Legal ethics questions

[ex-khobar Andy]

Giuliani is claiming that he did not have the time to verify his client's assertions about the 2020 election. From HuffPost's reporting:

Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani — who has relentlessly, baselessly railed against a rigged presidential election — admitted in a videotaped deposition that he didn’t actually verify certain claims he made about election fraud and Dominion Voting Systems because he didn’t “have the time.”

These are claims such as

In the sworn deposition from August, Giuliani recalled: “We had a report that the heads of Dominion and Smartmatic ... went down to Venezuela for a get-to-know meeting with [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro so they could demonstrate to Maduro the kind of vote fixing they did for [former President Hugo] Chávez.”

Three questions. Bear in mind that I dislike Guiliani almost as much as I dislike his boss; but I like the idea of justice more.

1) Is "We had a report that . . ." sufficient? I am quite willing to believe that he did actually have a report to that effect so his statement was not actually a lie.

2) An attorney cannot verify everything. "My client was nowhere near the scene of the crime that night: he was in bed with his wife 50 miles away" may be impossible for the attorney to verify: it's up to the cops to find evidence (gas station receipts, CCTV footage, witnesses) to prove otherwise. If they do find that in fact his client's prints were all over the place, is the attorney guilty of making shit up? In terms of legal ethics, is there a difference between "My client was nowhere near . . . " and "My client tells me that he was nowhere near . . "?

3) It's probably not true that Trump told him about Maduro and Chavez. It would astonish me if Trumo had any idea who Maduro is and who Chavez was. So Guiliani was more in the role of an investigator - assembling evidence, howsoever and from whomsoever obtained - to make his client's case. Do ethical considerations change if the role is different? So if "My client was nowhere near . . ." is OK because that's what his client told him, is it OK if this was not what his client told him but the result of his (the attorney's) shoddy or even hallucinatory investigation?

In other words, much as I would like to see him locked up - with a few years at Riker's to start with - for the rest of his unnatural life, does he have a case?

[Scooter]

I think you are framing the discussion incorrectly by saying that it is about legal ethics. This wasn't the case of a lawyer representing his client in court, making statements which might be considered privileged on that basis. He made those claims out in public to broadcast media, and he had an obligation to determine that there was some factual basis to support them.

Otherwise, any news outlet could say, "well, we had a source who told us that so-and-so embezzled millions of dollars from his company, but it was a fast moving story so we didn't have a chance to verify that before we published it," and would never have to face a defamation claim as a result. Sorry, not how it works.