Giuliani incoherently tweets a possible apology for sharing doctored Pelosi video

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After sharing a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been doctored to make her appear to be drunkenly slurring her words, President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani sent out what appeared to be an attempted apology. But Giuliani’s tweet was garbled to the point of incoherence.

“Ivesssapology for a video which is allegedly is a caricature of an otherwise halting speech pattern, she should first stop, and apologize for, saying the President needs an ‘intervention.’ Are,” wrote the former New York City mayor, 74, in a tweet Friday morning that inexplicably included a GIF of a basketball game.

(Yahoo News photo Illustration; photos: AP, Getty Images)
Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: AP, Getty Images

“No further comment needed,” responded Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, who originally referred to the video as “sexist trash.”

But in a follow-up tweet defending his role in spreading the altered video, which quickly went viral, Giuliani wrote: “Nancy Pelosi wants an apology for a caricature exaggerating her already halting speech pattern. First she should withdraw her charge which hurts our entire nation when she says the President needs an ‘intervention. ‘People who live in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.’”

On Thursday, one day after Trump abruptly walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders called to discuss infrastructure funding, Pelosi cast aspersions on the president’s mental state and called on his family or staff to stage an “intervention for the good of the country.”

Pelosi had described his demeanor in the abortive meeting as constituting a “temper tantrum.”

Meeting with the press at an unrelated event Thursday, Trump insisted he had been “extremely calm” at the meeting, and called on a number of aides, including Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders, to back his account. As he has before, he described himself as a “stable genius,” and referred to Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy” while mocking her hand movements.

Giuliani, whose high-volume appearances as a Trump surrogate on talk shows have been described as “unhinged,” tweeted a link to the doctored video of Pelosi, which had apparently made its rounds on conservative sites beforehand, and questioned her mental state. “What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?” he asked in his original tweet, which he has since deleted. “Her speech pattern is bizarre.”

A version of the video had been viewed over 2 million times by Thursday night after it was posted by the conservative Facebook page Politics WatchDog, according to the Washington Post.

Trump separately shared a “supercut” of videos of Pelosi speaking that had been spliced together by Fox Business into a montage of hemming and hawing. “Pelosi stammers through news conference,” Trump captioned the video.

“This video is different from the slowed and distorted ‘drunk’ one, but it serves the same purpose, by attempting to disparage Speaker Pelosi,” the Washington Post’s artificial-intelligence reporter Drew Harwell tweeted. “It's also stripped of context, cut and edited so as to make it hugely disorienting, probably by design.”

As the political and legal struggles over investigations into Trump’s 2016 campaign and his administration have heated up, Pelosi called the president’s refusal to cooperate in congressional investigations a “cover-up.”

In an apparent response, Trump authorized Attorney General William Barr to begin another investigation into how and why the FBI began its investigation of his campaign’s links to Russia.

It is still unclear who created the original doctored video.

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