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Tribune News Service
Tribune News Service
National
Dave Goldiner

Rudy Giuliani says Diet Pepsi is his favorite drink after former Trump aides testified he was drunk on election night

Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday deleted tweets insisting he was not drunk at the White House on Election Night and bitterly attacking fellow Trump aides who said he was.

“I REFUSED all alcohol that evening,” Giuliani tweeted. “My favorite drink..Diet Pepsi.”

He deleted the tweet hours later without any explanation.

The ex-mayor, who has been known to enjoy a drink or two, blasted senior Trump adviser Jason Miller and Bill Stepien over their account of his condition as the votes rolled in.

He accused them of retaliating against him for convincing Trump to claim victory and cry fraud even as it became increasingly obvious that the president was not going to win reelection.

“I am disgusted and outraged at the out right lie by Jason Miller and Bill Steppien,” Giuliani wrote in the now deleted tweet, misspelling the last name of Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. “I was upset that they were not prepared for the massive cheating (as well as other lawyers around the President).”

Giuliani even accused Miller and Stepien of being bribed to make false claims about his drinking.

“Are they being paid to lie?” he asked.

He deleted that tweet too.

The mayor angrily agreed with a Twitter user who branded the pair “quislings,” or traitors, to Trump and retweeted a 2018 story about Miller allegedly slipping his pregnant girlfriend a pill designed to induce an abortion.

He left those posts up.

The videotaped testimony of Miller and Stepien about Giuliani’s actions on Election Night was aired Monday at the second hearing of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The pair made the claims under oath. Giuliani says he was not asked if he was drinking on election night when he gave sworn testimony of his own to the panel.

Miller and Stepien both told the committee that they met with Giuliani before the mayor spoke to Trump in his White House residence on election night.

“The mayor was definitely intoxicated,” Miller said in previously taped testimony to the committee. “I’m not sure about his level of intoxication when he talked to the president.”

Giuliani told Trump to “just say we won” because the president was leading President Biden in some battleground states on election night, before hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were counted.

Miller and Stepien said they urged Trump to hold off from declaring victory because they knew there would be large numbers of ballots still to be counted.

But Trump liked Giuliani’s tipsy game plan better. He delivered a fiery speech declaring himself the winner, launching the "big lie" campaign that culminated with the Jan. 6 attack.

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