Hair dye runs down Rudy Giuliani's face during news conference

WASHINGTON - Streaks of sweat and what appeared to be hair dye ran down the sides of Rudy Giuliani's face during a Thursday afternoon news conference that included claims of a stolen election and debunked conspiracy theories.

The former New York City mayor is President Donald Trump's personal lawyer and is handling his election lawsuits.

“I know crimes. I can smell them,” Giuliani said. “You don’t have to smell this one. I can prove it to you 18 different ways.”

The former federal prosecutor needed to continually wipe his face during the extended press event.

Giuliani and other Trump lawyers berated reporters at the news conference for questioning their claims.

Part of the evidence they cited was a Michigan affidavit already dismissed by a judge.

They also argued a debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela could have hacked election results through machines used by local authorities.

Giuliani also claimed that votes were sent to other countries to be counted and that new votes for Joe Biden magically appeared after votes were counted.

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In one long segment of the news conference, Giuliani cited My Cousin Vinny as his favorite courtroom movie and cited it as part of a claim that Republican observers were kept too far away to watch ballot counting.

Fighting to challenge an election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden, Trump has launched a barrage of lawsuits across the country. Top Republicans have stood behind him and said they will wait for those cases to be resolved before officially recognizing the winner, a standard that has no modern precedent.

But his attorneys have repeatedly made elementary errors in those high-profile cases: misspelling “poll watcher” as “pole watcher,” forgetting the name of the presiding judge during a hearing, inadvertently filing a Michigan lawsuit before an obscure court in Washington and having to refile complaints after erasing entire arguments they’re using to challenge results.

“The sloppiness just serves to underscore the lack of seriousness with which these claims are being brought,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Trump’s legal team has lost repeatedly in court and failed to uncover the kind of widespread fraud that might challenge Biden’s leads in several key battleground states. His lawyers and allies have still pressed forward with asking judges and certification authorities to block the results.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.