Rudy Giuliani pushed false claims about Jan. 6 on Thursday—specifically that “nobody died” during the insurrection and that not a single one of Trump’s supporters was armed—while Newsmax host Eric Bolling failed to step in to correct him.
In an interview pegged around Fox News’ recent ousting of Tucker Carlson, Bolling and Giuliani each criticized the network over the move.
“Everything we’re going to see now for the next year and a half can all be answered by: They don’t want Trump back,” said Giuliani, apparently lumping Fox News in with most other media outlets.
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“It wasn’t even so much that Tucker was that much for Trump. He had become that way. Really, he was laying out the circumstances that show how incredibly crooked they are. I mean, they manipulated Jan. 6. They were more than willing to create the fiction of an American insurrection in order to get rid of Donald Trump. For that, you probably should be thrown out of the country,” said Giuliani, who is still being sued by Dominion Voting Systems over his false comments in the weeks leading up to the insurrection.
Carlson, of course, pushed baseless conspiracy theories about Jan. 6 on his Fox News show and in a Fox Nation documentary.
“The reality is they’re talking about six people dead. Nobody’s dead,” said Giuliani, similar to how Donald Trump has also tried to minimize the death toll. Four people in the crowd of Trump supporters died on Jan. 6, and five police officers who had been at the Capitol later died, four by suicide and one from a series of strokes.
“They’re talking about an insurrection, except an insurrection without a single gun and without a single person being charged with insurrection after four hundred charges,” continued Giuliani, even though it was just last week that rioter Chris Alberts told a Washington, D.C., jury that he had been armed with 25 rounds of ammunition. Guy Reffitt, another rioter sentenced last year to over seven years in prison, was also carrying a handgun. (The crime of inciting an insurrection is rarely prosecuted, though several rioters, like Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.)
Rather than mention any of this, Bolling responded to the former Trump lawyer’s rant by keeping the microscope on Fox News.
“I’m old enough to remember when Fox used to embrace that and… allow the host to dig into the stories,” said Bolling, who left Fox in 2017 over sexual misconduct allegations and who recently took aim at Carlson for once writing that he hated Trump “passionately.”
“It was never ‘Don’t say that’ or ‘Don’t talk about that’ over there. Now it’s like, ‘Be careful what you say or you might get fired,’” said Bolling, clearly angling to siphon off the competitor network’s viewers. “If they can fire Tucker, they can fire everyone. I’m sure the rest of the hosts are going, ‘Uh oh, I wonder what we can and can’t do anymore’. And they’ve clearly moved left.”
