Giuliani is silent on $150m defamation award but noisy on election lies in book

In a new book, Rudy Giuliani claims his extensive legal problems and those of Donald Trump are the results of persecution by “a fascist regime” run by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – all while avoiding mention of a $150m defamation award against him won by two Georgia elections workers and repeating the lies about electoral fraud which saw him lose law licenses in New York and Washington DC.

Giuliani’s book also ignores the widely reported autocratic tendencies of Trump, which have triggered numerous warnings, including from former staffers, that he is a fascist in waiting, should he return to the White House.

The New York mayor turned Trump lawyer even avoids mention of fascistic sympathies in his own family, specifically those harbored by his mother, whose own sister said she “liked Mussolini”, the dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943.

Giuliani’s book, The Biden Crime Family: The Blueprint for their Prosecution, is released in the US on Tuesday. The book’s title betrays the reason for its delayed release – it is largely a propagandistic election-season attack on Biden, the president who stepped aside in July, amid concern that at 81 he was too old for a second term, ceding the Democratic nomination to Harris, his vice-president.

Giuliani’s book is finally released a week from election day but even he may not have foreseen it landing amid explosive debate over whether Trump is a fascist himself.

Mark Milley, formerly the chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, and John Kelly, another retired general who was Trump’s second White House chief of staff, have said Trump deserves the label.

Speaking to the reporter Bob Woodward, Milley said Trump was “fascist to the core”. Last week, Vice-President Harris said: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, ‘certainly falls into the general definition of fascists’, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”

On Sunday, outside a Madison Square Garden Trump event many observers compared to a Nazi rally at the same New York venue in 1939, Giuliani told reporters Trump was “the furthest from a fascist imaginable”.

On the page, Giuliani’s case against Biden is undercut by omission of inconvenient details – as in the passage in which he complains of persecution by a “fascist regime”.

“They … have sued me, sent me to bankruptcy court, and tried to force me to sell my homes,” Giuliani writes – not mentioning that such dire financial straits are the result of being ordered to pay around $150m for defaming Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the Georgia elections workers, while pushing Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election. This week, Giuliani was ordered to give the women control of his New York apartment, his Mercedes-Benz, several luxury watches and other assets.

Giuliani was disbarred in Washington DC and New York. Claiming such moves were politically motivated, he nonsensically claims: “I have never been disciplined by the bar association and my record is unblemished.” His legal troubles, he insists, are the result of being “but one” political opponent of Biden and Harris.

“They’ve indicted and attempted to disbar legal friends and colleagues like John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark for their work on trying to correct the stolen election results,” Giuliani writes, of disgraced lawyers who also worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“Others, like [Trump advisers] Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, actually had to serve four months in federal prisons for misdemeanor of contempt of Congress – while their cases were on appeal!”

Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist, was released from prison in Connecticut on Tuesday. He provides a short introduction for Giuliani’s book.

Giuliani also cites court cases involving “a Florida social media influencer … arrested by eight FBI and other law enforcement agents for the ‘crime’ of posting memes mocking Hillary Clinton supporters on Twitter” and a “75-year-old grandmother with a medical condition sentenced to jail for two years for protesting outside an abortion center”.

“These are the actions of a fascist regime,” Giuliani writes, adding, “So is the lawfare leveled against President Donald J Trump”, in reference to 88 criminal charges, 34 having produced guilty verdicts regarding hush-money payments, the rest remaining outstanding as election day nears.

Giuliani does admit in his book to having “some criminal issues in my family background” – namely his father’s 1930s conviction and prison time for robbery, an uncle’s work as a loan shark, and a cousin who “turned out to be head of an auto-theft ring and died in a shootout with the FBI”. Such ties are well known but tellingly, in light of his accusation of “fascist” behavior by Biden and Harris, Giuliani chooses not to mention another famous family detail: his mother’s liking for Mussolini.

In 2000, the Village Voice published an examination of Giuliani’s family background by Wayne Barrett, the legendary New York investigative journalist. Entitled Thug Life, the extract from Barrett’s biography of the then New York mayor told the story of Giuliani’s criminal father, including his work as a mafia enforcer. But Barrett also described conversations around the dinner table during the second world war.

“The fact that their homeland was an Axis country did not diminish Helen Giuliani’s sense of patriotism,” Barrett wrote of the future mayor’s mother. “‘Helen was a little sticking up for the Italians, a little on the Italian side,’ recalled Anna, Rudy Giuliani’s aunt.

“‘She liked Mussolini and things like that.’”