Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s legal team filed a motion to jump ship from a case in which two election workers he defamed are trying to collect a $146 million defamation judgment.
Kenneth Caruso asked Wednesday that he and co-counsel David Labkowski be allowed to quit representing the disgraced coffee salesman and onetime lawyer for President-elect Donald Trump, citing New York rules that let lawyers bail on clients with whom they have a “fundamental disagreement.”
They also invoked provisions that allow counsel to withdraw if their client insists on making claims in bad faith or “fails to cooperate in the representation.”
Judge Lewis Liman still has to make a ruling on the request.
The lawyer overboard incident comes as Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Georgia election workers that Giuliani falsely accused of manipulating voter tallies in the 2020 election, are poised to collect on the massive judgment a jury awarded them in December 2023.
Giuliani’s case has devolved into a bizarre game of hide-and-seek as he has repeatedly refused to turn over assets, including his Manhattan apartment, New York Yankees memorabilia, and luxury watches in defiance of a court order.
When lawyers for Freeman and Moss were granted access to the apartment last month, they found that valuables including furniture and art had been removed in advance.
To add injury to insult, Giuliani showed up to vote in Florida on Election Day driving a Mercedes-Benz he was ordered to surrender.
Days later, he begged for money and claimed he couldn’t afford food in a desperate, since-deleted tweet.
Judge Liman has at times sounded livid in court as Giuliani’s counsel have launched one squirrely argument after another that he shouldn’t have to hand over property.
When they said last week that he shouldn’t have to part with one watch because his grandfather gave it to him, Liman retorted, “Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous. The law is the law.”
Last week, Liman told Giuliani has until the end of this week or he could be held in contempt.
It sounds like his legal team has also had enough.
