Rudy Giuliani has said that his call for ‘trial by combat’ hours before last week’s Capitol riots was just a Game of Thrones reference, and appeared to mistake the HBO cult hit for a documentary.
Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, told Trump’s ‘Save America’ rally in Washington D.C. last week, January 6, that ‘we will have a trial by combat’, but has dismissed the notion that he was inciting violence.
At the rally, Giuliani repeated a number of false claims about the presidential election, announcing to the crowd, ‘If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.’
Following the rally, pro-Trump protesters breached the Capitol in a riot that claimed the lives of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.
I was referencing the kind of trial that took place for Tyrion in that very famous documentary about fictitious medieval England. When Tyrion, who is a very small man, is accused of murder. He didn’t commit murder, he can’t defend himself, and he hires a champion to defend him.
What he was actually referring to, according to Giuliani, was a ‘trial between machines’, referencing the legal actions against Dominion Voting Systems by the Trump campaign in the wake of the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters have regularly claimed that the voting machines were rigged against him.
‘In fact, you’ll see it comes up exactly in the context of I challenge them to allow us to examine their machines,’ he told The Hill.
Following the events of last week, the New York State Bar Association has opened an inquiry into whether Giuliani should be disbarred.
