Giuliani Lashes Out as Biden Camp Demands He Be Dumped From TV
In one of four followup tweets Giuliani said the Bidens “have played the influence game for years.”
(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden’s campaign implored the U.S. media on Sunday to stop booking Rudy Giuliani, who responded on Twitter that the former vice president was arrogant and entitled in “demanding” to silence him.
Frequent appearances on TV by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer are “increasingly unhinged” and peppered with “desperate lies” about Biden and his son, according to a letter sent to various news outlets by Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield of Biden for President.
“We write to demand that in service to the facts, you no longer book Rudy Giuliani, a surrogate for Donald Trump who has demonstrated that he will knowingly and willingly lie in order to advance his own narrative,” they said in the letter.
Dunn and Bedingfield said comments made by Giuliani about the work the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, and suggestions that Biden had improperly intervened in the affairs of Ukraine to protect his son, were “baseless.”
“Think of the Biden arrogance and entitlement to protection,” Giuliani responded in a tweet Sunday evening. “They know I have incriminating facts.”
In one of four followup tweets Giuliani said the Bidens “have played the influence game for years.”
Democrats in Congress are moving ahead with an inquiry into Trump’s attempt to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election by pressuring Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on a July 25 phone call, according to a rough transcript released Wednesday.
Giuliani, 75, a former mayor of New York City, spent months in back-channel outreach to Ukraine’s government in an effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens. The whistle-blower complaint painted Giuliani as operating outside diplomatic channels, at times actively undercutting U.S. envoys.
As the impeachment inquiry ramps up, Giuliani and other Republicans have attempted to flip the narrative away from Trump and onto discredited claims of wrongdoing by Biden and his son, a lobbyist who served for years on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine.
The elder Biden has been the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination since jumping into the race, in large part because he’s seen as the most electable candidate against Trump. The regular drumbeat of commentary and confusion about Trump and Ukraine may dent Biden’s support.
Giuliani made three television appearances on Sunday alone, on ABC, CBS and Fox, spots that Biden’s campaign said were riddled with “completely baseless suggestions” about Hunter Biden’s work in China as well as Ukraine.
“Giuliani is not a public official, and holds no public office that would entitle him to opine on the nation’s airwaves,” the Biden campaign wrote. “The decision to legitimize his increasingly outlandish and unhinged charges and behavior -- calling it ‘news’ -- rests solely with you.”
The letter marked an escalation from Biden’s campaign. The former vice president, at a news conference in Delaware on Tuesday, dismissed allegations of about wrongdoing in Ukraine as a “smear.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net;Tyler Pager in Washington at tpager1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ian Fisher, Linus Chua
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