Former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign is asking television news executives to stop booking attorney Rudy Giuliani, who is spreading “false, debunked conspiracy theories on behalf of” his client, President Donald Trump.
The request came in a letter that top aides Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield sent to anchors, producers and senior leadership at ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and Fox News.
“While you often fact check his statements in real time during your discussions, that is no longer enough,” a copy of the memo obtained by HuffPost read. “By giving him your air time, you are allowing him to introduce increasingly unhinged, unfounded and desperate lies into the national conversation.”
Continuing, the campaign slammed Giuliani as a Trump surrogate who “has demonstrated that he will knowingly and willingly lie in order to advance his own narrative.”
“Giuliani is not enlightening your viewers in any way. He’s not offering a unique or informed perspective. He’s certainly not introducing new facts, since his relationship with the truth is casual at best.”
The message follows revelations that Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July phone call to assist Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr with a probe of Biden and his son, based on unfounded corruption allegations. The conversation has fueled an impeachment inquiry into the president, who has been accused of soliciting election help from a foreign government.
During the elder Biden’s vice presidency, Hunter Biden worked on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukraine-based energy firm from which he made up to $50,000 per month, according to The New York Times. At the time, Joe Biden was pushing ― along with the international community ― for the ouster of the country’s then-prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who was leading a corruption probe of Burisma.
However, there remains no evidence that Joe Biden was aware of the investigation. Furthermore, in May, Yuriy Lutsenko, one of Shokin’s successors who has since left the position, told Bloomberg News, “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws ― at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”
In spite of that, Giuliani has made television appearances as recently as Sunday to promulgate his theory and gin up suspicion over the Democratic presidential candidate. He has also claimed that Ukraine, rather than Russia, was responsible for the 2016 hack into the Democratic National Committee’s server. U.S. intelligence agencies have already determined that it was indeed Russia that perpetrated the breach.
The latter allegation prompted Trump’s own former homeland security adviser and current ABC News analyst Tom Bossert to speak out against Giuliani on air Sunday, stating the claim has “no validity.”
“At this point I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing in repeating that debunked theory to the president,” Bossert said.
Now, Biden’s campaign is urging news outlets to cut Giuliani off, warning that he is pushing “outlandish falsehoods and disinformation in the knowledge that it is hard for the corrections to catch up.”
“Your obligation is to provide the American people with an informed, fact-based and responsible coverage and debate of critical issues.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, which broke the story, Giuliani said the letter “sounds like the usual left wing censorship,” arguing that “everything” he says is backed up by “affidavits and statements” and that the left is engaged in a cover-up.
Trump’s reelection campaign manager, Brad Parscale, also weighed in on Twitter, asking whether the same request could be made of news organizations regarding the booking of Democrats, accusing the left of pushing “hoaxes.”