Mr. Giuliani’s verbal strikes began on Wednesday night when he appeared with Sean Hannity on Fox News and declared that the F.B.I.’s office in New York — with which he worked closely during his time as United States attorney in Manhattan — had behaved like “storm-troopers” in conducting raids on the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. In the same interview, he called Mr. Comey “a disgraceful liar” and said he should be prosecuted. He also had strong words for the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which he dismissed as “tainted” and “totally garbage.”
On Thursday morning, after Mr. Comey shot back on his Twitter account, saying that the New York F.B.I. was “devoted to the rule of law and the truth,” Mr. Giuliani assailed Mr. Comey, his onetime colleague in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, as a “sensitive little baby.” By Thursday afternoon, he had tossed another bomb, calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “step in” on the Cohen case and put the people behind it “under investigation.”
In all of this, Mr. Giuliani was following the lead of Mr. Trump, who in both the Cohen and Russia matters has adopted a strategy of attacking agents, prosecutors and the larger institutions of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. While some former law-enforcement officials said that those attacks had eroded trust in the criminal-justice establishment, others said that the figures singled out by the president and his lawyer were deserving of their ire.
“Rudy is not anti-law enforcement, but he is upset, like me, at a small cadre of people who have lost their way,” said James K. Kallstrom, who once ran the New York office of the F.B.I. and has emerged more recently as a vigorous supporter of Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. “We’ve had long talks about it and what we can do to rebuild the bureau.”
Though Mr. Kallstrom acknowledged that Mr. Giuliani, in his television appearances, could have opted “for a better choice of words,” he also said there was ample reason to be wary of some recent decisions by law-enforcement officers. He criticized, for instance, the way that F.B.I. agents, acting on a search warrant last year, broke into the home of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager. Echoing comments by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, he also blasted the more recent raids on Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room, saying that they may have violated the attorney-client privilege.
After a series of disastrous media interviews, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s newly minted lead attorney, issued on Friday afternoon a new statement which he promised would “correct” his previous comments.
The three-point statement clarifies precisely nothing.
Giuliani starts by making a a conclusory statement about campaign law. He then says the payment was made to Stormy Daniels to “resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president’s family.” Giuliani claims the payment would have been made whether or not Trump was a candidate for president.
But on Thursday on Fox and Friends, Giuliani had a much different story. “Imagine if that came out of October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton…Cohen made it go away. He did his job,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani did not explain why, yesterday, he claimed the payment was influenced by the election.
He also did not explain how he knows the purpose of the payment at all. According to Giuliani and others, the payment was made by Cohen without consulting Trump. Giuliani says he has not spoken to Cohen about the payment, so it’s unclear how he would know the actual motivation for the initial payment.
Giuliani’s second point
Giuliani claimed on Wednesday and throughout the day on Thursday that Trump first learned that he reimbursed Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payment a few days ago, even though Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017. This was hard to believe.
Friday morning on MSNBC, advertising executive Donny Deutsch said that he spoke to Cohen on Thursday night and Cohen told him that Giuliani had no idea what he was talking about.
Now Giuliani is saying his understanding of when Trump found out about the payments might be wrong. But he’s not saying it is wrong or what is right.
In other words, we still have no idea of when Cohen first discussed his payments to Stormy Daniels, or Trump’s reimbursement, with Trump.
Giuliani’s third point
Giuliani strengthened a potential obstruction case against Trump by offering a third, contradictory explanation for why Trump fired Comey. As ThinkProgress reported:
Early in the interview, Giuliani said that Trump fired James Comey as FBI director because “Comey would not — among other things — say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation.” Giuliani said Trump was “entitled to that.”
This rationale was not mentioned either in the official memo explaining Comey’s dismissal or Trump’s statements to NBC’s Lester Holt. Avoiding an obstruction charge requires Trump to present a “a consistent, and legal, explanation for the firing.”
In his statement, Giuliani skirts around the issue by claiming Trump had the ability to fire Comey for any purpose, even if his motives were corrupt. This is a legal argument many experts reject.
