Radio station owner says Giuliani had ‘three strikes’ against him

The billionaire owner of WABC has revealed that Rudy Giuliani had “three strikes” against him before he was finally suspended from the station and had his radio show struck off air.

John Catsimatidis, 75, told The New York Post that the former New York City mayor’s ongoing “behavior” was making it increasingly difficult to welcome him back to the station.

“It’s pretty hard to bring him back,” said Mr Catsimatidis, a Republican donor and the founder of Gristedes Food.

“His behavior makes it very hard to reverse course. He makes it hard not to terminate him.”

Mr Catsimatidis revealed that Mr Giuliani was suspended after the station had to bleep out Mr Giuliani’s comments when he launched into a spiel on voting machine live on air on The Rudy Giuliani Show last week.

This was a violation of the station’s policy about the 2020 presidential election, he said – adding that the former mayor had been given repeated warnings before being ousted.

“That was strike one,” Mr Catsimatidis told The New York Post.

Then came “strike two”, when Mr Giuliani allegedly “issued an ultimatum to double the hours of his show–or else”.

Then, when Mr Giuliani hit out at Mr Catsimatidis on his Twitter/X show, the radio station owner said it was “strike three”.

The man once known as “America’s mayor” after 9/11 had taken to his show on X – America’s Mayor Live – on Friday night to lash out at the radio station owner, following his suspension for airing baseless claims about the 2020 election.

In the online rant, the former personal attorney to Donald Trump claimed that the “trailer trash little creep” President Joe Biden had something to do with his ousting.

“The Democrat thing has something to do with it. And the fact that the Bidens are really zeroing in, now, on interference with the 2024 election. And remember, we can go right back to the beginning. The first thing Biden did as a candidate is write a letter to the network saying to keep me off,” Mr Giuliani claimed.

“He began as a trailer trash little creep taking little bits with his scummy little brothers. And now he’s a world-class thief. Somehow, strangely, he’s president of the United States,” he added.

Mr Giuliani went on to claim that Mr Catsimatidis was attempting to keep him from “telling the truth” about the “stolen” 2020 presidential election.

“What John Catsimatidis has done is disgraceful,” Mr Giuliani said.

“With the pretence that he was building some kind of a First Amendment station, he blew a hole in the First Amendment that’s so big you can’t even find it. You can’t tell somebody not to talk about the 2020 presidential election and tell me that you have respect for free speech.”

The radio station owner personally filled in Mr Giuliani’s scheduled WABC slot on Sunday from 10am to 11am along with two other radio hosts.

“What happened last week was very tragic,” Mr Catsimatidis said on air during the usual time slot for the Rudy Giuliani Show.

“When I hired Rudy, I got a lot of criticism,” he continued. “In this country, you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

This latest turmoil comes mere months after the man formerly known as “America’s mayor” before he became synonymous with pushing election conspiracies filed for bankruptcy in December.

As well as this, Mr Giuliani is facing a criminal trial, having been indicted on charges of attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Georgia and Arizona. The trained attorney has also been disbarred in Washington DC and New York.

In an emailed statement to The Independent, Mr Giuliani said he had learnt of his firing from a report in The New York Times and claimed that he was unaware of a policy against his speaking out about the 2020 election.

“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,” Mr Giuliani wrote.

Even if such a policy did exist, he said it was “violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously”. He called the directive a “clear violation of free speech”.