Rudy Giuliani is about to find out the exact pricetag for destroying two innocent people's lives. And it could be as high as tens of millions of dollars. A jury may decide that Giuliani owes the people he defamed as much as $47 million -- and that's before they get around to assessing emotional and punitive damages on top of the base award. And this is just the first lawsuit Giuliani faces for his serial lying about the 2020 election. No matter what the jury settles on as a punishment for Giuliani, it may wind up being small potatoes if the voting machine company Dominion wins its own defamation lawsuit against Rudy -- because they're suing him for a cool $1.3 billion.

Donald Trump started it all, of course, with his Big Lie. Somehow, in some nefarious fashion, the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" against Trump and "stolen" from him. No evidence was ever produced to back these claims up, other than tinfoil-hatted delusions and conspiracy theories. Trump's legal team -- with Rudy in a very prominent position -- launched over 60 lawsuits. They lost over 60 lawsuits. Because they had no evidence.

But Rudy wasn't just filing court cases at the time, he was also working to manipulate state legislatures into overturning the state's votes and just (falsely) declaring that Trump had won. None did so, because Rudy just didn't have any evidentiary leg to stand on. He had conspiracy theories instead. And one of them involved two innocent elections workers in Georgia, a mother and daughter.

Rudy testified to a Georgia senate committee that footage of the elections workers on the night of the election was somehow evidence of voter fraud on a massive scale. This was not true and was soon contradicted by a deep-dive investigation by the Georgia elections officials, who released the full and unedited video Rudy was pushing. It plainly showed the truth of the matter -- the two women were just doing their jobs, and all the votes were properly handled and counted. This didn't stop Rudy (and, later, Trump on his infamous "find 11,780 votes" telephone call to the top Georgia Republicans) from flat-out lying about what the video showed. Giuliani pointed to one woman handing something small to the other woman and asserted she was "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine." The two women are Black, it is worth pointing out.

The reality of the situation was that one woman passed another "a ginger mint." But Rudy didn't care:

Giuliani claimed it was "obvious to anyone who's a criminal investigator or prosecutor, they are engaged in surreptitious illegal activity", and said the women's places of work and homes "should have been searched for evidence" of voter fraud.

Rudy Giuliani lied about two women -- by accusing them of committing serious crimes -- to a state legislative committee in an effort to get them to overturn the will of the people of Georgia. Criminal charges have now been filed in the state against Giuliani for this and all his other efforts to steal an election.

The current case is a civil one, not criminal. The two maligned women sued Rudy for defamation, because after Giuliani started spreading the baseless rumor that they were some sort of election fraud masterminds, their lives were utterly destroyed. They suffered death threats and racist harassment, they had to leave their jobs, they became haunted by the dangerous rage that Giuliani and Trump had created among Trump's loyal followers. All because Rudy latched onto a selectively-edited video and named them as the ones primarily responsible for Trump losing Georgia.

Rudy has already lost his case. The court entered a summary judgment after Rudy refused to turn over documents and actually admitted in a court filing that he had made false statements about the two women. The only thing that is in question at this point is how much Rudy's going to have to pay for his defamation.

Giuliani doesn't seem to be fully aware of how bad his position is, however. Yesterday, when he was leaving the courtroom, he addressed the media and doubled down on his defamatory remarks: "Everything I said about them is true.... Of course I don't regret it.... I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes." When one of the reporters said there was no proof of any of this, Rudy shot back: "Oh, you're damn right there is. Stay tuned."

It has been over three years since the 2020 presidential election, and no proof of any massive voter fraud has ever been uncovered, because such proof does not actually exist. Rudy isn't the only one who still insists that sooner or later such proof will be revealed (see: Mike Lindell, the "pillow guy"), but he is the first one who is going to be forced to pay for his false claims about these two innocent women.

In fact, the two women would be entirely justified if they finished this trial and then immediately filed another defamation lawsuit against Giuliani, just for what he publicly said yesterday. Because they'd win that one too.

Rudy Giuliani destroyed his own political legacy (such as it was) when he first decided to back Donald Trump. His speech to the Republican National Convention in support of Trump was horrifying to behold, as Rudy became completely unhinged right in front of America. Since then, he's become a caricature of himself -- a living, walking cartoon. When the newspapers run his obituary some day, they'll all prominently feature two photos of Rudy -- one of his hair dye leaking down his cheek at a press conference, the other of him giving a different conspiracy-riddled press conference, this one in front of "Four Seasons Total Landscaping" (conveniently located just down the block from the local sex shop). That's how Rudy will be remembered.

One can only hope that after the current jury decides how much Rudy owes the two women whose lives he destroyed, that Rudy will lose all his subsequent court cases as well. He will be forced into bankruptcy and may even be forced into a prison cell. These are the consequences of his blind support of Donald Trump, and Rudy Giuliani will deserve every bit of it. He certainly proved that yesterday. He is deep in a hole he dug himself and to solve everything he picked up a shovel and started digging even deeper. He's already lost his case of defamation, so obviously the smart thing to do was to repeat the defamation to the national news cameras.

As I said, Rudy deserves every bit of what's about to happen to him.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant