Hillary Clinton's camp is using Donald Trump's comments about Second Amendment supporters to "demonize" him and draw attention away from her own criminal activities, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday.
"It's the only way they can demonize him, because they have a criminal on the top of their ticket," Giuliani told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "[She is] somebody who should have been indicted two months ago and now should be indicted for [her] pay-to-play State Department."
"You have tapes — they were hiding — that shows that millions of dollars were given to the Clinton Foundation and the State Department did favors for those people that they knew had given millions of dollars," Giuliani said. "That is a direct violation of 18 United States Code Section 209. It is called illegal. It's called criminal.
"I will tell you this, if I were back at my old job at the U.S. Attorney, we'd begin a RICO investigation — racketeer influenced and corrupt organization, which is what I believe the Clinton Foundation is," Giuliani said.
Giuliani also questioned the FBI's role in not investigating ties between Clinton and the millions taken in by her foundation.
Trump is under fire for commenting during a political rally in North Carolina that Second Amendment supporters might be able to stop Clinton from picking Supreme Court justices. The remark was construed by some people to mean he was suggesting violent action against Clinton.
Giuliani, who was on the road with Trump on Tuesday, ridiculed the complaints, pointing out that Trump rarely pulls punches.
"If Donald Trump wanted to say that, believe me, nobody in the world would stop him from saying that," said Giuliani. "Of course, he isn't going to say it. He doesn't mean it. He isn't that kind of man. This is part of their process of trying to demonize him."
Giuliani said Trump was unaware of the furor his words caused just after the speech.
"I was at the speech," the former mayor said. "I introduced him. I heard it. We drove for a half hour to the airplane [after]. We got on the airplane. Nobody had any idea that any such suggestion was made and when he first heard it, he was shocked. I can't even tell you the word he used, it begins with a B."
Further, said Giuliani, Trump said that his words were a call for Second Amendment supporters to vote against Clinton, not shoot her.
"He was saying voters, you are a very powerful organization," said Giuliani. "You can vote against her. If he had time to spell it out, you could say they could be the turning point in Ohio, in Pennsylvania — in a lot of these swing states you have a lot of NRA members.
"That's what he was saying. That's what he intended to say. There were no words of violence used. Believe me, if he said something like that, that crowd would have had a much different reaction."
But the Clinton "spin machine" picked up the words within minutes and put the assassination interpretation on it, and got its acolytes in the media to turn his words against him.
Now they're saying, 'Oh, this puts our candidates in jeopardy,'" said the former mayor. "You know who is putting our candidates in jeopardy? The Clinton spin machine. They take words that contain no words of violence. You can't find a word of violence in there."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.