened because of Giuliani’s lies, as were their family members.
The warning here is against anyone who insists on telling lies even after they have been disproven. There is no right to spread lies, so “free speech” is not being “suppressed” here. It’s not “excessively punitive” to hold a liar to account, and who continued to spread those lies long after the original defamation judgment against him.
Dorstewitz closed by playing the victim card:
Giuliani is now appealing the judgment, but it’s not just him.
Nearly everyone associated with former President Trump seems to have a target on his back.
That includes Roger Stone, and Trump adviser Peter Navarro.
They’re even going after billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
And of course, the former president himself has been hit with a rash of lawsuits and indictments — all to prevent his return to the White House.
But in eight more days the nation will have a chance to make everything right again.
Stone and Navarro were “targeted” because they committed crimes. Apparently, Dorstewitz thinks people should be able to get away with crimes if they’re done for the benefit of Trump.