Rudy Giuliani railed against Donald Trump’s historic criminal conviction on Thursday, describing the guilty verdict against his close ally as a “very sad day for America” in a post-decision livestream.
In the same video, Giuliani, the disgraced former mayor of New York City who’s currently under indictment and mired in money woes, insisted the city is historically corrupt. That’s despite the fact that he served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989 before becoming mayor.
“The simple fact is that they’ve certainly in New York, for 150 years, with a couple of exceptions — [under Fiorello] La Guardia, me, [Michael] Bloomberg — been a thoroughly corrupt city, ruled by a Democratic dictatorship,” Giuliani told his audience of nearly 9,500 viewers. “It’s no exagerration, any smart New Yorker knows it.”
Giuliani, who has served as both a campaign and a legal adviser for Trump over the years, offered no evidence as he painted the jury’s guilty verdict as part of a wider Democratic plot. On Thursday, the 12 jurors convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“You want to save the American justice system, you have to vote this demented dictator our of office,” he continued, accusing the prosecutors who brought the case of being the real “criminals” and Joe Biden of furthering a “Marxist” plot to take over the country.
Donald Trump, for his part, sounded a similar note, calling the decision a “disgrace” in a statement to The Independent.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people,” the statement continued.
After raging against the verdict, Giuliani, a former US attorney for New York, called today’s developments a “sad day” for the US justice system.
“I am dedicated to the impartial administration of justice as maybe the single most important part of our system of laws,” he said. “When it goes, we’ll no longer have a system of laws. We’ll have a system of deranged men who can decide our fatee and change the laws.”
According to officials across the country, it is actually Giuliani who has ignored the rule of law.
He has been indicted or named as an unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona for his alleged involvement in the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (He denies any wrongdoing.)
He was ordered in December to pay $148m to a pair of Georgia election workers whom he defamed after the 2020 campaign. And most recently, a group of creditors accused Giuliani of “gross mismanagement” of his finances after declaring bankruptcy late last year.
Earlier this month, the judge overseeing the case said he was “disturbed” at how little progress Mr Giuliani had made in resolving his financial issues.
