Rudy Giuliani is FINALLY revealed as a contestant on The Masked Singer

Rudy Giuliani’s long-awaited controversial appearance on The Masked Singer finally aired last night and showed judge and executive producer Ken Jeong walking off stage in a tantrum after he was unmasked.

The premise of the FOX show is that a handful of celebrities perform in costume for a panel of judges who are seemingly unaware of their identities. Jeong, best known for appearing in The Hangover series, is a judge, along with Robin Thicke, Nicole Scherzinger and Jenny McCarthy.

Giuliani appeared last night dressed up as Jack in the Box. He sang ‘Bad to the Bone’ by George Thorogood.

When it came time to unmask, Rudy – Trump’s former lawyer – delighted in revealing his identity. The two female judges jumped up and down clapping, declaring ‘I had no idea!’

Robin Thicke said it was the last person he expected, but he smiled uncomfortably.

Jeong, who shot to fame in The Hangover, stood furiously with his arms cross, even as Giuliani told the audience he had taken part to show his newborn granddaughter that you should ‘try everything’.

When it came time for him to sing again without his disguise, Jeong walked off stage, declaring ‘I’m done!’

Jenny McCarthy and Niccole Scherzinger stayed and cheered him on, dancing as he belted out an off-key chorus.

If Thicke walked off too, as was reported in Deadline in February after the show was taped, FOX edited it out.

Now, Jeong is being slammed for his theatrical response to the 77-year-old’s appearance on the reality TV show.

On Wednesday’s episode, after Giuliani removed his mask judge Nicole Scherzinger was heard asking: ‘Is that Robert Duvall?’

Jeong responded grimly: ‘No, that’s not Robert Duvall.’

Though the episode was highly edited, it appeared that Jeong did not storm off immediately – but did walk away in disgust a bit later in the show.

The episode did not show judge Robin Thicke leaving the stage, as had been previously reported, though at one point Thicke appeared to be missing as the other judges danced.

Following the bombshell reveal, host Nick Cannon initially tried to keep things light by bantering with Giuliani as usual.

‘It surprises us all that you’re here on The Masked Singer,’ Cannon said.

‘This is definitely something I never would have guessed,’ added judge Robin Thicke.

‘Me too, me too,’ Giuliani replied, explaining that he decided to appear on the show to show his granddaughter that ‘you should try everything, even things that are completely unlike you and unlikely.’

‘And I couldn’t think of anything more unlike me and unlikely than this,’ said the 77-year-old Giuliani.

He added that he had long been a fan of the show and that he thought it would be fun to appear, saying: ‘I don’t get to have a lot of fun.’

Despite a clue referencing the notorious ‘Four Seasons’ press conference fiasco, none of the judges were successful in guessing Giuliani’s identity.

Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg guessed he was Joe Pesci, Thicke guessed Robert Duvall, Jeong proposed Elon Musk and Scherzinger hazarded Al Roker.

After his identity was revealed, a wildly off-key Giuliani sang George Thorogood & the Destroyers’ ‘Bad To The Bone’ to close out the episode.

It was at this point that Jeong said ‘I’m done’ and stormed off the stage.

It had previously been reported that Thicke also left the stage to console Jeong, though footage of him leaving was not shown in the episode.

However, a brief shot did show judges McCarthy-Wahlberg and Scherzinger dancing without Thicke or Jeong, raising the possibility that Thicke’s exit was edited out.

The first episode of the season aired last month, and some had speculated that controversy over Giuliani’s appearance would lead Fox to cut him from the show.

In 2020, Giuliani unwittingly appeared in Borat 2, in a compromising scene with Borat’s daughter who he thought was a journalist for an Eastern European conservative news show.

In January this year, the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection issued subpoenas to Giuliani and other members of Donald Trump’s legal team who filed bogus legal challenges to the 2020 election that fueled the lie that race had been stolen from the former president.

The committee is continuing to widen its scope into Trump’s orbit, this time demanding information and testimony from Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Boris Epshteyn. All four publicly pushed Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims in the months after the election.

‘The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former President about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes,’ Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the panel, said in a statement.

Epshteyn in a tweet called the committee illegitimate and its efforts part of a ‘witch hunt’ against Trump and his supporters. The others who were subpoenaed did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Trump’s legal team sought to overturn the election results in the battleground states by filing lawsuits alleging widespread irregularities with ballots and claims by partisan poll watchers who said they couldn’t see everything going on, in part because of precautions taken as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 50 lawsuits were filed, mostly in battleground states.

The lawsuits were soundly batted down in the courts, sometimes within days of filing. But the legal challenges and the multiple press conferences held by Giuliani and others helped galvanize Trump supporters behind the idea that the election had been stolen, even though Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, and local officials said it had been the most secure election in history.

The committee said it is seeking records and deposition testimony from Giuliani, the 76-year-old former New York City mayor once celebrated for his leadership after 9/11, over his promotion of election fraud claims on behalf of Trump. The panel is also seeking information about Giuliani’s reported efforts to persuade state legislators to take steps to overturn the election results.

Four days after the November 3, 2020, election, while The Associated Press and other media outlets were calling it for Joe Biden, Giuliani held a press conference at a landscaping company in Philadelphia to announce his team planned to challenge the election results. It was the beginning of a pressure campaign to allot electoral votes in battleground states where Biden won over to Trump instead.

Ellis and Powell also appeared with Giuliani at press conferences, pushing false claims of election fraud, and Giuliani met with local elected officials to push false theories about corrupt voting systems. Powell was eventually removed from the team after she said in an interview she was going to release ‘the kraken’ of lawsuits.

Giuliani even appeared in a Pennsylvania courtroom for the first time in nearly three decades to argue an election case. During the course of the hearing, he fiddled with his Twitter account, forgot which judge he was talking to and threw around false accusations about a nationwide conspiracy by Democrats to steal the election.

The lawsuit had been Trump’s best-case scenario to overturn the election using the courts — not because of the facts of the case but because of the number of electoral votes at stake, 20.

‘One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,’ Judge Matthew Brann wrote at the time. ‘That has not happened.’

Giuliani was a reliable cheerleader for Trump through much of his presidency, serving on his legal team during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and defending him in repeated television news appearances. But he also found himself personally entangled in Trump’s own political and legal woes.

He was a central character in the first impeachment case against Trump, focused around the former president’s efforts to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Democratic challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Federal investigators last year raided Giuliani’s home in New York as part of an investigation into his own Ukraine work.

And Giuliani spoke at the rally in front of the White House that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. Like Trump, he suggested the certification of Biden’s victory was an existential crisis for the country and used rhetoric that alluded to violence.

‘Let’s have trial by combat,’ Giuliani said. ‘I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there.’

His speech came after dozens of judges — including the U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump nominees — rejected every significant claim of alleged voter fraud brought by Giuliani and other lawyers. More than a year later, there still is no evidence of criminality. Even a widely criticized review ordered by Republicans in Arizona, one of the states Biden flipped to Democrats in 2020, did not produce proof to support Trump’s false claims.

Guiliani has not commented on his participation in the Masked Singer.