Donald Trump's adviser and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani went on Fox Business today to hype up his allegations against Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
It went hopelessly off the rails.
Giuliani has been pursuing allegations of corruption against the Bidens for a long time – most notably, he travelled to Ukraine last year to search for evidence involving the energy company Burisma.
He is the one who provided material purportedly from Hunter's laptop to The New York Post, sparking its first story on the matter a couple of weeks ago.
The core allegations here are that Hunter tried to profit off his father's name overseas, which certainly appears to be true, and that Biden himself profited from Hunter's business dealings, for which there is currently no evidence at all.
So, the interview. Giuliani spoke to Fox Business host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, and got upset when she suggested his efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens were comparable to those of the former British spy Christopher Steele four years ago.
To refresh your memory, Steele was employed to do opposition research on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. He put together a dossier of unproven and salacious allegations, most of them involving Russia.
The Steele dossier remains a touchy subject for the President, and Giuliani did not appreciate the comparison.
"Some can say that you're acting like Christopher Steele, that you were abstracting information," Kennedy put to him.
"You've got to be kidding me. I was acting like Christopher Steele?" Giuliani responded.
"You better apologise for that. I mean, I've been a United States attorney, associate attorney general, mayor of New York City and a member of the bar for 50 years. I've never been accused of anything, and you're accusing me of being Christopher Steele."
"I'm accusing you of acting in a capacity similar to Christopher Steele, and that you were going back and forth between Ukraine and the United States," Kennedy clarified.
"What you're saying is an outrageous defamation of me, of my reputation," Giuliani shot back.
"I came on your show in good faith to give you evidence that is being withheld from the American people, and I get defamed. That is outrageous. I think our interview is now over.
"This may be the last time we'll be on camera because I don't let people call me Christopher Steele."
At one point in the interview, Giuliani alleged there was criminal material on Hunter's laptop – I'm not going to go into more detail than that, because it's defamatory and completely unverified.
"We will have the people in our news departments verify all of this," Kennedy remarked, a little dryly.
There was more shouting before the interview actually ended.
The interview with Giuliani has won Kennedy few fans among President Trump's supporters.