Liberal Fox News contributor Jessica Tarlov didn’t hold back on Sunday when discussing Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, describing the former New York City mayor as “transparently corrupt” in response to his confession that he led the effort to oust for U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Earlier this month, in an interview with The New Yorker, Giuliani—who is a key figure at the heart of President Donald Trump’s impeachment—said he saw Yovanovitch as an obstacle to his dirt-digging operation on former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani boasted. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”
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During a later appearance on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Giuliani doubled down on his claim. Having just returned from another Ukrainian trip to gather more info on Biden, Giuliani told Fox host Laura Ingraham that he “forced” Yovanovitch out “because she’s corrupt.”
On Sunday’s broadcast of Fox News’ MediaBuzz, host Howard Kurtz asked Fox News contributor and loyal Trump defender Mollie Hemingway if Giuliani’s admission shows that the media was right that the Trump attorney was instrumental if forcing Yovanovitch out.
“I feel like he said stuff like this before. It definitely matches some of the testimony that we heard about his opposition to this ambassador,” she said. “But really it just gets back to the main issue, does the president have the right to handle foreign policy, to have people in positions as he wants them or not.”
Tarlov, meanwhile, noted that Giuliani regularly goes on TV and “confesses to the things he’s been accused of,” prompting Kurtz to assert that this shows Giuliani is just being “transparent.”
“He’s transparently corrupt, yes,” Tarlov retorted. “And the president’s personal lawyer has no business doing this.”
“It is important that it was a central plank of the Intel Committee hearings where Adam Schiff was overseeing and the conversations we’re having about Marie Yovanovitch about there being a formal foreign policy channel and then a backchannel that Rudy Giuliani was running, which is wholly inappropriate,” she added. “He’s not a government employee, he is a personal fixer for the president.”
