Rudy Giuliani is refusing to apologize after sending a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) out to his 317,000 Twitter followers.
Giuliani on Thursday tweeted a video that had been spreading online, which takes footage from a Pelosi speech and slows it down to make her sound drunk. Giuliani wrote, "Her speech pattern is bizarre." He later deleted the tweet.
President Trump's lawyer told The New York Times that he "didn't know" the video was doctored when he shared it and had "no reason to believe" it was because it "looked like enough of an extension of the way she communicates anyway." He also suggested it's "hypocritical" to "overreact" to him sharing this fake video because Pelosi in recent days has questioned Trump's "competence."
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Giuliani also claimed to CNN he had "no way to know" if the video was fake and asked the Times, "Where do you go to check that it's inaccurate? How could I have figured out that it was inaccurate?” The Washington Post's Aaron Blake shot back on Twitter, "there is no way he couldn't have known."
Giuliani separately told the Post he shared the video because he has "been noticing a gradual change in [Pelosi's] speech pattern and gestures for some time."
On his Twitter page, Giuliani on Friday refused to apologize for posting the fake video, first sending an incomprehensible tweet in which he seemed to coin the word "ivesssapology." In a follow-up, he said that Pelosi must "withdraw her charge" that Trump needs an "intervention" before he apologizes.
Trump himself also shared an edited video of Pelosi on his Twitter account, although this one did not doctor her actual speech but instead edits together different moments from a press conference in which she stumbles over words. Asked on Friday about the manipulated footage of Pelosi spreading online, Trump claimed he "doesn't know about the videos."