WASHINGTON — President Trump undercut his attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, on Friday, and said the former New York mayor will eventually get the facts right regarding a payment to a pornographic actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Giuliani, who joined Mr. Trump’s legal team last month, “started a day ago,” Mr. Trump said, speaking to reporters on Friday as he left Washington to attend a National Rifle Association convention in Dallas.
“He’s a great guy,” Mr. Trump said. “He’ll get his facts straight.”
It was the first time the president addressed the inconsistent narrative about the payment made by his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.
Mr. Giuliani kicked off the confusion with an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, surprising even some of Mr. Trump’s other attorneys.
In a series of Twitter posts the following morning, the president backed up what Mr. Giuliani said. But, on Friday, Mr. Trump said that everything said about the transaction “has been said incorrectly.”
“It’s actually very simple,” the president said, without elaboration.
Rudy Giuliani, as part of a media blitz that began Wednesday night, has created a new narrative around the payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels from Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen.
Giuliani claims that Trump, over the course of 2017, repaid Cohen for the $130,000 he sent to Stormy Daniels in 2016 as part of a hush money agreement struck just before the election. And yet Giuliani also claims Trump just found out that he reimbursed Cohen for the money a few days ago. It was Giuliani himself, according to this new narrative, who informed Trump.
Giuliani said he made @realDonaldTrump aware of paperwork that showed payments were actually reimbursements for Stormy. Trump replied: ‘Oh my goodness, I guess that's what it was for,’” Giuliani said.
This story is hard to believe. Michael Cohen himself, according to someone who spoke to Cohen directly, says not to believe it.
Donny Deutsch, an advertising executive who has known Cohen and Trump for years, revealed on MSNBC that he had a conversation with Cohen on Thursday. According to Deutsch, in that conversation Cohen said that the narrative Giuliani had constructed around the Stormy Daniels payment was false.
“I spoke with Michael Cohen yesterday, and his [comment] about Giuliani was that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He also said that, ‘Look, there are two people that know exactly what happened — myself and the president, and you’ll be hearing my side of the story,’” Deutsch said.
Deutsch described Cohen as “very frustrated” with Giuliani’s attempt to spin the facts.
Cohen is currently the target of a federal investigation in the Southern District of New York. His office, home, and hotel room were raided by the FBI on April 9. Based on the threshold of evidence needed to get authorization for such a raid, Cohen is in grave risk of being indicted.
There is reportedly concern among the Trump camp that Cohen will “flip” — provide damaging information about Trump to prosecutors in exchange for more lenient treatment. Cohen’s conversation with Deutsch yesterday, as reported, is unlikely to alleviate these fears.
As his host tried to throw him several lifelines, Mr. Giuliani dug in, insisting that Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had tried to keep Ms. Clifford from going public with the alleged affair before the 2016 election.
He also called agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who raided Mr. Cohen’s office “storm troopers,” a reference to Nazis that offended others in the law enforcement community who once held Mr. Giuliani in largely high regard.
(In 2000, Mr. Giuliani refused to apologize for using the same term to describe federal agents who seized Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban boy at the center of an immigration battle in Florida. “I’m not going to back down from it,” he said at the time.)
Mr. Giuliani’s appearances infuriated others in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who had been kept in the dark about his plans. At the White House, many of the president’s associates were particularly angry over an odd swipe that Mr. Giuliani took at Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser.
“Jared is a fine man, you know that,” Mr. Giuliani said, before adding, “Men are disposable.”
What he meant by disposable is unclear, but Mr. Kushner’s friends in the West Wing were equally puzzled by Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Ivanka Trump, Mr. Kushner’s wife. Mr. Giuliani called her “a fine woman” and predicted that “the whole country” would turn on Robert S. Mueller III, the special prosecutor in the Russia investigation, if Mr. Mueller went after Ms. Trump.
“A fine woman like Ivanka?” he said. “Come on.”
A veteran of the no-holds-barred world of New York tabloids that Mr. Trump inhabited for decades, Mr. Giuliani was an early and vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign — a potential entree back into the limelight of national politics after his failed 2008 bid for the White House.
During Mr. Trump’s campaign, he was a forceful critic of Hillary Clinton, a longtime political rival and Mr. Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, and indulged in some non-truth telling that was as puzzling as it was brazen.
