It was Wayback Wednesday on MSNBC’s All In, where Chris Hayes dug up old comments from Rudy Giuliani claiming the 1989 New York mayoral election was stolen from him.
Giuliani was indicted on Monday in Fulton County, Georgia, along with former President Donald Trump and 17 others. After the 2020 election, Giuliani falsely claimed the presidential election was stolen from Trump and sought remedies in court to overturn the election.
The former mayor first came to national prominence as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, where he prosecuted mob figures – often via the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. Giuliani is currently under indictment under a state RICO law in Georgia, an irony that is not lost on the clients of mob lawyers.
Giuliani was also of course mayor of New York during the September 11 attacks and became known as “America’s Mayor.” In recent years, however, his public image has become a husk of what it once was.
“What happened to Rudy?” Hayes asked. “You hear that a lot. I would submit – if you take a closer look – there’s a case to be made, Rudy has actually been this version of Rudy the whole time, or at least had it in him.”
The host went on to give a brief history of Giuliani’s career up to and including his false claims of fraud in the
That goes way back to the 1989 race for mayor, which Giuliani lost to the first Black man elected as mayor in New York, David Dinkins. As Giuliani himself told journalist Jack Newfield in an interview he quotes in his 2002 book, The Full Rudy – this is 21 years ago, and I’m quoting him here:”They stole that election from me… They stole votes in the black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights. Illegal Dominican immigrants were allowed to vote in Washington Heights.”
“That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Hayes concluded. “Has a certain ring to it. Let me tell you, as a lifelong New Yorker, reporters in New York City and critics will tell you, Rudy Giuliani has always been an absolute Machiavellian operator. So yeah, you might say, ‘What happened to Rudy?’ Or you could say, ‘This has always been Rudy.'”
Watch above via MSNBC.