President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed on Wednesday that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey should be thrown “in jail” for his company’s handling of Giuliani’s smear story against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. He also suggested the social media company’s actions were worse than the United States’ internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II.
Giuliani controls access to what he claims are emails and text messages obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden supposedly left at a Delaware computer repair store in 2019. He, the Trump campaign, and right-wing media outlets have made an array of increasingly wild claims about the contents of those documents in the final days of the 2020 election.
During a Wednesday morning Senate hearing, Dorsey defended Twitter’s decisions to initially limit distribution of the October 14 New York Post story that first reported on the Hunter Biden documents and to lock the paper’s account until it removes a tweet about the piece, which violates the social media site’s terms of service by linking to content that included personal information.
Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Eric Bolling asked Giuliani to respond to Dorsey during an interview later that day.
Giuliani claimed Dorsey is “an accessory after the fact to the numerous crimes committed by Hunter Biden” supposedly revealed by the hard drive, including “bribery,” “extortion,” “racketeering,” and “the endangering of children.” He also claimed Dorsey is “covering up child pornography.”
“Put him in jail,” he added.
Giuliani went on to accuse Twitter of “the worst invasion of rights in America” since “putting the Japanese in camps, except it’s being done to all of us.”
“He’s not an American, he’s something else, maybe -- maybe he’s working for the Chinese, I don’t know,” he added of Dorsey.
Bolling wrapped up the interview by saying, “I will tell you, I am hoping none of that is right but I am concerned that it is right and those things all happened.” He then accused “the people who push back on an interview like this” of wanting to “stifle free speech.” (Sinclair decided not to air a Bolling interview with the star of the coronavirus conspiracy theory video Plandemic in July and edited out comments he made casting doubt on the effectiveness of face masks this month following reports from Media Matters.)