The New Yorker:

The lawyers at Protect Democracy have brought defamation suits against Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake, and Project Veritas, hoping to limit the spread of disinformation. Could their efforts impinge on freedom of speech?

By Charles Bethea

On December 3, 2020, Jen Jordan, then a state senator in Georgia, received a text message. “Get over to the capitol,” it read. “Rudy Giuliani is there and it’s bad.” When she arrived, she found the halls of the state capitol building, in downtown Atlanta, packed with Republican legislators, Donald Trump supporters, and Trump attorneys, including Jenna Ellis and Giuliani. “They were taking selfies like it was a party,” Jordan, a Democrat, recalled recently. The crowd soon moved to a fourth-floor hearing room. Taking a seat, Jordan saw correspondents for far-right media outlets including One America News Network, the Epoch Times, and Newsmax. “The alarm bells really went off when Trump tweeted for people to tune in live to OAN,” Jordan said.

What followed at the state capitol astounded Jordan. “Giuliani took control of what felt like a mini-trial,” she recalled. He claimed that the Presidential election had been stolen from Trump, in part through election fraud in Georgia. He referred to “smoking gun” evidence of unmonitored vote counting, and of machines switching votes to Joe Biden—claims that Jordan, who as an an attorney had helped oversee the election locally, knew were bogus. Then a lawyer on Giuliani’s team played surveillance video from Fulton County’s main ballot-processing center, which showed election workers moving ballot containers around a brightly lit room. “I saw four suitcases come out from underneath the table,” the lawyer told those assembled. “What are these ballots doing there, separate from the other ballots? And why are they only counting them when the place is cleared out?” She said that the number of ballots in the supposed suitcases “could easily be and probably is certainly beyond the margin of victory in this race.” One of the two alleged perpetrators, she added, “had the name Ruby across her shirt.”

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