Rudy Giuliani weighed in on the 9/11 controversy, confirming Trump’s claim that there was some cheering after the attack.

Is he a liar, too?

“We did have some celebrating,” Giuliani told Alisyn Camerota on CNN’s ”New Day” Tuesday.

The former New York City mayor, who was in office during the terrorist attacks, described “pockets of celebration, some in Queens, some in Brooklyn.”  When Camerota asked him how many, he said “ten, twelve, thirty, forty.”

Unlike the disputed Washington Post story by then-reporter Serge Kovaleski, Giuliani said these reports were not rumors, but facts.  Trump was widely condemned in the media for appearing to mock Kovaleski’s disability (Koveleski now works for the New York Times), when the reporter backed away from his own story published 14 years ago.

Giuliani recalled one documented incident where celebrations and cheering by Muslims at a Muslim-owned candy store were ended when teens from a nearby housing development beat them up.

But Giuliani challenged Trump to show his own evidence.

“I don’t want to say he’s not telling the truth or not. Let him deal with it,” the former mayor said. “Let him explain to people. Let him show the evidence of it.”

Almost immediately after the billionaire made his statement about celebrations in the wake of 9/11, BPR writer Carmine Sabia, who lives in New Jersey, stepped forward with his own recollection of those events.

“The funny part of the media-made controversy is that until Trump recalled his experience on that day, these events were a commonly accepted fact by Jerseyans,” he wrote.  “Suddenly we are all being called liars in order for Trump-haters to cast aspersions on him.”

Related: I live in Jersey and Trump is right: Muslims DID celebrate on 9/11 in NJ . . . we saw it!

Trump tweeted additional evidence on Tuesday, highlighting a snippet from a NY Post editorial from three days after the attack, and a video clip from Guardian Angels founder and radio host Curtis Sliwa.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/671710514007904256

In the video, Sliwa spoke of “people celebrating and cheering” when the towers were struck by jets, and when the buildings collapsed.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/671716793195634688

But the clip, a video of a video, lacks context, and efforts to find the original video have proved unsuccessful.  Sliwa responded to Trump on Twitter, claiming the clip was edited and that he was referring to a handful of people.

Thanks @realDonaldTrump for the trip down memory lane. I was saying there were a handful of people. Clip is edited. https://t.co/PnqhCv8zvV

— Curtis Sliwa for New York City Mayor (@CurtisSliwa) December 1, 2015

Blogger Andrew Husband dug up a Newark Star-Ledger story from Sep. 23, 2001, which supported Sliwa’s statement.

So the discussion on exactly who and how many celebrated continues, but the clear evidence points to the fact that there were celebrations, and many many people did witness them with their own eyes.  Once again, Trump demonstrated his ability to spur national conversations that the media and other candidates would never start.

Watch video of Giuliani and Camerota below.

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Steve Berman

Steve is a serial entrepreneur who has been starting and running businesses for 25 years. Writing about conservative causes is his passion.

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