Cool lines from the judicial evisceration of Rudy.
Oh, my, I went through the whole order (it’s long) and extracted these essential bits, leaving out the multitude of case citations and quotes in the rigorous and extensive consideration given to all the issues. Since it’s a public document – a court order – I hope this amount of quoting is okay.
Giuliani has submitted declarations with concessions turned slippery on
scrutiny
the result of these efforts to obtain discovery from Giuliani, aside from his initial production of 193 documents, is largely a single page of communications, blobs of indecipherable data, a sliver of the financial documents required to be produced, and a declaration and two stipulations from Giuliani, who indicates in the latter stipulations his preference to concede plaintiffs’ claims rather than produce discovery in this case
Giuliani’s stipulations hold more holes than Swiss cheese,
Giuliani’s completed TrustPoint production of 7,949 records consists “almost entirely [of] nonusable, nonresponsive materials,” consisting of “approximately 4,142—or more than half—as indecipherable blobs,” id. at 13. Out of the remaining 3,807 documents, plaintiffs identified only “188 documents that might be relevant to [their] claims” but “63 of those documents consist[ed] of texts with what appear to be wiped bodies,” leaving just 124 potentially relevant documents. Id. at 13–14. Yet, plaintiffs’ counsel identified only “50 or fewer documents” out of those 124 records that were “directly relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims,” and the majority of those were“unremarkable documents,” such as meeting emails querying the location of zoom links or copies of publicly available documents.
The fact that Giuliani is a sophisticated litigant with a self-professed 50 years of experience in litigation—including serving as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York—only underscores his lackluster preservation efforts.
Simply put, the government is not Giuliani’s ESI preservation team
The only reasonable explanation for Giuliani’s blatant disregard for satisfying his preservation obligations—despite fully understanding them—is that he intentionally and willfully ignored them.
Giuliani’s failure to preserve his ESI forced plaintiffs to waste time by wadingthrough thousands of pages of gibberish derived from the TrustPoint dataset in search of some potentially relevant evidence, while his concomitant failure to produce any meaningful discovery has similarly brought this litigation to a standstill.
Giuliani would like to have his proverbial cake and eat it too: He wants to bypass his discovery obligations now with stipulations that would leave him, somehow, free to raise his affirmative defenses to plaintiffs’ claims on appeal, with a record predicated on deficient discovery. This discovery shortcut is simply unfair and will not be permitted here.
None of Giuliani’s attempts to explain away these unambiguous failures to comply with these court orders are persuasive.
Giuliani’s willful withholding of relevant financial records provides the “special circumstances counseling for a stronger inference” because the only conclusion that could be drawn from this discovery deficiency is that Giuliani is intentionally trying to hide information about his net worth.
