Rudolph W. Giuliani was suspended by WABC radio on Friday and his daily talk show was canceled after he violated station policy by trying to discuss "discredited claims" about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election on air.
John Catsimatidis, the billionaire who is a major Republican donor and owns the station, said he had made the decision after Mr. Giuliani refused to comply with the policy related to the election after repeated warnings.
“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in a brief phone interview. “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,” Mr. Catsimatidis continued, “he left me no option. I suspended him.”
Mr. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, was one of the leading figures in former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to contest and overturn the 2020 election results. He was Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time and helped coordinate legal challenges to Mr. Biden’s victory in several states in a bid to keep Mr. Trump in office.
Mr. Guiliani’s removal from WABC, one of his only current sources of income, could add to the mounting legal and financial woes that have accumulated since then. The suspension will also deny him what may be one of his largest public platforms.
Mr. Giuliani has been criminally charged in two states, Georgia and Arizona, for this role in the effort to overturn the 2020 results and has been implicated in a number of recent lawsuits. He has also been besieged by creditors, including two Georgia election workers he defamed in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and to whom he now owes $148 million.
Mr. Giuliani could not immediately be reached for comment.
WABC aired Mr. Giuliani’s show every weekday and on Sundays. Mr. Catsimatidis said he did not pay Mr. Giuliani a salary; the former mayor instead earned a percentage of the advertising revenue the show brought in.
Mr. Catsimatidis said Mr. Giuliani had tried to speak on air during the closing minutes of his Thursday show about election-related issues, but that station employees had cut him off.
“Look, I like the guy as a person, but you can’t do that,” Mr. Catsimatidis said. “You can’t cross the line.”
He added: “My view is that nobody really knows but we had made a company policy. It’s over, life goes on.”
