Rudy Giuliani loses radio show for peddling false claims about 2020 election on air
Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from his radio show for peddling false claims about the 2020 presidential election live on air.
WABC’s billionaire owner John Catsimatidis, who is also a Republican donor, told The New York Times that he had axed the former New York City mayor from “The Rudy Giuliani Show” and the radio show has been cancelled because he failed to comply with the station’s policy around the election.
Mr Catsimatidis said that Mr Giuliani had been given repeated warnings before his ousting.
“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Mr Catsimatidis told the outlet.
“We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.”
In the end, the former personal attorney to Donald Trump gave him no other choice but to suspend him, he said.
The final blow came on Thursday, when Mr Giuliani tried to speak about election-related issues live on air, prompting station employees to cut him off, The New York Times reported.
Now, his ousting from the show that aired every weekday and on Sunday, Mr Giuliani has lost one of his main ways of communicating with the public as well as a source of income.
Mr Giuliani only earned advertising revenue from the show and was not paid a salary.
The loss of income for the man formerly known as “America’s mayor” before becoming synonymous with pushing election conspiracies comes after he filed for bankruptcy in December.
As well as his financial woes, Mr Giuliani is also facing multiple criminal charges after being indicted on charges of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and Arizona.
The trained attorney has also been disbarred in Washington DC and New York.
In an emailed statement to The Independent, Giuliani said he learned of his firing from the story in The New York Times and claims he was unaware of a policy against him speaking out about the 2020 election.
“How can you possibly believe that when I’ve been regularly commenting on the 2020 election for three and a half years, and I’ve talked about the case in Georgia incessantly ever since the verdict in December,” Giuliani said.
Even if such a policy did exist, he stated that it was “violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously.”
He called the directive a “clear violation of free speech” and said he’d be addressing the subject at-length during an 8pm livestream.