Rudy Giuliani was pretty incensed on his radio show Thursday after a disclaimer was added to the show during a commercial break.
WABC Radio inserted in the following statement before cutting back to Giuliani’s show: “The views, assumptions and opinions expressed by former U.S. Attorney, former attorney to the President of the United States and New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, his guests and callers on the program are strictly their own, and do not necessarily represent the opinions, beliefs or policies of WABC Radio, its owner Red Apple Group and other WABC hosts or our advertisers.”
“I would have thought they would have told me about that before just doing what they just did,” Giuliani said after he came back on air. “Rather insulting.”
Giuliani then tried to make the disclaimer some sort of free speech issue. “Gives you a sense of how far this free speech thing has gone. And how they frighten everybody. I mean, we’re in America, we’re not in East Germany. They got to warn you about me? I’m going to have to give that a lot of consideration. I also think putting it on without telling me, not the right thing to do. Not the right thing to do at all.”
Naturally, he said this during this show, which absolutely had not been canceled, which was still being aired and which he was still allowed to speak on.
Throughout the rest of his show, Giuliani continued to advance the same old lies and false claims about 2020 election fraud he’s been making since last year. And even some of his listeners seem to have grown tired of it, as evidenced by a caller who asked Giuliani if he felt “somewhat guilty about spreading a lot of unproven conspiracy theories to folks who may not have the ability or critical thinking skills” and if maybe Giuliani was “taking advantage of the gullible.”
Giuliani replied by repeating the false claims. “I know that they stole 30,000 votes in Georgia, I have the tape of it,” and proceeded to then argue with the caller that Biden stole the election and that most of the votes were “illegal.” None of those things are true.
It’s unclear why the disclaimer was added, but it might be to insulate the radio from potential legal exposure. In recent weeks right wing media outlets have been threatened with lawsuits from voting machine makers Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
On Thursday Smartmatic sued Giuliani and Fox News for $2.7 billion for defamation and spreading lies that their machines were involved in tampering with the 2020 election results. Giulani is also currently facing a $1.3 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion.
Giuliani is no stranger to public gaffes. Just in the final two three months of 2020, he was made a laughingstock by Sacha Baron Cohen in “Borat 2,” he leaked what appeared to be hair dye all over his face during a press conference, he kept calling the wrong numbers while trying to convince senators to overthrow the 2020 election, and also butt-dialed an NBC News reporter.
Listen to the clip of the Giulani’s show from Mediaite here.