Two Georgia election workers sue Rudy Giuliani and One America News

Two Georgia election workers have sued former president Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and right-wing news network One America News.

Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss filed the lawsuit on Thursday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia and said that because of both defendants, the two, who are mother and daughter, “have become the objects of vitriol, threats, and harassment.”

“They found themselves in this unenviable position not based on anything they did, but instead because of a campaign of malicious lies designed to accuse them of interfering with a fair and impartial election, which is precisely what each of them swore an oath to protect,” the lawsuit said.

Ms Freeman and Ms Moss specifically cited OAN owners Robert and Charles Herring as well as reporter Chanel Rion alongside Mr Giulian,i and said they are responsible for assassinating their character. Specifically, the suit alleges that the network engaged in a “concerted effort” to accuse Ms Freeman and Ms Moss of committing ballot fraud to steal the 2020 presidential election despite knowing the claims were not true.

“With knowledge that the claims against Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were not based in fact, OAN has spent the past year accusing them of engaging in the illegal act of election fraud, along with other false allegations. As part of that campaign, OAN repeatedly turned to Giuliani, a member of former President Trump’s campaign team and one of the central orchestrators of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged,” the suit said.

Ms Freeman worked as a temporary election worker with Fulton County’s Registration and Elections Department while Ms Moss supervised the county’s ballot operation during the election.

The lawsuit noted how the Trump campaign retweeted video footage from OAN that allegedly showed that election workers illegally instructed observers to leave and counted election ballots without proper observation. These claims were promptly refuted by state Voting Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling and Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. But OAN continued to repeat the claims, as did Mr Giuliani on his podcast.

“In sum, Defendants were aware of the numerous statements by Georgia officials disproving the portrayal of misconduct that had been advanced by the Trump campaign, and they also knew that multiple fact-checking organizations had confirmed the facts as presented by the Georgia officials,” the suit alleges.

The lawsuit claims defamation against all the defendants in the suit, as well as infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy for alleged torts against all defendants. Lastly, the suit accuse OAN and Mr Giuliani of aiding and abetting “all torts against all defendants.”

Mr Giuliani was previously suspended from practicing law in both New York and Washington after he spread “demonstrably false and misleading statements” that “directly” inflamed the riot on January 6.