Rudy Giuliani, diagnosed with COVID-19, says will leave hospital soon

[December 09, 2020]    By Jarrett Renshaw and Jason Lange

(Reuters) -President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday said he is feeling better after contracting COVID-19 and expects to leave the hospital on Wednesday.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks after media announced that Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden has won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 7, 2020. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

The 76-year-old former New York City mayor, who is spearheading Trump's flagging effort to overturn the Republican president's election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, said he began to feel unusually tired on Friday.

By Sunday, when his diagnosis was announced, Giuliani said he was showing other "mild symptoms" but that currently he has no fever and only a small cough.

"I think they are going to let me out tomorrow morning," Giuliani said in an interview with WABC Radio in New York. He was at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, two sources familiar with the situation said on Sunday.

Giuliani plans to attend a virtual hearing this week with Georgia lawmakers, one of the sources said on Tuesday.

With Trump's legal effort so far failing to convince any court of the president's claim that widespread fraud cost him the election, Giuliani has been meeting with state officials in a long-shot bid to persuade them to overturn the election results.

State and federal officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence of fraud on any significant scale. Across the country, courts have rejected cases seeking to toss out votes, including the U.S. Supreme Court, which on Tuesday refused to block Pennsylvania from formalizing Biden's victory there.

In Georgia, state lawmakers are due to hold a virtual meeting on Thursday to discuss election issues, following a hearing last week in which Giuliani urged the state's lawmakers to intervene to overturn Biden's victory in the state. Giuliani made similar pleas last week in Michigan and Arizona.

After news broke on Sunday of Giuliani's test result, the Arizona state legislature said it would close both chambers this week out of caution "for recent cases and concerns relating to COVID-19." Giuliani met with about a dozen Republican lawmakers there last week.

In his radio interview, Giuliani said he had tested negative just before his trip to the three states.

He also confirmed that Jenna Ellis, an attorney with whom he has worked side-by-side on Trump's legal challenges, also had contracted the coronavirus.

(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Jason Lange; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Scott Malone, Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis)

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