For example, he suggested that Hillary Clinton had not visited ground zero in the immediate period after the 9/11 attacks, even when reporters covered their joint trips there and ample photographic evidence to the contrary instantly emerged.
Mr. Giuliani also said during the campaign that the F.B.I. gave him the inside track into investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. His private security consulting firm often attracted scrutiny and dinged his chances at joining the Trump administration.
An energetic speech he delivered in 2016 at the Republican National Convention and his repeated defense of Mr. Trump after Mr. Trump was heard making crude comments on an “Access Hollywood” tape prompted talk of Mr. Giuliani’s being appointed secretary of state or, perhaps, of his leading the Department of Homeland Security.
Those aspirations never materialized. Mr. Giuliani was passed over for both jobs — not once, but twice for each position.
Still, Mr. Giuliani has never wavered in his support for his fellow New Yorker. And when Mr. Trump was seeking a new lawyer — a high-wattage TV combatant who would not wilt under the pressures of the news media or legal adversaries — Mr. Giuliani seemed a natural pick.
But Mr. Giuliani is not used to having his words carefully managed. His comments on Fox News on Wednesday set off a frenzy on Twitter. Almost instantly, people were reposting video of Mr. Trump on Air Force One last month saying he knew nothing about the payments.
Asked about his remarks after finishing the interview, Mr. Giuliani said that what might have seemed to some — including, perhaps, Mr. Hannity — like a slip of the tongue, was actually a planned disclosure.
“That removes the campaign finance violation, and we have all the documentary proof for it,” Mr. Giuliani said, explaining that the president was aware of what Mr. Giuliani intended to say on the program. He insisted he had spoken with Mr. Trump before and after the interview on Fox News. Mr. Giuliani also dismissed the social media furor.
But late Wednesday, Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said Mr. Giuliani’s remarks bolstered its lawsuit accusing the president and his campaign of breaking the law by failing to disclose a contribution to his campaign.
“Giuliani seemingly thought he was doing President Trump a favor — but instead made Trump’s legal problems much, much worse,” said Paul S. Ryan, the group’s vice president for policy and litigation.
Whether or not that proves true, Mr. Giuliani is likely to have an opinion about it. And a combative one, at that.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s new legal team made a chaotic debut as Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was tapped recently to be one of the president’s lawyers, potentially exposed his client to legal and political danger by publicly revealing the existence of secret payments to Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer.
After he moved into the White House, the president began paying Mr. Cohen $35,000 a month, Mr. Giuliani said, in part as reimbursement for a $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen made to a pornographic film actress to keep her from going public about an affair she said she had with Mr. Trump. The president confirmed he made payments to Mr. Cohen in a series of Twitter posts on Thursday morning.
The explosive revelation, which Mr. Giuliani said was intended to prove that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen violated no campaign finance laws, prompted frustration and disbelief among the president’s other legal and political advisers, some of whom said they feared the gambit could backfire.
Legally, the failure to disclose the payments could be a violation of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which requires that federal officials, including Mr. Trump, report any liabilities of more than $10,000 during the preceding year. Mr. Trump’s last disclosure report, which he signed and filed in June, mentions no debt to Mr. Cohen.
Politically, Mr. Giuliani’s remarks — made in television appearances and interviews — raised questions about the president’s truthfulness and created a firestorm at the White House, where aides were caught off guard and furiously sought to deflect questions they could not answer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said she had been unaware of the payments before the interviews.
“Everyone is wondering, what in the world is he doing?” said George Arzt, a longtime New York Democratic consultant who has known Mr. Giuliani for decades. “I would not have sent out Rudy to talk about the investigation. But Trump likes chaos and Trump just added to the chaos.”
By the end of the day, the president and his advisers had done little to clarify the confusion that Mr. Giuliani had set in motion a night earlier.
Mr. Giuliani did not consult every member of the president’s legal team, or the network of lawyers around Washington whose clients have been entangled in Mr. Trump’s legal disputes, according to several people close to the team. Emmet T. Flood, a lawyer hired by Mr. Trump on Wednesday, was not involved in Mr. Giuliani’s plans to reveal the payments to Mr. Cohen during an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, one of the people said.
