Hair dye trickling: Giuliani’s presser subject of ridicule
WASHINGTON: With hair dye streaming down his cheeks and Donald Trump watching on television, the American president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani unleashed eyebrow-raising claims on Thursday that George Soros, China and a dead Venezuelan dictator conspired with Democratic “crooks” to hand the US election to Joe Biden.
In an extraordinary 90-minute press conference at the Republican National Committee in Washington, DC, Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team left no doubt they were refusing to acknowledge President-elect Biden’s win, arguing instead that a broad “national conspiracy” to deny Trump re-election was underway.
Giuliani opened with a frontal attack on “corrupt” Democratic-led cities like Detroit he accused of purposely flipping thousands of votes to Biden, spoke of “a plan from a centralised place to execute” voter fraud, and warned of an “iron curtain of censorship” denying the American people facts about the election.
Then it turned bizarre. “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?” asked Giuliani, who proceeded to deliver a Joe Pesci impersonation, copying the actor’s persona from the hit 1992 movie.
“How many fingers do I got up?” he groaned, referring to how far away election monitors were kept from the ballotcounting in swing states. Patting his beading brow with a handkerchief, and with sweat mixed with hair dye dripping down from his temples, Giuliani’s attacks veered towards the outlandish.
“You should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany, and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of (Hugo) Chavez and (Nicolas) Maduro,” Giuliani told reporters.
The company in question is elections software firm Smartmatic, founded in 2000 in Florida by two men born in Venezuela. “My goodness. What do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?” Giuliani said.
Accusing Biden’s aides of orchestrating alleged fraud, Giuliani asserted, “They made significant mistakes, like all crooks do, and we caught them.”
Chris Krebs, fired this week by Trump as head of cybersecurity, later tweeted, “That press conference was the most dangerous 1 hour, 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”