Conspiracy theorist and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, continued to serve up a series of falsehoods and dubious claims about the 2020 presidential election and about what happened on Jan. 6, baselessly claiming that Trump’s enemies were responsible for the planning the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Appearing on pardoned former Donald Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Giuliani laid out what he thought was Trump’s best strategy going into his impending impeachment trial in the Senate next month.
“If the case is mainly that he caused this—he caused the insurrection—then the defense is going to have to show that this thing was planned and that a lot of the people involved in the planning—Antifa, and then even some right wing groups who are enemies of his—and that they were doing it in order to hurt him. Including some right-wing groups that operate for the Lincoln Project or have been working with the Lincoln Project at various times,” Giuliani said.
Bannon then interjected, asking what groups Giuliani was suggesting were working with the group.
“One of the people who organized this is well known to have worked with the Lincoln Project in the past. One of the people involved brought in right-wing groups that opposed Trump, and he brought them in specifically to blow this thing up,” Giuliani responded. “He had the same motivation the Antifa people had. So it isn’t as if all these right-wing groups were all pro-Trump. And the biggest problems—violent problems—were caused by Antifa. That’s where the shooting took place. That was surrounded by all Antifa people. So how can [Trump] be held responsible for a whole thing that’s planned days before he’s going to speak that has a mixture of people that hate him and people that support him.”
Giuliani’s specific claim about the Ashli Babbitt shooting, the ardent Trump supporter and QAnon believer who was shot and killed by police while trying to vault through a broken window inside the Capitol, also appears to be spun entirely out of whole cloth. One of the people who was standing next to Babbitt when she was shot, David Charles Mish, Jr, was also an avid supporter of the former president. Court documents show that Mish was among those standing next to Babbitt when she was killed. Several other Trump supporters were identified as being within several feet of Babbitt when she was shot, including Christopher Ray Grider and Chad Barrett Jones.
And to be clear, there has been no evidence even remotely supporting any of Giuliani’s claims regarding the Lincoln Project or Antifa being responsible for orchestrating the Capitol riots. There is, however, copious amounts of evidence showing that Trump’s supporters, believing the lie that election was stolen, stormed the Capitol. The Justice Department has charged at least 150 people for their involvement in the insurrection, nearly all of whom were unapologetic supporters of the president.
When Bannon pressed Giuliani to reveal the name of the person associated with the Lincoln Project responsible for organizing the riots he said he couldn’t reveal that information “because we have that from anonymous sources,” but said “he worked in the past for [Mitt] Romney.”
The Lincoln Project did not respond to an inquiry from Law&Crime about Giuliani’s claims.
[image via YouTube screengrab]
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