Four of the strangest claims from Rudy Giuliani’s ‘election fraud’ press conference

Senior Republicans have called on Donald Trump to drop his challenges to the US election result after his lawyer Rudy Giuliani followed up his appearance at a Pennsylvania landscaping centre with a second bizarre press conference.

As hair dye ran down the cheeks of the president’s closest legal aide, a sweating Giuliani (pictured) laid out another series of baseless accusations, including claims of an influx of “communist money” and a recreation of a scene from the film My Cousin Vinny.

The unsubstantiated claims saw Utah Senator Mitt Romney tweet that the president is seeking to “subvert the will of the people and overturn the election”, while Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host and prominent supporter of the Trump administration, also “criticised the claims”, the Financial Times says.

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Communist cash

After weeks of wild accusations, one might think that Giuliani and the remaining Trump loyalists may have run out of ways to attack the election. But yesterday, the former mayor of New York “gave it a damned good try”, The Guardian says.

In a new addition to the range of false claims, Trump’s legal team claimed to have identified “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States”. They declined to provide evidence for the allegation.

Movie moment

Giuliani, in trying to convince reporters of his claims, evoked 1992 Oscar-winning comedy My Cousin Vinny. “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn,” he said.

A Brooklyn native himself, Giuliani then claimed that Republican poll observers were “further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing”.

According to the Detroit Free Press (DFP), more than 225 Republican poll watchers were “roaming the room and observing the process” in Michigan, a state the Trump campaign has complained extensively about. The 225 figure is “almost double the number of challengers who were supposed to be there”, the DFP adds.

Connection issues

Making matters worse for Giuliani, the stream of the event, held at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC, kept on cutting out.

Heard in the background throughout was a series of voices asking “can they hear us on the stream?” and “you see fucking Rudy’s hair dye dripping down his face?”.

Team Trump has since claimed that “hackers” disrupted the stream, The Independent reports. They have produced no evidence for this claim and YouTube removed the video shortly after the event ended.

Losing the room

After the press rushed to Pennsylvania’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping for a hastily arranged briefing last week, there was perhaps an air of skepticism in the room before Giuliani had even opened his mouth this time.

Perhaps sensing that he was not in command of the event, he made an appeal to the assembled journalists, angrily saying: “I don’t know what you need to wake you up, to do your job and inform the American people, whether you like it or not, of the things they need to know!

“This is real! It’s not made up! There’s nobody here who engages in fantasies.”