WITH hair dye streaming down his cheeks and Donald Trump watching on television, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani unleashed eyebrow-raising claims yesterday that George Soros, China and a dead Venezuelan dictator conspired with Democratic “crooks” to hand the elections to Joe Biden.

In an extraordinary 90-minute press conference at the Republican National Committee in Washington, Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team left no doubt they were refusing to acknowledge president-elect Biden’s win, arguing instead that a broad “national conspiracy” to deny Trump re-election was underway.

Giuliani opened with a frontal attack on “corrupt” Democratic-led cities like Detroit he accused of purposely flipping thousands of votes to Biden, spoke of “a plan from a centralised place to execute” voter fraud, and warned of an “iron curtain of censorship” denying the American people facts about the elections.

Then it turned bizarre. “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny?” asked Giuliani, who proceeded to deliver his best Joe Pesci impersonation, copying the actor’s mafioso persona from the hit 1992 movie.

“How many fingers do I got up?” he groaned, apparently complaining about how far away election monitors were kept from the ballot-counting in swing states like Georgia.

Patting his beading brow with a handkerchief, and with sweat mixed with hair dye dripping down from the temples, Giuliani’s attacks veered towards the outlandish.

“You should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro,” Giuliani lectured reporters, referring to Venezuela’s notorious strongman Hugo Chavez, who has been dead for seven years, and the country’s current leftist President Nicolas Maduro.

The company in question is elections software firm Smartmatic, founded in 2000 in Florida by two men born in Venezuela. 

Smartmatic’s chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is on the board of the Open Society Foundation begun by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a recurring bogeyman of Republican politicians.

The company’s chairman “is a close associate and business partner of George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democratic Party, the biggest donor to Antifa – and the biggest donor of Black Lives Matter”, Giuliani said.

“My goodness. What do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?”

Accusing Biden’s aides of orchestrating the alleged fraud, Giuliani asserted: “They made significant mistakes, like all crooks do, and we caught them.”

As Giuliani repeated conspiracy theories and discussed the various “pathways to victory” for his boss, Trump revelled in the lawyer’s message as he looked on from the White House, tweeting of “an open and shut case of voter fraud”.

The president’s claims of mass cheating have been debunked by a cybersecurity agency in Trump’s own administration that declared November’s election “the most secure in American history”.

That agency’s head, Chris Krebs, was fired this week by Trump. Like the president he too was watching Giuliani’s performance.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest,” Krebs said on Twitter. – AFP, November 20, 2020.