NEED TO KNOW
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Rudy Giuliani was an attorney who later served as the mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001
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Giuliani later supported President Donald Trump and represented him in several lawsuits stemming from the 2020 presidential election
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In November 2025, Trump granted Giuliani a “full, complete and unconditional pardon”
Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001 before he ran for several other political offices.
The disbarred attorney, who previously served as the United States Associate Attorney General, pivoted his career to working with businesses and law firms after his various political campaigns didn’t succeed following his mayoral tenure. He returned to the political spotlight in 2016 when he supported Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.
Giuliani went on to join President Trump’s early administration when he began his term in 2017 and later became part of his legal team in 2018. He continued working closely with Trump after he lost the 2020 presidential election to President Joe Biden.
The two politicians continued working together on efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. For the next few years, Giuliani made various claims regarding the election, including allegations of voter fraud and rigged voting machines. He also represented Trump in various election lawsuits. However, Giuliani faced several lawsuits of his own and was later disbarred in both N.Y.C. and Washington, D.C.
In September 2025, Trump announced that he would be awarding Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom and later signed a “full, complete and unconditional pardon” for him.
“The president has made the justice system fair again,” Giuliani told the New York Post after learning about the pardon on Nov. 10.
Here’s everything to know about what Rudy Giuliani has been doing since the 2020 presidential election and why President Donald Trump pardoned him.
He defended Trump in several lawsuits after the 2020 election
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty
Rudy Giuliani at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024.
After supporting Trump in his 2016 presidential election, he continued working closely with then-President Trump and campaigned for him during his 2020 re-election bid.
However, when Trump lost to Biden, Giuliani continued standing by Trump and represented him in several lawsuits related to his election loss and his team’s attempts to overturn the results.
Giuliani defended Trump in lawsuits that he brought against various states, as well as lawsuits in which organizations and states sued Trump and his election campaign staff.
He was named as a co-conspirator in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election
Fulton County Sheriff’s Office
Rudy Giuliani’s mugshot.
While the dozens of lawsuits involving Giuliani and Trump differed in plaintiffs and defendants, many of them centered around allegations involving the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
After Trump lost the election to Biden — evidence has supported that the election results were legitimate — he appointed Giuliani to lead their efforts to sue various states and organizations for fraud in hopes of overturning the election, according to ABC News.
Trump allegedly told Giuliani to “go wild” and “do anything you want” to get the outcomes they wanted, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman wrote in her 2022 book, Confidence Man, per Business Insider.
Giuliani went on to play a major role in suing several battleground states over the vote counting processes, the vote certification process and their overall election processes, according to USA Today. Trump’s team and his allies filed a total of 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts, and 61 suits were dismissed, dropped or lost.
Their only victory came when a Pennsylvania judge sided with Trump, ruling that voters could not change their ballots if they failed to provide identification days later, but the ruling didn’t change the election results in the state.
After nearly all of the lawsuits failed, Giuliani continued pushing the narrative that the election was rigged. On Jan. 6, 2021, he spoke at a rally ahead of the United States Capitol attack, in which he reiterated false claims of voter fraud and encouraged people to engage in “trial by combat.”
Giuliani has since denied that his phrase was intended to provoke violence, but several Trump supporters subsequently raided the U.S. Capitol. The riot turned fatal and resulted in four people being killed.
In 2023 and 2024, the Justice Department and grand juries in Atlanta and Arizona all separately indicted Trump and Giuliani as “co-conspirators” who worked together to “change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” per The New York Times.
Giuliani pleaded not guilty to the nine federal charges in the Arizona case, which is scheduled to head to trial in January 2026, per The Hill. As of November 2025, Giuliani has maintained that he had a right to question the 2020 election and defend Trump.
Giuliani was later disbarred in Washington, D.C., and New York
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Rudy Giuliani speaking at the White House in July 2020.
Although Giuliani was a successful attorney for decades, he was disbarred in both N.Y.C. and Washington, D.C., after his representation of Trump and his alleged impact on the Jan. 6 riots.
Just days after the attack, the New York State Bar Association announced that they were investigating Giuliani and his involvement. By June of 2021, a New York Appellate Court suspended Giuliani’s law license, and a New York state appeals court disbarred him three years later, saying he “flagrantly misused his prominent position as the personal attorney for former President Trump and his campaign.”
