Rudy Giuliani filed a defamation lawsuit against President Joe Biden on Wednesday in New Hampshire, claiming Biden falsely referred to him as a "Russian pawn" during a 2020 presidential debate.
The 16-page complaint, filed in Merrimack Superior Court in Concord, names Biden and his various presidential campaign committees as defendants.
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In a press conference held outside the courthouse Wednesday morning, Giuliani said Biden's comments cost him a good deal of his law practice, his consulting business and got him "close to bankruptcy."
"Being called a Russian pawn and being called by the leading candidate of the Democratic Party a facilitator of Russian disinformation is an extraordinarily damaging thing," he said. "That is 100%, 1,000% untrue."
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Giuliani's New Hampshire attorney, former House Speaker Bill O'Brien, said the suit was filed in New Hampshire because the state's statute of limitations allows the recovery of damages "wherever and in whatever jurisdiction the statements were distributed or published."
The lawsuit comes a week after Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, sued Giuliani and another attorney, saying the two wrongly accessed and shared his personal data after obtaining it from the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop.
That suit was the latest in a new strategy by Hunter Biden to strike back against Republican allies of Donald Trump, who have traded and passed around his private data including purported emails and embarrassing images in their effort to discredit his father.
Giuliani delivered information allegedly gleaned from Biden's laptop to the New York Post, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., in October 2020, a month before the election between Trump and Joe Biden.
The Post then published a story based on that data, which suggested that President Biden may have attended a meeting with a representative of a Ukrainian company that employed Hunter.
