Giuliani tries to fix disastrous interview tour, continues to make things worse – ThinkProgress

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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.

JUST IN: Rudy Giuliani issues statement "intended to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days." https://t.co/usoHflZShm pic.twitter.com/cHKwDvhMnq

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 4, 2018

Giuliani’s first point

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.

Then, Trump threw Giuliani under the bus and said he was not familiar with the facts.

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.

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The fundamental contradictions in Giuliani’s erratic interview with The Washington Post – ThinkProgress

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On the heels of his disastrous interview with Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani did another with The Washington Post. This one got somewhat less attention, but was just as problematic for his client.

The most important thing for Giuliani to establish is that Michael Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels was not a campaign contribution. But in the Washington Post interview, Giuliani provided more evidence to the contrary.

Giuliani told a muddled story about the payment to Daniels. While he repeatedly insisted that that money ultimately came from Trump’s “personal funds” and that Cohen and Trump “never considered this a campaign payment,” at another point he admits that he’s doesn’t know if Trump “distinguished it from other things Cohen might have done for him during the campaign… I don’t know that he distinguished it from other expenses that Cohen had for which he had to be reimbursed.”

By acknowledging that Trump lumped the expense with other explicitly campaign-related expenses, Giuliani suggests that, in Trump’s mind, the payment was designed to benefit his campaign. Giuliani also blows up the fundamental argument as to why this was not a campaign expense: it was paid for with Trump’s personal funds. Now, Giuliani is saying that campaign expenses were paid in the exact same way.

During his conversation with The Post, Giuliani also contradicted himself about when President Trump learned of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. At one point, Giuliani suggested that Trump was aware of the $130,000 payment at the time it was made in October 2016, and even chatted with Cohen about it.

“I also think, personally, neither one of them saw it as a campaign thing; they thought of it as a personal thing,” Giuliani said. “Personal reputation, family, wife, harassment charge. She doesn’t want a lot of money? Pay her. Let her go away. Follow me?”

But at another point, Giuliani explicitly says that Trump “wasn’t told” about the payment before the election — and even if he was, he “wouldn’t have remembered it, like I wouldn’t have remembered it,” because he was so busy in the days leading up to November 8, 2016.

Giuliani also offered an implausible interpretation of the comments Trump made aboard Air Force One on April 5, when he pretended to know nothing about the Daniels payment.

Pressed on why his personal attorney would, just before the 2016 election, make a $130,000 hush payment to Daniels, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

Giuliani’s explanation for Trump’s comment is that Trump didn’t get the “full picture” about the Daniels payment until “about two weeks ago.” But he argues there’s nothing unusual about that, because $130,000 is chump change for Trump.

“This is not the kind of money that you would absolutely think of as the settlement of some kind of substantial case,” Giuliani said. “It’d be more the kind of money that you’d think of to be used to pay for a harassment case, which is the way they always thought of this.”

According to Giuliani, Trump did not know about the expense even after the details of the agreement with Cohen became public, and despite the fact that Trump was reimbursing Cohen for it throughout last year. It’s a valiant effort by Giuliani — but it strains credulity.

Giuliani wants the American people to buy that Cohen decided to make a hush payment to Daniels despite the fact that Trump never actually had an affair with her, because it wasn’t “a lot of money.”

“What the public doesn’t understand is that lawyers have the authorization up to a certain amount to spend money to protect their clients from embarrassment or unjust charges, shakedowns,” Giuliani said. “That’s not uncommon.”

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