The abrupt disclosure — which even caught Mr. Hannity, a confidant of the president’s, by surprise — set off a flurry of calls between Mr. Trump’s lawyers as they sought to determine whether Mr. Giuliani meant to reveal the president’s reimbursement. Witnesses and lawyers around Washington scoured transcripts, watched television clips and called each other in an effort to grasp the consequences of what Mr. Giuliani had said.
The president’s other lawyers ultimately determined that Mr. Giuliani had consulted with Mr. Trump, people close to them said, but were left speechless about why he decided to make the disclosure in such a high-profile way and without any strategy to handle the fallout.
Mr. Giuliani recognized the situation was problematic, two people close to him said, because Mr. Trump had previously said on Air Force One that he was unaware of the hush payments to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels. However, Mr. Trump and his aides see lying to or misleading the news media as far less troublesome than lying to investigators, they said.
Even some of the president’s advisers said they were skeptical of Mr. Giuliani’s statements that Mr. Cohen entered into a settlement, made payments to a pornographic film actress and was reimbursed by the president all without Mr. Trump’s knowing why.
Mr. Giuliani’s disclosure is a sign of how Mr. Trump’s reshuffled legal team — which now includes a highly paid Washington lawyer, a famous former mayor, a constitutional lawyer who specializes in religious cases and former federal prosecutors — will function in the coming weeks as they sort out who takes the lead on representing the president.
Mr. Giuliani has said he is the lead lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation in Washington. But his statements on Wednesday night related to the continuing investigation in New York that is examining the conduct of Mr. Cohen. People close to the president are concerned that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani may create more problems for themselves if they consult only with each other and leave out the other lawyers who may know more about the nuances of the cases.
Mr. Trump faces a two-front battle with the Justice Department: one investigation in New York into Mr. Cohen and the special counsel investigation in Washington.
Whoever runs the president’s legal defenses will almost certainly adopt a more aggressive strategy than the previous team, which was led by the Washington lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb.
Despite the president’s desire to take on the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the Justice Department, Mr. Dowd and Mr. Cobb persuaded Mr. Trump to buy into their strategy of cooperation. The more helpful the president was, Mr. Dowd and Mr. Cobb told him last year, the more likely the investigation would conclude by year’s end.
Instead, the investigation has intensified, and the president has concluded that approach was a mistake, according to people close to him. Convinced that the investigation is a growing threat to his presidency, he has resorted to his initial inclination to fight.
Mr. Trump appears to hope that Mr. Giuliani, a like-minded political street fighter from New York, will aid his combative approach. Mr. Giuliani’s comments on Wednesday and Thursday were an attempt to do just that.
His aggression carried risks. Besides revealing that the president had reimbursed Mr. Cohen, Mr. Giuliani appeared to admit that the payment to Ms. Clifford just before Election Day in 2016 was made because of concerns about the coming vote. That could be used to argue that it was an illegal campaign contribution.
“Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Giuliani said on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends.” “Cohen didn’t even ask. Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”
Violating campaign finance laws can be serious. John Edwards, a former Democratic senator and presidential hopeful, was charged with corruption for his role in trying to hide details of his affair with a videographer during his 2008 bid for the White House. Mr. Edwards’s trial ended in an acquittal on one count with the jury unable to reach a verdict on five others.
Mr. Giuliani’s comments also raised fresh questions about the president’s relationship with Mr. Cohen. As Mr. Giuliani told it, Mr. Cohen entered into a legal agreement with Ms. Clifford and paid her without Mr. Trump’s knowledge. Mr. Giuliani described that as commonplace, saying he performed similar services for his own clients. But legal ethics experts said such an arrangement was highly unusual and would only expose Mr. Cohen to new questions.
Lawyers are required to keep their clients fully informed of their activities and are generally prohibited from advancing money to or on behalf of their clients, said Deborah L. Rhode, a scholar on legal ethics at Stanford Law School. “This is a guy who says he’ll take a bullet for the president,” she said. “And what they’re giving him is the legal ethics equivalent of a bullet.”
“Giuliani thinks he’s serving President Trump’s interest,” she said. “President Trump’s interest is not the same as Michael Cohen’s interest.”
