Jake Tapper Pushes Back On Rudy Giuliani's Dog Whistles About Election Fraud In “The Inner Cities”

From the October 16 edition of CNN's State of the Union:

Video file

JAKE TAPPER (HOST): Why does [Donald Trump] call for people to go to elections, to go to polling places to be election monitors? Why does he say “if I lose Pennsylvania, it will be because it's stolen”? Pennsylvania, a state that hasn’t gone Republican since 1988?

RUDY GIULIANI: There are a few places and not many in the swing states, there are a few places where they have been notorious for stealing votes, Pennsylvania, Chicago, there have been places where a lot of cheating has gone on over the years. I know that from my own knowledge, of bussing people in from Camden. When I ran for mayor of New York City, the first time, some people voted eight and ten times and the second time I had firefighters and police officers outside checking on the buses so we take down the number of the bus, the bus that voted ten times and then we wouldn't let the bus vote again. When I asked Randy Levine who is now president of the Yankees, who did this for me, I said how much cheating did we stop, he said I think we stopped about 75 percent of it, and we're still going to have to give them about 25,000 votes. I'm sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans.

TAPPER: So he's not talking about elections being stolen except in some cases when he is talking about elections being stolen?

GIULIANI: You want me to tell you the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that. I would have to dislearn everything I learned in 40 years of being a prosecutor.

TAPPER: The Republican Party in Philadelphia would disagree with you. They looked into the allegations from 2012 and they said there was nothing irregular in what happened. Yes there were areas where people only voted for Obama, just like in Utah there were places that only voted for Romney.

GIULIANI: Maybe there are situations in which it's right. I remember a case where I was associate attorney general where 720 dead people voted in Chicago in the 1982 election. I remember in my own election about 60 dead people voted. So I can't sit here and tell you that they don't cheat. And I know because they control the polling places in these areas. There are no Republicans. It's very hard to get people there who will challenge votes. So what they do is they leave dead people on the rolls and then they pay people to vote for those dead people, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times.

TAPPER: We have to go, Mr. Mayor. Just to put a button on this it sounds as though you're saying that Trump is serious when he says that the election is going to be stolen.

GIULIANI: No, I'm not saying that.

TAPPER: You just laid out a whole case about how Democrats steal elections.

GIULIANI: If she wins Illinois by eight percent or he wins Illinois by eight percent then that cheating doesn't make any difference. If he wins Pennsylvania by five or she wins by five it’ll makes no difference. If it's a one or two-point race it could make a difference in a few places. It’s not going to make a difference in Indiana, not going to make a difference in North Carolina, not going to make a difference in a lot of other places where they don't have this tradition of cheating.

TAPPER: That's not an affirmation of the way our elections are held in this country.

GIULIANI:  We do cheat. We have people that cheat in elections

TAPPER: You're saying only Democrats cheat.

GIULIANI:  I found very few situations where Republicans cheat. They don't control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities they would do as much cheating as Democrats.

TAPPER: I think there are a lot of election experts that would have very strong disagreements with you.

GIULIANI: They never prosecuted election fraud.

Previously:

Trump’s “Rigged” Election Nonsense Comes Straight From His Conspiracy Theorist Allies