Rudy Giuliani satisfies Fulton County election workers’ $148 million defamation case
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(FULTON COUNTY, GA) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday satisfied the judgment against him that required him to pay two Fulton County election workers a total of $148 million for defamation.
A jury found Giuliani liable in 2023 for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss by falsely accusing them of tampering with the 2020 presidential vote in Georgia.
In the process of reaching a settlement in January, he was held in contempt twice, by two different federal judges, for failing to relinquish possessions and continuing to defame the two election workers.
Court documents showed that the settlement action was dismissed in district court on Monday after it was determined that Giuliani had fully satisfied his obligations to Freeman and Moss.
Giuliani began surrendering assets soon after a federal jury determined what he should pay Freeman and Moss in damages and penalties in December 2024.
The settlement last month allowed him to keep his condo in Florida and his World Series rings.
A statement from Giuliani at the time of the settlement said that he would agree not to further defame the two election workers. It did not include an admission of guilt.
Giuliani was previously disbarred in New York and in Washington after his law license was stripped over his efforts to aid President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election.
His representative, Ted Goodman, said in a statement last month that the plaintiffs’ attorneys could take the possessions from the former Trump lawyer, “but they can never take away his extraordinary record of public service.”
(CALIFORNIA) — A California man and his dog were rescued on Wednesday after spending the night trapped in a crushed pickup truck along a highway in the northern part of the state, according to the California Highway Patrol.
At approximately 10:03 a.m. Wednesday, a motorist traveling along Highway 89 — three miles north of Calpine, California — called 911 after passing by the wreckage, “but was unsure if anyone was in the vehicle,” the Sierra County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement Wednesday evening.
Since police were not certain of the condition of the driver, paramedics, the local fire department and California Highway Patrol accompanied a sheriff’s deputy to the scene, officials said.
Upon arrival, first responders found the pickup truck approximately “30 feet down the hillside along Highway 89,” the sheriff’s office said.
Inside the vehicle, authorities found “one single occupant and a dog,” the sheriff’s office said.
The driver told officials he “crashed the day before around 2 p.m. and had spent the night in the truck,” even admitting to officials that “he just wasn’t paying attention and went off the road,” according to highway patrol.
The Sierra County Fire Department contacted the U.S. Forest Service and Graeagle Fire for assistance in extracting the driver from the wreckage, the sheriff’s department said.
After an hour of “meticulous work,” the driver was removed from the vehicle and taken to the hospital with “moderate injuries,” the sheriff’s office said.
“It was a pleasure working with Sierra County Fire — Calpine in the successful extrication of a complicated situation. Wishing the patient a full and speedy recovery,” Graeagle Fire Department said in a statement on Wednesday.
The dog appeared to not have any injuries and is currently “being cared for by a friend of the driver,” the sheriff’s office said.
Upon investigation, authorities said they believe the driver had been trapped inside the car for neatly 22 hours before being discovered by the motorist.
The cause of the crash is currently being investigated by the California Highway Patrol.
After this situation, California Highway Patrol urged people to remember “the responsibility we all have to each other when operating these rolling hunks of metal,” the agency said in a statement.
(NEW YORK) — In the moments before a tornado destroyed her family’s Arkansas home, Misty Drope noticed the silence.
“There’s a silence that happens before a strong storm hits you,” Drope told “Good Morning America” in an interview on Monday. “And I said, out loud, ‘Oh no, this is not good.'”
She and her family — Bruce and Keely — were standing outside what was left of their home in Paragould. The tornado that tore through the town over the weekend was the second to touch their neighborhood in less than a year.
“You’re so thankful you’re alive,” Bruce said.
At least 40 other people were killed amid more than 970 severe storm reports across more than two dozen states over the weekend. A 3-day tornado outbreak tore through at least nine states. Twelve people were killed in tornados in Missouri.
An EF-2 tornado that tore through Tylertown, Mississippi, with wind speeds up to 111 miles per hour killed at least three people, officials said.
Many of the cabins at that town’s Paradise Ranch RV Resort were reduced to rubble as the tornado tore through the camp, leaving behind a mangled mess of tree branches and building materials.
But the manager told “GMA” that there were no deaths reported there, in part because most of the cabins were empty.
