Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy-obsessed Giuliani
interview: not for the faint hearted
Fox News chat leaves vague impression that FBI raid on
ex-mayor’s apartment was somehow Hunter Biden’s fault
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Fri 30 Apr
2021 03.13 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/29/rudy-giuliani-tucker-carlson-interview-fox-news
Rudy
Giuliani guilty? That’s what they want you to think! And who are they? The
sinister cabal of Hunter Biden, the Lincoln Project and Department of
Injustice, of course.
That would
have been the impression of Fox News viewers on Thursday night when Giuliani
gave his first TV interview since federal agents seized mobile phones and
computers from his New York apartment, part of an investigation into his dodgy
Ukrainian dealings.
The host
was Tucker Carlson, whose smirking sympathy for the white supremacist “great
replacement” theory, and insistence that making kids wear face masks is “child
abuse”, have made him the true heir to Donald Trump as the rightwing
conspiracy-theory king.
A split
screen of Carlson and Giuliani was not for the faint hearted. The former
maintained his notorious expression, eyebrows furrowed, mouth open just enough
to catch a fly. Giuliani, in suit and tie with white handkerchief in top
pocket, was in his office, a bald eagle model and books including his own on
display. Wearing a ring on his little finger, he played nervously with his
spectacles.
First, Carlson tried to coax Giuliani into a poignant,
heart-tugging account of having his home raided at dawn
What the
former New York mayor turned legal hatchet man for Trump had to say didn’t make
much sense, but left viewers with the notion that somehow it was all Hunter’s
fault, so in that sense it was a great success. Such was the fixation that at
one point Giuliani even said “Hunter” rather than “Tucker” by mistake.
First,
Carlson tried to coax Giuliani into a poignant, heart-tugging account of having
his home raided at dawn. The ex-mayor, who on 9/11 touched everyone with his
lament “the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear”, is less
limpid these days.
“Well,
about six o’clock in the morning, there was a big bang! bang! bang! on the door
and outside were seven FBI agents with a warrant for electronics,” he recalled.
“And I looked at the warrant and I said it was extraordinary because I offered
to give these to the government and talk it over with them for two years.
“I don’t
know why they have to do this. The agents seemed somewhat apologetic. They were
very, very professional and very gentlemanly.”
The FBI
agents had taken seven or eight electronic devices, he went on, but had not
been interested in hard drives that, Giuliani claims, contain evidence of
Hunter’s wrongdoing. He offered them over and over but still they refused.
Could it be they don’t spend their days watching Fox or diving down rightwing
blog rabbit holes?
Giuliani
led an effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine before
last year’s election. Prosecutors are investigating whether he illegally
lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs
while also serving as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Ingeniously,
Carlson and Giuliani cooked up the argument that Hunter’s position on the board
of a Ukrainian gas company, and his fight against drug addiction, were equally
worthy of a dawn raid. “We have a picture of him five days before, smoking a
crack pipe behind the wheel of a car and then saying under oath that he’s not
an addict.
“And it’s
the left that gets all perturbed about people who are mentally unstable having
guns. Well, he was unstable, unfortunately and tragically, I feel sorry for
that part of Hunter Biden. I think his father exploited him but the reality is
he’s still a danger to the public driving an automobile or holding a gun but
they don’t care about that.”
Turning
back to his own case, Giuliani said the FBI agents had hammered on his door “in
a frightening way” but “I don’t get frightened very easily”. He added: “It is
an illegal, unconstitutional warrant, one of many that this Department of
Injustice tragically has done.”
And so it went on, deflated campaign slogans for an
election that was lost six months ago when Giuliani ended up at Four Seasons
Total Landscaping
The search
warrant was, he said, “purportedly based on one single failure to file for
representing a Ukrainian national or official that I never represented”.
Carlson sneeringly
suggested that the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republican
consultants, had known in advance about the raid but noted that Biden says he
did not. Giuliani duly scored more Fox points by mocking the president’s age:
“Maybe he doesn’t remember. I’m not sure if he can retain anything for more
than about the time it takes to read it.”
And so it
went on, deflated campaign slogans for an election that was lost six months ago
when Giuliani ended up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping outside Philadelphia.
“Thirty years of the Biden crime family violating our laws. That is what’s on
the hard drive that they have censored and that’s why they want to put me in
jail.”
Giuliani
claimed his iCloud account had been snooped upon in the middle of his attempt
to defend Trump against impeachment (the first time around, for those who are
counting). Cue a rapid escalation to comparisons with the Stasi.
“The
prosecutors at the justice department spied on me and that is not taken
seriously. If that doesn’t result in their being sanctioned, the case being
dismissed and it stopping, this is no longer a free country. We might as well
be in East Berlin before the wall fell. This is tactics only known in a
dictatorship, where you seize a lawyer’s records right in the middle of his
representation of his client.”
After 10
minutes that felt like 10 years, the interview was done, not likely to join the
annals of David Frost and Richard Nixon. Even so, it was manna from heaven for
a certain viewer at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. For these guys, he’s still
the one that counts.
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