(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The embattled Rudy Giuliani has sued President Joe Biden for defamation, claiming that Biden’s remarks during an October 2020 presidential debate damaged the former New York City mayor’s reputation and cost him career opportunities.
Biden’s allegedly defamatory remarks came when he told Donald Trump at the Oct. 22, 2020 national debate: “Rudy Giuliani, he is being used as a Russian pawn. He is being fed information that is Russian, that is not true.”
About 48 minutes later, Giuliani said Biden defamed him again when the candidate said, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he is accusing me of is a Russian plant … Nobody believes it except [Trump] and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.”
According to Giuliani, Biden’s allegations “quickly became viral” and “massively magnified” the harm to his reputation.
Giuliani stressed that he is not a Russian asset, nor was he fed Russian disinformation during the 2020 campaign.
“The Hunter Biden laptop contained no Russian information,” he said, “but rather contained the accurate, depraved, and revealing entries of someone engaged in influence peddling but also in throes of a drug addiction, and thereby revealing conduct and actions that at the very least would have cost Defendant Biden the 2020 presidential election if he had not lied about them and defamed the Plaintiff in the process of doing so.”
“America’s Mayor” may have an uphill battle to successfully sue for defamation, as his reputation has plummeted in recent years due to events that have little to do with Biden’s comments.
Along with his most obvious legal challenge—his criminal charge in Georgia over the election interference allegations—a Washington DC Board on Professional Responsibility recommended that he be disbarred in July.
He also faces his own lawsuit from Hunter Biden, who sued him over his infamous laptop, saying that Giuliani hacked and manipulated data on an external hard drive in a “total annihilation” of Biden’s “digital privacy.” That Biden lawsuit came after Giuliani already had a default judgment issued against him in yet another defamation case, this one involving two Georgia election workers.
And even if Giuliani didn’t have any of those other legal woes, his lawsuit against Joe Biden faces another barrier: There is an FBI whistleblower who claims that he was, in fact, co-opted by Russians.
The whistleblower, special agent Jonathan Buma, filed a statement with the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, alleging that Giuliani’s associate, Russian-Ukrainian oligarch Pavlo Fuks, was a Russian intelligence asset.
Buma said that one of his informants told him that Fuks had paid Giuliani $300,000 to serve as his U.S. lobbyist. But Buma’s bosses at the FBI prevented him from pursuing the matter, he said.
“By 2020, information collected by me through my [informants], as well as other agents and analysts in the FBI, led to a determination … that Fuks was a co-opted asset of [Russian intelligence],” Buma said in his whistleblower statement.
“However, in 2020 and 2021, it became increasingly apparent to me that my reporting on Fuks and his ties to Giuliani was negatively received by my superiors, who were eager for the flow of information about Fuks and his relationship to Giuliani to stop.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani has also been accused of being an alcoholic by the New York Times.
Giuliani denied that accusation Wednesday, the same day he filed his lawsuit against Biden.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