In his tweets on Thursday, Mr. Trump contradicted his earlier statements that he knew of no payment to Ms. Clifford. Mr. Trump said he paid a monthly retainer to Mr. Cohen and suggested that the payment to the actress could not be considered a campaign contribution.
Government watchdog groups warned that willfully violating the financial disclosure laws can be punished by a fine of up to $50,000 and a year in prison. Although federal officials who lie on the forms are also typically charged with other, more serious offenses such as bribery or fraud, more than 20 officials or former officials have been charged in the past 12 years with making false statements to federal officials, a felony offense. An Environmental Protection Agency official who failed to report a source of income on the form, for instance, was convicted and sentenced to probation.
“Mr. Giuliani did his client no favors,” said Norman L. Eisen, the chairman of the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Mr. Cohen had worked for Mr. Trump for a decade and has said he would “take a bullet” for him. Mr. Trump, however, treated Mr. Cohen poorly over the years, people familiar with their relationship have said.
Ms. Clifford is suing Mr. Cohen to try to be released from the nondisclosure agreement. And Mr. Cohen is under federal investigation into possible bank fraud, raising concerns in the president’s inner circle that Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer will cooperate with the government. Federal agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office and home last month and seized documents that included information about payments to Ms. Clifford.
Michael D. Shear and Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Reporting was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer, Sharon LaFraniere, Jeremy Peters, Michael S. Schmidt and Eileen Sullivan in Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on of the New York edition with the headline: On Attack for Trump, Giuliani May Aggravate Legal and Political Peril. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has contradicted Mr. Trump’s rationale for firing James B. Comey as the F.B.I. director, saying he was dismissed because he would not say publicly what he had told the president privately: that Mr. Trump was not under scrutiny in the Russia investigation at the time.
“He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview late Wednesday with Sean Hannity of Fox News. “He’s entitled to that.”
Mr. Giuliani’s assertion contradicted the myriad explanations that the president and his aides have given for the firing, and was the first public acknowledgment by a Trump adviser for what Mr. Comey has maintained: that he was fired for his handling of the Russia investigation.
At the time of Mr. Comey’s dismissal last May, both Mr. Trump and his aides cited his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and his decision to say publicly during the 2016 presidential campaign that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, would not be charged with a crime.
Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said that Mr. Comey’s handling of the Clinton investigation “was a total disgrace.” Later in the interview, Mr. Giuliani added: “I’m sorry, Hillary. I know you’re very disappointed you didn’t win. But you’re a criminal. Equal justice would mean you should go to jail. I do not know why the Justice Department is not investigating her.”
Mr. Comey said in July 2016 that Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information was “extremely careless” but fell short of criminal behavior and that he was not recommending charges.
Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Mr. Comey were overshadowed by his disclosure that Mr. Trump reimbursed his longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, for hush money paid before the election to Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress who has said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani’s comments directly contradicted Mr. Trump, who had said he had no knowledge of the payments.
Mr. Giuliani’s assertion that Mr. Comey was fired over the Russia inquiry did line up with accounts from both Mr. Comey and White House officials who have been interviewed by the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose appointment was prompted in part by the abrupt firing of Mr. Comey.
Those people said that Mr. Trump became increasingly frustrated in the spring of 2017 with Mr. Comey’s reluctance to say publicly that the president was not under investigation.
Mr. Comey testified to Congress that during calls to him that spring, the president asked him to get out word that he was not being investigated. Mr. Comey responded — and memorialized his answer later in memos — that such a matter needed to be considered through proper channels between the White House and the Justice Department, rather than by the two of them.
Mr. Comey was reluctant at the time to publicly exonerate Mr. Trump in case he were to be investigated later. Mr. Comey’s top lawyer at the F.B.I. had argued that as the bureau’s inquiry into links between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia progressed, investigators were almost certainly going to examine Mr. Trump’s conduct.
Since then, the special counsel has begun examining Mr. Trump’s actions, including his firing of Mr. Comey, and whether they constitute an effort to obstruct the investigation itself.
On Thursday, Mr. Comey criticized Mr. Giuliani’s description of F.B.I. agents who raided Mr. Cohen’s office and home as “storm troopers,” though he did not address his firing.
