Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has engendered a stir on social networks by claiming he is "more of a Jew" than 89-year-old billionaire and Holocaust survivor George Soros.
Speaking to New York Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi in an interview published Monday, Giuliani, who is now often described as President Donald Trump's personal attorney, claimed that the Hungarian-born Democratic donor hires FBI agents and "controlled " Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Kyiv recalled by President Trump. During the interview, Giuliani rushed to bust the potential counter-claim that he was invoking anti-Semitism regarding Soros' ethnicity.
"Don't tell me I'm anti-Semitic if I oppose him, Soros is hardly a Jew. I'm more of a Jew than Soros is," said Mr Giuliani, who was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated in Catholic institutions in his youth. Giuliani went on to further castigate the financier, taking aim at his lack of religiousness:
"I probably know more about — he doesn't go to church, he doesn't go to religion — synagogue. He doesn't belong to a synagogue, he doesn't support Israel, he's an enemy of Israel, "he proceeded, explaining that Soros "elected eight anarchist DA's in the United States." "He's a horrible human being," Giuliani summed up.
The ex-US Attorney for the Southern District of New York went on to lambast the staffers currently working in his former office arguing they are "a**holes" and "a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York liberals," thereby referring to the investigation his former employees are reportedly conducting into his alleged violation of campaign finance and foreign agents registration rules.
"If they think I committed a crime, they're out of their minds," he said.
"I've been doing this for 50 years. I know how not to commit crimes. And if they think I've lost my integrity, maybe they've lost theirs in their insanity over hating Trump with some of the things they did that I never would've tolerated when I was US Attorney."
Giuliani reasoned they could be proceeding with the investigation in retaliation for differences in his political stance:
"They're all — they're all knee-jerk, now logically impaired anti-Trump people," he said before reminding the audience that the office currently employs former FBI Director James Comey's daughter Maurene as an assistant attorney.
"You don't think she's bitter? Do you know the things that I've called her husband?" Mr Giuliani asked with an apparent slip of the tongue, before calling out "her father" as "a disgrace."
"I'm embarrassed that I hired him. Never seen anyone run the FBI like that," he rounded off his tirade.
Civil Rights Attorney Andrew C Laufer promptly weighed in on Twitter arguing the interview was meant to distract attention from the ongoing impeachment proceedings:
The press should ignore people like @RudyGiuliani and @AlanDersh They are walking disinformation machines tasked with sucking up the news cycle so it will distract from reporting on Trump’s impeachment and his many crimes. We need to keep our eyes on the ball folks.
— Andrew C Laufer, Esq (@lauferlaw) December 24, 2019
“Rudy proves himself once again to be a bigot and a jerk, “ another posted, while a third assumed ironically we are moving to the point where “the only true Jews are Rudy Giuliani, Megan McCain and other Christian conservative Republicans”.
We're rapidly moving to the point where the only true Jews are Rudy Giuliani, Megan McCain and other Christian conservative Republicans while the only true anti-Semites are Jews who champion Palestinian civil rights (like Soros or @elivalley https://t.co/SP2hgEXX0A
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) December 23, 2019
Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote this story, Olivia Nuzzi, took to Twitter to recall the latest phone call with Giuliani and his feedback over the interview which "he thought was unfair:"
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani earlier accused his Democratic opponents of seeking to "execute him," noting that as a matter of fact, he could only wish them "luck," as many other powerful groups have already tried that.
"They wanna put [Attorney General William] Barr in prison, and they wanna execute me," Giuliani said, addressing the audience at the Student Action Summit, an event sponsored by conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA in mid-November.
Aiming at the Democrats over their using the impeachment process to try to move the United States toward a "dictatorship," the former mayor suggested that "the whole impeachment process just trashed the constitution. No right to counsel, no right to call witnesses, no right to confrontation, no right to even have your lawyer there and investigate all the lawyers."
Last week, the Dem-dominated House almost unanimously voted to impeach the president. However, the final proceedings to this end are due to take place on the Senate floor, where Republicans hold a majority. The upper chamber of Congress is to decide whether to uphold the impeachment bid or block it exonerating POTUS.
