‘You are a jackass’: video of Rudy Giuliani rant at Israel parade goes viral

With a reporter’s cellphone recording him, Donald Trump’s sometime lawyer Rudy Giuliani hurled profanities at a pro-Israel parade attender in New York City and said, “You are probably as demented as Biden.”

The video of the former New York mayor’s verbal clash had racked up more than 440,000 views on Monday morning, just three days after he reportedly met for hours with the US House committee investigating the deadly Capitol riots on 6 January 2021.

Giuliani in Sunday’s footage was waving an Israeli flag – behind the current New York mayor, Eric Adams – when he walked over to barricades on his right and yelled, “You are jackass,” and, “you are a brainwashed asshole,” at one attender at least. Someone who shouted back at Giuliani identified as a Democrat, according to the person who recorded the clip, Jacob Kornbluh, a political reporter at Jewish news source the Forward.

“You are probably as demented as Biden,” Giuliani said at one point in a reference to the man who defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Giuliani also referred to his seven years as mayor of New York beginning in 1994, saying, “I reduced crime, you jackass!”

The exchange at the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Celebrate Israel Parade has drawn ridicule for Giuliani from some quarters as the committee investigating the Capitol attack prepares to stage a half-dozen public hearings in June which will seek to illustrate how Trump and some allies broke the law while trying to keep Trump as president despite his loss to Joe Biden in 2020.

Giuliani has been accused of being at the forefront of a plot to have Trump’s vice-president at the time, Mike Pence, stop the certification of Biden’s win, with which Pence didn’t go along. He also allegedly coordinated an illegal attempt to have legislatures certify slates of pro-Trump electors in states that had actually been won by Biden.

Both schemes were unlawful, the committee investigating the Capitol attack has said in court records.

According to a draft schedule, the public hearings are set to occur over a 12-day period in June, with two being held in prime time.