GIULIANI: They funneled through a law firm, and the president repaid it.
HANNITY: Oh. I didn’t know that. He did.
GIULIANI: Yep.
HANNITY: There’s no campaign finance law.
GIULIANI: Zero. Just like every — Sean, Sean —
HANNITY: So this decision was made by —
GIULIANI: Everybody was nervous about this from the very beginning. I wasn’t. I knew how much money Donald Trump put into that campaign, and I said, “$130,000? He could do a couple of checks for $130,000.”
When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, “Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael.
HANNITY: But you know the president didn’t know about this?
GIULIANI: Ah, he didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this. Like, I take care of this with my clients. I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.
_________
HANNITY: As we continue with President Trump’s attorney, former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, I want to clarify something. Because I was asking you about Perkins Coie and you said that the money was not campaign money — “I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know, it’s not campaign money, no campaign violation.” And I said, “Because they funneled through a law firm.”
I think we were talking about two different things there. I want to make sure.
GIULIANI: I was talking about the $130,000 payment —
HANNITY: Right.
GIULIANI: The settlement payment, which is a very regular thing for lawyers to do. The question there was, the only possible violation there would be: Was it a campaign finance violation? Which usually results in a fine, by the way, not this big stormtroopers coming in and breaking down his apartment and breaking down his office.
That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds or whatever funds — it doesn’t matter — and the president reimbursed that over the period of several months.
HANNITY: He had said, I distinctly remember, that he did it on his own —
GIULIANI: He did?
HANNITY: Without asking —
GIULIANI: I don’t know, I haven’t investigated that. No reason to dispute that, no reason to dispute that recollection. I like Michael a lot, you like Michael a lot —
HANNITY: I’ve known him a long time.
GIULIANI: I feel very bad he’s been victimized like this. The president feels even worse. The fact is, just trust me, they’re going to come up with no violations there. Payments are perfectly legal.
WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani has been President Trump’s lawyer for only a few days, and already he is causing political explosions.
In one of his first interviews since joining Mr. Trump’s legal team, Mr. Giuliani appeared to briefly stun Sean Hannity of Fox News on Wednesday night by asserting that the president had reimbursed his personal lawyer for a $130,000 hush payment to a pornographic film actress — contradicting his client, the president.
“I want to clarify something,” Mr. Hannity said, offering a do-over to Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, failed presidential candidate and longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s. Instead of taking a mulligan, Mr. Giuliani repeated the assertion.
It was another high-profile, slightly off-kilter moment for Mr. Giuliani, who has lived a life full of them.
A veteran of the no-holds-barred world of New York tabloids that Mr. Trump also inhabited for decades, Mr. Giuliani was an early and vocal supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. He was also a forceful critic of Hillary Clinton, a longtime political rival and Mr. Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race.
For Mr. Giuliani, the embrace of Mr. Trump’s candidacy at times appeared to be a likely entree back into the limelight of national politics after a disastrous 2008 bid for the White House. An energetic speech he delivered in 2016 at the Republican National Convention, at which Mr. Trump was nominated, prompted talk of Mr. Giuliani’s being appointed secretary of state or, perhaps, of his leading the Department of Homeland Security.
Those aspirations never materialized. Mr. Giuliani was passed over for both jobs — not once, but twice for each position.
Still, Mr. Giuliani has never wavered in his support for his fellow New Yorker. And when Mr. Trump was seeking a new lawyer — a high-wattage TV combatant who would not wilt under the pressures of the news media or legal adversaries — Mr. Giuliani seemed a natural pick.
But Mr. Giuliani has historically been something of a loose cannon who is not used to having his words carefully managed. (Just ask his campaign handlers from 2008, who were constantly frustrated by his freestyling ways.)
So it may have surprised nobody when Mr. Giuliani’s comments on Wednesday night on Fox News set off a frenzy on Twitter. Almost instantly, people were reposting video of Mr. Trump on Air Force One last month saying he knew nothing about the payments.
Asked about his remarks after finishing the Fox News interview, Mr. Giuliani said that what might have seemed to some viewers — including, perhaps, Mr. Hannity — like a slip of the tongue, was actually a planned disclosure.
