Rudy Giuliani suspended from New York radio station for alleging 2020 election fraud

A New York radio station cancelled former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's radio show on Friday, and suspended him from the station because he continued to talk about the 2020 election allegedly being stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Giuliani, who is considered a close ally of the former president, was among 18 of Trump's co-conspirators to be indicted on charges related to an alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Giuliani has also previously admitted that some statements he made about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea "Shaye" Moss were "defamatory" after they filed a lawsuit against him.

New York billionaire and Republican donor John Catsimatidis, who owns the radio station WABC where Giuliani was just suspended, said he had given the former mayor several warnings not to talk about the 2020 election.

“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election," Catsimatidis told the New York Times. "We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it. So he left me no option. I suspended him.”

Giuliani has rejected this account of the conversations, stating that he was not previously warned not to talk about the previous election. 

"[T]elling reporters I was informed ahead of time of these restrictions ... is demonstrably untrue," Giuliani said, per the Guardian. "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. Other WABC hosts and newscasters questioned me on these topics. Obviously I was never informed on such a policy, and even if there was one, it was violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously.”

The outlet obtained a copy of the warning letter to Giuliani, which was dated May 9, and stated that he was banned from talking about "the legitimacy of the election results, allegations of fraud effectuated by election workers, and your personal lawsuits relating to those allegations.”

Catsimatidis said this warning was also emphasized when Giuliani was cut off by employees during his broadcast Thursday night, when he tried to speak about the 2020 election.

“Look, I like the guy as a person, but you can’t do that,” Catsimatidis said. “You can’t cross the line. My view is that nobody really knows [about the 2020 result] but we had made a company policy. It’s over, life goes on.”