Rudy Giuliani: I Didn't Mean 'Trial By Combat,' Or If I Did, I Meant Trial By Combat AT A LATER DATE!

Good court filing, Roodles!

Certain things are starting to move that were put in motion after the January 6 domestic terrorist attack incited by Donald Trump. One of those is a lawsuit filed by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson and the NAACP against Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the white boy militias, et al . They filed the lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which hasn't hardly been used since Reconstruction. And if you click that last link, you can get a Wonk-splainer about it to refresh your memory.

Point is, Rudy Giuliani's lawyer filed a response, and therein lies some pretty funny logic, if you ask us, and we are Wonkette, so we know from funny. (We are sorry, Rudy Giuliani's lawyer. We know you probably didn't think you were auditioning for "Laugh-In" when you wrote this. But surprise, you got the part!)

Nobody would possibly think that when Rudy Giuliani said LET'S HAVE TRIAL BY COMBAT! during the hate incitement rally before the domestic terrorist attack committed by the people who attended the hate incitement rally that Rudy really meant LET'S HAVE TRIAL BY COMBAT!

We'll excerpt freely from the New York Daily News because you can't make us transcribe that ourselves:

"No reasonable (person) would perceive Giuliani's speech as an instruction to march to the Capitol, violently breach the perimeter and enter the Capitol building and then violently terrorize Congress into not engaging in the Election Certification, Giuliani's lawyers said in a new legal filing in federal court.

And yet they all somehow got that idea!

Giuliani's lawyers latched onto his use of the word "trial" to suggest that he was actually calling for Trump supporters to engage in some sort of quasi-legal process for overturning the election instead of storming the Capitol to hunt down perceived opponents.

"Trial by combat" was actually an old timey Germanic law way of settling a conflict. It's basically a legally sanctioned sword fight, and not the kind where two guys pull out their chrams and cross streams. We could write you a bunch of words on trials by combat, except for that would be stupid, because we doubt any of the overgrown hicks in Trump's crowd that day were really thinking of it in terms of historical context. (And yes, it's also a "Game of Thrones" reference. We grant that Trump's supporters might have been aware of that.) That said, the fact that the word "combat" is in the phrase "trial by combat" negates the lawyers' argument that Giuliani was talking about some "quasi-legal process," like in the courts or something.

Point is, what Giuliani was laying down seemed pretty violent in nature to the average listener.

His lawyer has an answer for that too, though, and it is that Rudy was doing a hyperbolic allegory! He's so allegorical, that Roodles:

"The statement was clearly hyperbolic and not literal," the filing said. "And even if it were to be perceived literally, Giuliani was clearly referring to an event in the future after evidence of election fraud is collected."

Hahahahahahaha OK.

This is the same argument Giuliani made in response to a lawsuit filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell accusing him and Trump of inciting the insurrection. (It's a copy/paste job, actually.) And if we'd seen it then, we'd have made fun of it then. We didn't see it then, though. So we're making fun of it now.

LET'S HAVE TRIAL BY COMBAT! AT A LATER DATE! WHEN IT'S MORE CONVENIENT! CERTAINLY NOT TODAY! HOO HA!

Gonna make that our Twitter bio, maybe.

The end.

[ New York Daily News ]

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