“That removes the campaign finance violation, and we have all the documentary proof for it,” Mr. Giuliani said, explaining that the president and his other lawyers were well aware of what Mr. Giuliani intended to say on the program. He insisted he had spoken with the president before and after the interview on Fox News. Mr. Giuliani also dismissed the social media furor. There was no cause for concern.
But it may take some time to determine if he was correct.
Late Wednesday night, Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said Mr. Giuliani’s remarks bolstered its lawsuit accusing the president and his campaign of breaking the law by failing to disclose a contribution to his campaign.
“Giuliani seemingly thought he was doing President Trump a favor — but instead made Trump’s legal problems much, much worse,” said Paul S. Ryan, the group’s vice president for policy and litigation.
Whether or not that proves true, Mr. Giuliani is likely to have an opinion about it. And a combative one, at that.
A day after contradicting Donald Trump’s and longtime Trump general counsel Michael Cohen’s claims that the president knew nothing about Cohen’s payments to Stormy Daniels, Rudy Giuliani contradicted himself in a Fox & Friends interview.
The former New York City Mayor and current Trump legal team member insisted that the payments were personal, not political — but moments later demonstrated that they were indeed campaign related.
On Thursday morning, Giuliani first said that the payment was to protect the Trump family from a “six year old, false allegation” that Donald Trump had had an extramarital affair.
“If we had to defend this as not being a campaign contribution, I think we could do that,” he said. “This is for personal reasons. The was the president had been hurt personally, not politically, personally so much — and the first lady — by some of the false allegations. That one more false allegation six years old, I think [Cohen] was trying to help the family. For that he’s treated like some kind of villain.”
Giuliani added that the $130,000 payment was “to save not so much their marriage, as much as their reputation.”
But then moments later, Giuliani noted the political reason for the payment. “Imagine if that came out of October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton…” he said. “Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”
If Cohen indeed made the payment — either as a gift or even as a loan without interest — to aid Trump politically, it could be considered an illegal and unreported campaign contribution in excess of the $2,700 federal contribution limit that was in effect for the 2016 campaign.
Mr. Giuliani said that he had spoken with the president before and after his interview on Fox News, and that Mr. Trump and other lawyers on the team were aware of what he would say. On Thursday, Mr. Trump said that he paid a monthly retainer to Mr. Cohen, suggesting, as Mr. Giuliani had, that the payment to Ms. Clifford was not a campaign contribution.
The president has repeatedly denied that he had an affair with Ms. Clifford, who has described having intimate contact with Mr. Trump before he became president.
Mr. Giuliani’s comments are also in direct contrast to what Mr. Cohen has been saying for months — that he used his own money to pay Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. Mr. Cohen is under investigation by the F.B.I., which raided his home and office last month and seized documents that included information about the payment to Ms. Clifford.
Video
Trump Speaks About Stormy Daniels Scandal
In April, President Trump denied knowledge of a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels. It was the first time he commented publicly on the scandal.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
“They funneled through a law firm, and the president repaid it,” Mr. Giuliani told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host. After Mr. Hannity asked for clarification, Mr. Giuliani insisted: “That was money that was paid by his lawyer. The president reimbursed that over the period of several months.”
The source of the $130,000 payment is at the center of several legal disputes involving Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Clifford. That includes whether the payment to Ms. Clifford was in effect a contribution to Mr. Trump’s campaign aimed at preventing a negative article from surfacing just before Election Day.
Mr. Giuliani said that Mr. Cohen had “settled several problems for” Mr. Trump, and that the payment related to them. Another person familiar with the payment confirmed that that was the mechanism used to repay Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Giuliani said that he was “not clear that” Mr. Trump was aware of the payment to Ms. Clifford at the time it was made, and he said that his understanding was that the president did not learn about the payment to her until recently.
“I don’t think he did” know “until now,” Mr. Giuliani said.
The comments on Fox sent a jolt through Washington and New York, including the legal teams working on behalf of the president, Mr. Cohen and Ms. Clifford, who has sued Mr. Cohen in an attempt to be released from the nondisclosure agreement that accompanied the $130,000 payment in October 2016.
