Former New York City mayor and committed Trump ally Rudy Giuliani now claims he actually wasn’t drunk on Election Night 2020, despite testimony suggesting the opposite from Trump allies Jason Miller and Bill Stepien. Giuliani suggested the pair were being “paid to lie.”
“I am disgusted and outraged at the out right lie by Jason Miller and Bill Steppien,” Giuliani insisted in since-deleted tweets. “I was upset that they were not prepared for the massive cheating (as well as other lawyers around the President) I REFUSED all alcohol that evening. My favorite drink..Diet Pepsi… Is the false testimony from Miller and Steppien because I yelled at them? Are they being paid to lie?” There’s obviously no evidence of some kind of conspiracy to pay Miller and Stepien to lie about Rudy. Revelations from the two of them came via clips of past testimony to the January 6 committee in the House that the panel revealed during Monday proceedings. “The mayor was definitely intoxicated,” Miller said in one clip played by the committee for the public.
Miller was discussing a post-election conversation about what then-President Trump should do as election results rolled in. Miller clarified that he was unaware of the level of Rudy’s drunkenness when he separately spoke with Trump that night. At some point as Giuliani sought to speak with Donald, he was instead directed towards Stepien, who was Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, and a group including Stepien, Miller, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and then-White House official Justin Clark listened to what Giuliani had to say — although the ex-mayor was eventually able to actually speak with Trump. The post-election conversation Miller referenced might be the same one Stepien was discussing; the order of clips presented by the riot committee on Monday seems to suggest as much, although Miller and Stepien’s testimonies to the committee aren’t available in full as of this point.
“I think effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying, we won it, they’re stealing it from us, where’d all the votes come from, we need to go say that we won, and, essentially that anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak,” Miller told investigators. That account of what Giuliani was saying behind closed doors obviously closely tracks with what he later spent months saying publicly. Giuliani is now facing ethics charges — which, although they’re called charges, aren’t criminal in nature — from the D.C. Bar in relation to his involvement in a post-election court case in Pennsylvania in which he argued on behalf of the Trump campaign.
In 2019, Giuliani said in an interview: “I love Scotch. I can’t help it. All of the malts. And part of it is cigars — I love to have them with cigars. I’m a partyer.” Trump eventually declared himself the victor of the presidential election in the hours after polls closed, meaning he went with the apparent advice of a potentially drunk Rudy Giuliani — kicking off months of turmoil that culminated in part in the Capitol riot. The potential drunkenness behind it all helps exemplify how ridiculous the whole thing really is.