Giuliani further faced consequences in D.C. In July 2021, the D.C. Court of Appeals temporarily suspended Giuliani’s license for violating ethics rules by defending Trump and making false claims about the 2020 election, per The Guardian. The D.C. Court of Appeals officially disbarred him in September 2024, per ABC News.
He was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay nearly $150 million to two poll workers in 2023
Michael M. Santiago/Getty
Rudy Giuliani at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum on Sept. 11, 2024.
As a result of defending Trump and bringing several election fraud cases against individuals, companies and states, Giuliani has faced a myriad of lawsuits over the last five years.
In 2021, two Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea’ ArShaye Moss, filed a defamation lawsuit against Giuliani after the attorney allegedly accused them of manipulating their votes by “passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine” and engaging in “surreptitious illegal activity,” per The Guardian.
Both Freeman and Moss testified about the alleged remarks and how they affected their lives in a 2022 hearing in front of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee. Freeman claimed that she had to leave her home after Trump supporters flooded her lawn and left threatening messages.
“I took it as though they were going to hang me with their ropes on my street,” Freeman testified, according to PBS. “I was scared. I didn’t know if they were coming to kill me.”
Giuliani claimed that his comments didn’t cause any damage to the mother-daughter duo. However, in December 2023, he was ordered to pay $148 million to Freeman and Moss after being found liable for defamation. After a year-long battle over Giuliani’s subsequent bankruptcy filing, he reached a private settlement with Freeman and Moss. The settlement allowed Giuliani to keep his two homes in addition to paying Freeman and Moss an undisclosed amount of money, per Politico.
Although Giuliani has put a few of his lawsuits to bed, there are several others still looming as of late 2025. In May 2023, his former employee Noelle Dunphy filed a civil lawsuit against him over alleged sexual assault, wage theft and abuse of power, per the BBC.
Dunphy accused Giuliani of making it an “absolute requirement” that she sexually satisfy him, according to Reuters. Giuliani’s attorney said he “unequivocally” denied the allegations. Dunphy is seeking at least $10 million.
Over the last few years, Giuliani has also faced lawsuits from law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron over alleged unpaid legal fees, former President Biden’s son Hunter Biden over alleged hacking (Biden has since dropped the suit) and Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for defamation (they settled in September 2025).
He released a podcast and appeared on The Masked Singer
Anthony Devlin/Getty Rudy Giuliani speaks during the Conference in Support of Freedom and Democracy in Iran in Paris in June 2019.
Amid Giuliani’s legal battles and getting disbarred, he experimented with other fields in entertainment.
In January 2020, he launched a podcast, Rudy Giuliani’s Common Sense, where he gave “insight on leadership, courage and the most pressing issues of our time,” per the podcast description. His last recorded episode was released on Feb. 25, 2023.
Giuliani continued trying his hand at media coverage by hosting a daily radio show with WABC radio in N.Y.C. in 2021. However, the station canceled his show in May 2024 after he made several remarks questioning the 2020 election, per NBC News.
In 2019, he launched a YouTube account and later created the show America’s Mayor Live!, which airs weeknights on several platforms. He also created extra income by launching a Cameo profile in 2021.
Giuliani made waves in 2022 when he was believed to be one of the contestants on the seventh season of The Masked Singer. After he was unmasked, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set.
“Ken was super upset and indeed stormed out,” a source told PEOPLE at the time. “Robin actually followed him because he and Ken are very close friends and he wanted to check on him. Robin didn’t storm out because of Giuliani.”
Trump has vehemently supported Giuliani and pardoned him
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Rudy Giuliani and President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey in 2016.
In November 2025, President Trump officially pardoned Giuliani, as well as more than 70 others who were involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Ed Martin, a member of the United States Department of Justice, announced the news on X on Nov. 10.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the pardon letter reads.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said in a statement to PEOPLE that Giuliani and the others were “persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy.”
“Getting prosecuted for challenging results is something that happens in communist Venezuela, not the United States of America, and President Trump is putting an end to the Biden Regime’s communist tactics once and for all,” she continued.
Although Giuliani has been pardoned, the protection can only be used for federal charges and will not affect civil or state rulings, per the U.S. News World Report.
In addition to Trump granting Giuliani full clemency, he also plans on awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“As President of the United States of America, I am pleased to announce that Rudy Giuliani, the greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, and an equally great American Patriot, will receive THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM, our Country’s highest civilian honor,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sept. 1, 2025.
Read the original article on People
