Giuliani Becomes Latest Lawyer to Make the President's Life a Living Nightmare
Rudy Giuliani was supposed to make things better. He's exactly the kind of high-profile, questionable judgment hire that Trump loves, and he was going to provide some kind of magic bullet to make the whole Robert Mueller thing go away.
But in record time, Giuliani has proven he's just one more bumbling Trump lawyer.
On Wednesday night, Giuliani appeared on Fox News to give an interview to famed Trump cheerleader Sean Hannity, and promptly set Trump's entire Stormy Daniels story on fire. Specifically, Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in hush money, and Giuliani wants everyone to know that despite reports to the contrary, Trump definitely paid Cohen back. Just one problem—this directly contradicts repeated statements from both Trump, who insisted to reporters on Air Force 1 that he knew nothing about Cohen's arrangement with Daniels, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who affirmed everything the president the said.
While it seems insane to blow up your client's story like that, Giuliani seems to be trying to undermine the possibility that Daniels' payment violated campaign finance law. Shortly after the Fox News interview, he was on the phone with the New York Times:
In an interview with The New York Times shortly after his Fox News appearance, Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and longtime Trump confidant who recently joined the president’s legal team, said that he had documentation showing that Mr. Trump had personally made the payment. Mr. Giuliani indicated that the goal was to conclusively demonstrate that there was no campaign finance violation involved.
"That removes the campaign finance violation, and we have all the documentary proof for it,” he said. Mr. Giuliani added that when the initial payment was made, Mr. Cohen did it “on his own authority.”
“Some time after the campaign is over, they set up a reimbursement, $35,000 a month, out of his personal family account,” Mr. Giuliani said. He added that over all, Mr. Cohen was paid $460,000 or $470,000 from Mr. Trump through those payments, which also included money for “incidental expenses” that he had incurred on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
Giuliani also told the Times that he spoke with Trump before and after Wednesday night's interview, and that Trump's team was aware of what he was going to say. And early Thursday morning, Trump tweeted out those same talking points, saying NDAs were "very common for celebrities and people of wealth" and that campaign money played "no roll [sic] in this transaction."
And then Giuliani went on Fox & Friends, and it's hard to picture an episode of the president's favorite educational programming where things could have gone worse for him. While Giuliani said they could definitely "defend this as not being a campaign contribution" because it was arranged for "personal reasons," he promptly followed it up by saying: "Imagine if this came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton."
"So to make it go away, they made this deal?" asked Steve Doocy, encouragingly.
"Cohen didn't even ask," Giuliani replied. "Cohen made it go away. He did his job."
If you're trying to convince people that you didn't do something for political motivations, it doesn't help to immediately explain how what you did was a huge help to you politically. Meanwhile, on MSNBC Daniels' lawyer, Micahel Avenatti, said he was "absolutely speechless" over Giuliani's revelations. And at Fox itself, even Laura Ingraham appeared flabbergasted, saying it was wild for Giuliani to so flagrantly contradict Trump.
"I love Rudy," she said, "but they better have an explanation for that. That's a problem."
She's not wrong.
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