By Ryan J. Reilly and Summer Concepcion - NBC News
Rudy Giuliani, former lawyer for former President Donald Trump, has admitted to making false statements about two Georgia election officials who sued him over his baseless allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, according to a court filing Tuesday.
"Defendant Giuliani, for purposes of litigation only, does not deny that, to the extent that the statements were statements of fact and otherwise actionable, such statements of actionable facts were false," Giuliani wrote in a signed stipulation that he said was intended to "avoid unnecessary expense in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes."
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Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Shaye Moss, had claimed that their lives were belly up when followers of conspiracy theories, as well as then-President Donald Trump and Giuliani himself, denounced that they had committed fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
One of the alleged evidence supporting this theory was a very short video with edited security camera footage that was widely circulated online by Trump allies.
Giuliani had claimed that Freeman and Moss were "passing USB sticks as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine." In reality, as reflected in the report of the congressional committee that investigated the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 and the allegations of election interference, both were passing mints.
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"I lost my sense of security, all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 [referring to Trump, who holds that spot on the historic list of presidents] and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter Shaye to push their lies about the presidential election being stolen." Freeman testified before the parliamentary committee, which called the treatment of the two women "insensitive, inhumane and inexcusable."
In a statement Wednesday morning, Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Giuliani, questioned whether Giuliani had acknowledged his statements were false, adding that he "did not challenge it to move on to the part of the case that will allow it to be dismissed."
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"This is a legal issue, not a factual issue," he said, "those who want to smear the mayor [Giuliani was of New York City from 1994 to 2001] are ignoring the fact that this stipulation was designed to get to the legal issues of the case."
The court filing by Giuliani comes after the Georgia State Board of Elections in June closed its more than year-long investigation into alleged voter fraud, clearing Freeman and Moss of any possible wrongdoing.
The fraud claims were "baseless and found to have no merit," the investigation concluded based on the work of the FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Secretary of State officials.