With hair dye streaming down his cheeks and US President Donald Trump watching on TV, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Thursday unleashed eyebrow-raising claims that billionaire investor George Soros, China and a dead Venezuelan leader conspired with Democratic “crooks” to steal the US presidential election.
In an extraordinary 90-minute news conference in Washington, Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team left no doubt that they were refusing to acknowledge US president-elect Joe Biden’s win, arguing 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 that he accused of purposely flipping thousands of votes to Biden, spoke of “a plan from a centralized place to execute” voter fraud and warned of an “iron curtain of censorship.”
Photo: AFP
“Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?” asked Giuliani, who proceeded to deliver his best Joe Pesci impersonation, copying the actor’s mafioso persona from the 1992 movie.
“How many fingers do I got up?” Giuliani said, apparently complaining about how far away election monitors were kept from the vote-counting in swing states like Georgia.
Patting his beading brow with a handkerchief, and with sweat mixed with hair dye dripping down from his temples, Giuliani’s attacks veered toward 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 Chavez and Maduro,” Giuliani said, referring to former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who has been dead for seven years, and the country’s current leftist President Nicolas Maduro.
The company in question is elections software firm Smartmatic, founded in 2000 by two Venezuelan-born men in Florida.
Smartmatic chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is on the board of the Open Society Foundation, which was founded by Soros, a recurring bogeyman of Republican politicians.
The company’s chairman “is a close associate and business partner of George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democratic Party, the biggest donor to Antifa — and the biggest donor of Black Lives Matter,” Giuliani said.
“My goodness. What do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?” he said.
As Giuliani repeated conspiracy theories and discussed the various “pathways to victory” for his boss, Trump reveled in the lawyer’s message as he looked on from the White House, tweeting of “an open and shut case of voter fraud.”
Trump’s claims of mass cheating have been debunked by a the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, calling the Nov. 3 election “the most secure in American history.”
That agency’s director, Chris Krebs, was fired this week by Trump. Like the president, he too was watching Giuliani’s performance.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Krebs tweeted.
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