Giuliani releases bizarre video claiming Fox News won election for Biden

The president’s lawyer also doubles down on false claims the president had already won the election

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and point man challenging election results across the country, accused Fox News of suppressing the vote in a conspiratorial video on Friday. He argued without evidence that when the network called various state races like Virginia and Arizona for Joe Biden, it depressed turnout elsewhere.

“Just think of that, the impact of Fox calling Arizona for Biden when CNN didn’t, and then making a big deal out of it,” the former New York mayor and close Trump ally said on his YouTube channel. “I think they were playing trumpets.”

Fox called the race at 11.20pm Eastern Time, after polls were already closed in Arizona and the rest of the country. Mr Giuliani seemed to allege that when networks projected the winners of various races, it was the same as legally certifying results, even though government officials are the ones who decide.

“Don’t tell me that didn’t have an impact on the campaign,” he added. “Of course it did. It had an impact on the psychology of this, which pushed all the networks then to leave out the calling of Trump states, [and say] 'Let’s call this for Biden. Lets get him to 270.’”

Read more: Follow The Independent’s live election results

He also doubled down on the president’s repeated, false notion that he already won the election and could only have lost early leads in certain states because of fraud. He also argued that there was no valid result but a Trump win in battleground states like Pennsylvania, which remains too close to call but is leaning towards Mr Biden as more mail-in ballots and votes from heavily Democratic Philadelphia get counted. 

“The reality of where we stand now is, Pennsylvania is Trump's,” Mr Giuliani said. “If for any reason that vote total changes, it has to be fraud.”

Mr Giuliani arrived in Philadelphia earlier this week promising to tackle Democratic “corruption” with lawsuits in the state, but the campaign’s legal record in there so far hasn’t been unsuccessful.

A federal judge denied a GOP request to toss out ballots containing errors which were later corrected, and an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court argues elections officials in the state have not segregated late-arriving ballots postmarked by Election Day, though Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had agreed to the policy and Republicans acknowledged in the filing that they are not aware of any county that has not adhered to it.

Read more: What happens if Trump loses and refuses to concede?