Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani shared a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that had been making the rounds of right-wing media.
Then, without irony, the personal attorney to President Donald Trump fired off a series of tweets on another matter that included a lecture on integrity.
“What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?” asked Giuliani in the initial tweet. “Her speech pattern is bizarre.”
The video was among several altered to make her appear to be slurring her speech ― a fact that had been widely reported by the time Giuliani shared it.
The Washington Post said one of the doctored Pelosi videos had been shared some 2 million times.
“It is striking that such a simple manipulation can be so effective and believable to some,” Hany Farid, a computer-science professor and digital-forensics expert at University of California, Berkeley, told the newspaper.
One of them appeared to be Giuliani, who deleted the tweet but did not acknowledge spreading the falsehood, nor did he apologize.
Instead, he shared conspiracy theories about a plot to “spy” on Trump by “high-level Obama officials” and wondered if the media would report on it.
“Will their concern about the integrity of their government overcome their pathological hatred of @realDonaldTrump?” he tweeted. “I hope it will.”