Rudy Giuliani Has An Odd Defense For His Attack On Clinton's Marital History
Rudy Giuliani, the thrice-married former New York City mayor now going after Hillary Clinton for the way she responded to her husband’s affairs, said he was perfectly morally capable of launching such an attack because infidelity was universal.
The comment from the top Donald Trump surrogate came during an exchange on “Meet the Press” this Sunday.
CHUCK TODD: Are you the right person to level this charge?
RUDY GIULIANI: Yeah. I’m the right person to level this charge, because I’ve never made such a charge, and I’ve prosecuted people who’ve committed rape.
CHUCK TODD: But your past, you have your own infidelity charge.
RUDY GIULIANI: Well, everybody does. And I’m a Roman Catholic, and I confess those things to my priest. But I’ve never ever attacked someone who’s been the victim―
CHUCK TODD: Okay.
RUDY GIULIANI: ―who’s been the victim of sexual abuse. Not only that, I put people in jail who’ve been the victim of sexual abuse.
Giuliani has been at the point of the spear of the newly developing attack line from the Trump campaign that Hillary Clinton mistreated the women with whom Bill Clinton had affairs. After Monday night’s debate, the former mayor said Clinton was “too stupid to be president” ― a point he elaborated on during the Sunday interview.
“What I meant was, after the long, long history of Bill Clinton, Gennifer Flowers, Juanita Broaddrick, I don’t know, 27 people making claims against him, including a settlement with one of them where it was obviously true, when she first heard about Monica Lewinksy, to pretend for five or six months that it was false,” he said. “[S]he was wrong to attack the victim.”
Attacking Clinton for attacking her husband’s accusers is the slightly more nuanced approach that the Trump campaign is taking in bringing up Bill Clinton’s past. But this is still treacherous political turf for the Republican nominee, which Giuliani surely must recognize.
Back when he was thinking of making a run against Clinton for the New York Senate seat in the 2000 election, Giuliani commissioned a focus group that, among other things, explored voter reactions to attacks on the Clinton marriage. Rick Wilson, a longtime GOP operative, recalled the findings to The Huffington Post.
“It was a totally ineffective attack in moving voters to Rudy, even if they weren’t pissed off and offended,” Wilson emailed. “It made [Clinton] more likable and we even had people saying things like, ‘Well, she deserves to be a Senator after how badly Bill treated her.’”
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.