Next week, about 250 campers were expected to show up, the manager said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — As the Trump administration continues to vet potential candidates for top posts within the Justice Department, a powerful White House intermediary has been pushing to hire candidates that exhibit what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump, and his efforts sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The White House intermediary, Paul Ingrassia, complained directly to Trump about Mizelle, the Justice Department’s chief of staff, and suggested to the president that Mizelle is hurting Trump’s political agenda, sources said. But Ingrassia has since been reassigned to work with the Department of Homeland Security, a White House official familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Trump was reelected in November after promising to rid the Justice Department of what he alleged was political bias tainting federal law enforcement. Bondi has echoed that rhetoric, issuing a directive within hours of taking office to establish a “Weaponization Working Group” that she said would review all of the “politicized” investigations previously targeting Trump.
According to Ingrassia’s LinkedIn page, he became “President Trump’s White House Liaison for DOJ” in January. In private, to White House colleagues, he described himself as Trump’s “eyes and ears” at the Justice Department, with significant authority to help interview and select candidates for senior and lower-level positions, sources said.
Soon after the White House announced Ingrassia’s appointment, Ingrassia began occupying an office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, in an area typically reserved for the most senior staff in the attorney general’s office, according to sources.
But in the wake of Ingrassia’s growing clashes with Mizelle, Mizelle took steps to have Ingrassia removed from the Justice Department and assigned to another agency — a move that irritated some senior White House officials, sources said. Ingrassia complained to associates earlier this month that he had been locked out of his Justice Department devices, said sources.
He is now serving as a liaison to DHS, helping with staffing there, the White House official told ABC News. Ingrassia did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News, but another White House official said ABC News’ reporting on this matter is “riddled with falsehoods,” without indicating specifically what information they believe is false.
“Everyone is working as one unified team to staff the DOJ with patriots who are committed to Making America Safe Again,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.
Infighting became almost commonplace during Trump’s first term, with one former Trump aide even titling his 2019 memoir about that administration, “Team of Vipers.”
Recently, Ingrassia told colleagues that finding candidates for Justice Department roles who are loyal to Trump is a top priority for him, and he privately claimed that even rank-and-file career prosecutors within the department are corrupt, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia insisted to colleagues that anyone who worked under the Biden administration’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, or under attorney general Bill Barr during Trump’s first administration, should be presumed as unqualified to work for Trump’s new administration, sources said.
If taken literally and broadly, that could implicate nearly every current employee of the Justice Department.
Sources said Mizelle resisted Ingrassia’s hard-line approach, leading Ingrassia to accuse Mizelle of disrespecting him and improperly making unilateral personnel decisions, sources said.
Among the candidates that sources said Ingrassia has been trying to place within the Justice Department is attorney John Pierce, who represented many of the defendants who were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by Trump’s recent executive order related to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Ingrassia pushed for Pierce to take over the office within the Justice Department that helps the White House vet pardon requests, the sources said.
In his first several weeks as Justice Department’s chief of staff, Mizelle himself has played a public role in promoting the Trump administration’s agenda. When Bondi held her first press conference two weeks ago to announce a civil lawsuit against state leaders in New York for their immigration policies that she said value “illegal aliens over American citizens,” Mizelle stood on stage behind her and helped answer a question from a reporter.
On Friday, Mizelle filed a publicly-released complaint with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, accusing a federal judge of “hostile and egregious misconduct” in his handling of a case challenging Trump’s recent efforts to limit or ban transgender service members. The judge has not yet responded to the complaint.
Ingrassia, before joining the Trump administration last month, led communications efforts for a nonprofit legal organization that promotes itself as “the answer to the useless and radically leftist American Civil Liberties Union,” and he was a writer for the right-wing website Gateway Pundit.
Trump was known to repost some of Ingrassia’s pro-Trump stories on social media, sources said.
Ingrassia graduated from Cornell Law School in May 2022, less than three years ago, according to his LinkedIn page. For several months in 2023, he worked as a law clerk and summer associate at the New York-based McBride Law Firm, which online promotes its work fighting “the Department of Justice’s malicious prosecution and horrific treatment of January 6th Detainees.”
Between 2021 and 2023, Ingrassia also worked for the law firm led by New York attorney Marc Kasowitz, who was previously a longtime personal attorney for Trump and represented him in the government’s investigations of alleged ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.
In January, after becoming the White House liaison to the Justice Department, he wrote on social media that the Trump administration has “a mandate from the American people [to] rebuild trust and confidence in our justice system by realigning it with its Constitutional prerogative.”
“The era of WEAPONIZED JUSTICE ends TODAY,” he wrote. “GOD BLESS AMERICA AND MAGA.”
During her confirmation hearing, Bondi assured senators that she would “not politicize” her office.
“I will not target people simply because of their political affiliation. Justice will be administered evenhandedly throughout this country,” she vowed.