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Ms. Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, outside federal court last month in New York. Mr. Giuliani’s statement appears to contradict the president, who has at times said that he was unaware of the payment to Ms. Clifford. Credit Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
Michael Avenatti, Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, said Wednesday night on Twitter that Mr. Giuliani’s comments amounted to an admission that the president had lied to the American people about whether he was aware of the hush payment.
“Mr. Trump stood on AF1 and blatantly lied,” Mr. Avenatti wrote. “This followed the lies told by others close to him, including Mr. Cohen. This should never be acceptable in our America. We will not rest until justice is served.”
In an interview, Mr. Avenatti said a key issue going forward would be how Mr. Trump accounted for any such payment and whether it was hidden in a way that could violate anti-money laundering statutes.
Mr. Giuliani’s statement to Mr. Hannity was the latest of several contradictory narratives from Mr. Trump’s representatives about the deal to pay Ms. Clifford for her silence during the campaign, each of which have had potential implications for violating campaign finance disclosure laws.
Mr. Cohen had previously provided a detailed account of how he had paid Ms. Clifford $130,000 out of his own pocket, drawing down on a home loan to do so. That opened Mr. Cohen and the Trump campaign to charges that he violated the law by exceeding the amount that an individual can donate to a presidential campaign.
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Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, leaving the federal courthouse last month in New York City. He has been saying for months that he used his own money to pay Ms. Clifford to keep quiet. Credit Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
If Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payment, that could help Mr. Cohen and the campaign avoid prosecution for violating campaign contribution limits because a candidate is allowed to contribute an unlimited amount to his own campaign.
According to a person close to the president, Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the payment, a determination made in recent weeks by the president’s lawyers after examining banking records. The lawyers determined that campaign funds had not been used for the payment, the person said.
The lawyers also concluded that the funds did not come from a third party or the Trump Organization, the person said. While the disclosure may be embarrassing for the president, his lawyers believe the payment did not violate campaign finance laws, the person said.
Another person familiar with the payment to Mr. Cohen from Mr. Trump said the money was reimbursed in a series of payments, not in a lump sum.
But such a payment from the candidate — even if it was made through a lawyer — would have to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission as an in-kind contribution to the campaign and as an expenditure by the campaign, if it was for the purpose of influencing the election.
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Mr. Giuliani boarding Air Force One in March at the airport in Charlotte, N.C. “They funneled through a law firm, and the president repaid it,” Mr. Giuliani said of the payment. Credit Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Mr. Trump’s campaign did not disclose the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen on its commission reports.
The crucial question in determining whether the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance laws might be whether the payment was specifically intended to help Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Paul S. Ryan, an official at the government watchdog group Common Cause, argued that “all the facts indicate that the payment was to influence the election.”
Mr. Ryan asserted that Mr. Giuliani’s admission could allow prosecutors to make the case that Mr. Trump “knowingly caused his campaign committee to file an incomplete disclosure report with the F.E.C.”
“Until tonight, it would have been tough to prove that because Donald Trump had denied knowing about the payment,” Mr. Ryan said. “But his reimbursement amounts to knowledge.”
While most violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act’s disclosure provisions are misdemeanors, a knowing and willful violation could be a felony.
But Mr. Giuliani’s comments could cloud Mr. Avenatti’s legal argument that his client should be formally released from the hush agreement she signed. When the president told reporters he knew nothing about the deal, he helped Ms. Clifford’s case that the hush agreement was not binding if Mr. Trump did not know about it and did not sign it.
Though far from bringing clarity to the question, Mr. Giuliani obscured it further — now two lawyers for the president are providing two very different versions of events.
न्यूयॉर्क के पूर्व मेयर रुडोल्फ गिउलिआनि हाल ही में ट्रंप की कानूनी टीम का हिस्सा बने हैं. उन्होंने ‘फॉक्स न्यूज’ के प्रस्तोता सियान हनीटी से एक साक्षात्कार में यह रहस्योद्घाटन किया.
पोर्न स्टार स्टॉर्मी डेनियल और अमेरिकी राष्ट्रपति डोनाल्ड ट्रंप.
