Trump legal team’s wild press conference features hair-dye malfunction, attacks on press, and serious allegations

President Trump promised that Thursday’s press conference would present “a very clear and viable path to victory.” But the half-hour of attacks on the media, dripping hair dye, and technical glitches that led the campaign to remove the video stream from its YouTube account left much of Twitter wondering what exactly had “fall[en] into place.”

Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell leveled serious allegations of widespread voter fraud that, if true, could swing the election in Trump’s favor. The claims have not been proven, but the campaign has collected a number of sworn affidavits alleging that election workers coached voters to vote for President-elect Joe Biden and improperly filled out falsified ballots across the country.

The campaign’s attempt at regaining control of a narrative that has largely swung in favor of Biden was lost amid the press conference’s more salacious allegations — for example, suggesting that Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez directed the construction of rigged voting systems used in the 2020 election to “ensure that he never lost an election.”

Chavez died in 2013. The system in question, Smartmatic, did replace voting systems in Venezuela ahead of a 2004 referendum, according to the Washington Post. Any connections to the deceased Venezuelan strongman stop there. However, in 2017, Smartmatic reported that its Venezuelan systems were manipulated by at least 1 million votes during President Nicolas Maduro’s final reelection campaign, according to Reuters.

The campaign also claimed, without presenting evidence, that prominent leftist investor and philanthropist George Soros was involved in the election fraud.

The Trump campaign removed its livestream of the press conference after someone appeared to leave his audio on, making their comments on Giuliani’s hair dye dripping down the side of his face audible over the conference.

“Did you see f—ing Rudy’s hair dye dripping down his face?” the voice is heard asking.

The Trump team said that the voices heard in the clip were not campaign staff. The campaign said that its operators were disconnected and that in the process of reconnecting, “unauthorized users used them to get in & their voices were overheard on the stream.”

Throughout the press conference, Giuliani occasionally used the same cloth to cough into and wipe his nose and the rest of his face.

Giuliani also ripped what he characterized as the liberal media for not covering the campaign’s allegation of voter fraud.

“I don’t know what you need to wake you up to do your job and inform the American people whether you like it or not of the things they need to know. This is real. It is not made up,” Giuliani said.

At one point, Giuliani asked a reporter who asked a question what network she worked for. When she responded that she worked for CNN, he laughed and called the national media “the Iron Curtain of censorship.”

At the end, reviews of the press conference were mixed.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, for instance, said, “This Rudy press conference is strong. He’s offering specific examples of systemic fraud.”

Rich Lowry of National Review tweeted, “Well, that easily was the most outlandish press conference ever held by a team of lawyers representing the President of the United States.”

Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by Trump this week, said, “That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”