Rudy Giuliani was suspended from WABC radio and his daily talk show was canceled after the station said he violated company policy by continuing to claim that the 2020 election, in which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, was rigged and stolen, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Employees in the station's control room reportedly cut Giuliani off as he was mid-sentence on-air. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Republican businessman who owns the station, told The New York Timesthat Giuliani refused to heed multiple warnings.
“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Catsimatidis said. “We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it. So he left me no option. I suspended him.”
"I was just FIRED by John Catsimatidis and @77WABCradio because I refused to stop talking about the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election," Giuliani tweeted on Friday.
In a statement, he called the decision “a clear violation of free speech” and disputed that he had been made aware of the company's policy. “Obviously I was never informed on such a policy, and even if there was one, it was violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously.”
“How can you possibly believe that when I’ve been regularly commenting on the 2020 election for three and a half years, and I’ve talked about the case in Georgia incessantly ever since the verdict in December. Other WABC hosts and newscasters questioned me on these topics.”
Catsimatidis said that WABC's parent company had issued a memo on Jan. 12, 2021, days after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, that read, "Red Apple Media is committed to uniting the nation during this unprecedented and tumultuous time. To that end, Red Apple Media is directing all of its on-air talent to not state, suggest or imply that the election results are not valid or that the election is not over.”
A separate letter sent from Catsimatidis to Giuliani Thursday and later obtained by The Times read, “You are once again stating that there was fraud. You may not do so on our airwaves.”
“Look, I like the guy as a person, but you can’t do that,” Catsimatidis said. “You can’t cross the line ... My view is that nobody really knows but we had made a company policy. It’s over, life goes on.”
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Giuliani's firing from WABC will effectively remove one of his only remaining mainstream platforms and sources of income.
The former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer, who helped coordinate legal challenges to Biden's 2020 victory, has faced mounting legal and financial troubles in recent years.
He has been criminally charged in both Georgia and Arizona for his role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has been ordered to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers after a court found that he defamed them.
