A year ago, Rudy Giuliani would have given his second cousin to get just a few minutes of airtime on Fox News. On Thursday night, he decided to trash the cable news network hand that once fed him — or at least allowed him to feed his 2020 election conspiracy lies to millions of people, and ultimately paid the price ($787 million, to be precise).
Clearly, Newsmax — which has already issued on-air apologies for giving a platform to Jan. 6th conspiracies — must have missed the memo about how much money Rupert Murdoch is set to hand over to Dominion Voting Systems following the settlement of their defamation suit. Or they simply don’t care. Because on Thursday night, Newsmax host Eric Bolling let Rudy ramble about Fox News, Tucker Carlson, and the former New York City Mayor’s unhinged (and pro-Trump) January 6th conspiracy theories.
As The Daily Beast reports, Bolling welcomed Giuliani onto the network, presumably to talk about Fox going “woke” (if the chyron is to be believed). While both men agreed that Fox News made a huge mistake by dumping Tucker, Rudy found a totally inelegant way to somehow make Carlson’s firing about Trump.
“Everything we’re going to see now for the next year and a half can all be answered by: They don’t want Trump back,” Giuliani predicted… then found a way to bring it all back to the Capitol insurrection:
“It wasn’t even so much that Tucker was that much for Trump. He had become that way. Really, he was laying out the circumstances that show how incredibly crooked they are. I mean, they manipulated Jan. 6. They were more than willing to create the fiction of an American insurrection in order to get rid of Donald Trump. For that, you probably should be thrown out of the country.”
Giuliani — who is also being sued by Dominion for $1.3 billion for pushing the Big Lie in the lead-up to the deadly events of January 6, 2021 — then also had the audacity to claim that NO ONE DIED as a result of the Capitol riots. The Daily Beast’s William Vaillancourt writes:
“The reality is they’re talking about six people dead. Nobody’s dead,” said Giuliani, similar to how Donald Trump has also tried to minimize the death toll. Four people in the crowd of Trump supporters died on Jan. 6, and five police officers who had been at the Capitol later died, four by suicide and one from a series of strokes.
“They’re talking about an insurrection, except an insurrection without a single gun and without a single person being charged with insurrection after four hundred charges,” continued Giuliani, even though it was just last week that rioter Chris Alberts told a Washington, D.C., jury that he had been armed with 25 rounds of ammunition. Guy Reffitt, another rioter sentenced last year to over seven years in prison, was also carrying a handgun.
Giuliani: They were more than willing to create the fiction of an American insurrection.. For that you probably should be thrown out of the country. They’re talking about six people dead. Nobody’s dead.. An insurrection without a single gun pic.twitter.com/BtpQshc3mW
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 28, 2023
Rather than regain control of the conversation, Bolling just let Rudy go — a move that has clearly gotten other networks into serious trouble in the past. Nor did the host even push back on any of Giuliani’s baseless claims. Instead, he simply claimed, “I’m old enough to remember when Fox used to embrace that and… allow the host to dig into the stories.”
Bolling, it should be noted, was a part of the Fox News family from 2008 to 2017 — until he was given the boot following a series of sexual misconduct allegations.
(Via The Daily Beast)