OOZY GIULIANI
Rudy melts down, literally, in bizarre sweat-dripped rant over election fraud
What a hot mess.
Rudy Giuliani sweated so much during a press conference Thursday that streaks of what appeared to be dark hair dye streamed down his cheeks, making for a bizarre juxtaposition as the ex-mayor insisted without evidence that Democrats stole the election from President Trump.
Giuliani, who’s spearheading the Trump campaign’s bumbling legal battle to overturn Joe Biden’s election, did not appear to notice the black liquid dripping down from his sideburns, though he kept dabbing pearls of sweat from his face with a napkin.
It’s unclear what caused Giuliani’s profuse perspiration. Four other Trump campaign attorneys present for the press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington did not appear clammy.
Sweating aside, Giuliani’s press conference was called to amplify Trump’s completely unfounded claim that Democratic officials used mail-in ballots to rig the Nov. 3 election against him.
“This is real! It is not made up!” Giuliani, who served as a federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s, shouted at reporters in the room, as the black liquid smeared his face. “There is nobody here that engages in fantasy. I have tried a hundred cases. I prosecuted some of the most dangerous criminals in the world. I know crimes. I can smell them.”
Sidney Powell, one of Giuliani’s fellow Trump attorneys, piled on by falsely claiming Trump won the election “by a landslide.” She also took the conspiracy theory-mongering a step further than Giuliani.
Biden’s decisive victory, Powell claimed, was facilitated by “communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China,” with operatives from the countries hacking into voting machines used in some states.
There’s not a shred of evidence for any of Powell’s outlandish claims.
In fact, election officials from both parties in all 50 states have asserted that the Nov. 3 contest was remarkably secure, and even the Trump administration’s own top cybersecurity official, Chris Krebs, said there were no irregularities or fraud. Trump fired Krebs this week in retaliation.
Despite the total lack of evidence, Trump’s team of lawyers have pushed ahead with filing a flurry of long-shot lawsuits alleging that an insidious voter fraud plot carried Biden to victory and that millions of ballots should be thrown out as a result.
Giuliani brought the matter to a new low Thursday as he accused Biden personally of committing crimes.
“He doesn’t get asked questions about all the evidence of the crimes that he committed,” Giuliani said without explaining what crimes Biden supposedly committed.
“What’s going on in this country is horrible,” he added.
One component of the Trump campaign’s dubious web of accusations involve the idea that Republican election watchers weren’t allowed to stand close enough to poll workers in Pennsylvania and other states.
Giuliani tried to drive home that point by referencing a scene from the 1992 movie “My Cousin Vinny,” which he called “one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn.”
“These people were further away than ‘ My Cousin Vinny’ was,” the Brooklyn-born Giuliani said of the poll watchers. “They couldn’t see a thing!”
Most of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have been thrown out by judges who note that the wild assertions of voter fraud are baseless.
On Thursday, a judge in Georgia dismissed a Trump campaign-backed lawsuit seeking to block certification of election results in the state, which remains the last one in the country to remain outstanding, though Biden is in the lead. A few hours before that ruling, the Trump campaign withdrew a similar lawsuit in Michigan, where Biden won by more than 100,000 votes.
Still, Giuliani vowed to keep filing more lawsuits.
“We’re about to file a major lawsuit in Georgia. That will be filed probably tomorrow,” he said.
The ex-mayor also lashed out at the FBI after a reporter asked why the agency isn’t getting involved if election crimes are as rampant as the Trump campaign claims.
“I don’t know where the FBI has been for the last three years,” he said. “What do we have to do to get the FBI to wake up? Maybe we need a new agency to protect us.”
Trump, who has barely been seen in public since losing the election, cheered on his lawyers from the White House.
“Lawyers now on,” he tweeted as the nearly two-hour-long press conference got underway. “An open and shut case of voter fraud. Massive numbers!”
Twitter quickly labeled the Trump tweet as “disputed.”
Giuliani repeatedly insisted in the press conference that the campaign’s failed lawsuits are packed with evidence of Democratic voter fraud.
“All you’ve got to do to find out if I’m misleading you at all is to look at the lawsuits,” he said.
However, Giuliani sang a different tune when pressed under oath by a federal Pennsylvania judge earlier this week on the specifics of one of the campaign’s fraud-claiming lawsuits.
“This is not a fraud case,” Giuliani admitted during a Tuesday hearing in that suit.
Trump’s refusal to concede is beginning to have dire consequences.
Biden said this week that he’s concerned his administration will be behind the ball on shipping doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine because Trump has blocked the incoming president’s transition team from accessing federal distribution plans.
Trump is also blocking Biden from receiving the top-secret intelligence briefings that presidents-elect are supposed to get in order to be up to speed on threats facing the nation before taking office.
Speaking in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday afternoon, Biden said history won’t be kind to Trump. “He will go down in history as being one of the most irresponsible presidents in American history,” he said.
While Trump keeps up his evidence-free fight for reelection, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spiral out of control, with the U.S. death toll surging past 250,000 this week.
Giuliani and his colleagues paid the pandemic no mind during their press conference, with none of them wearing masks.
Trump critics were aghast by Giuliani’s spectacle.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” tweeted Krebs, the cybersecurity official fired by Trump. “And possibly the craziest.”