Rudy Giuliani Went on T.V. Again, Still Hard at Work on Those Facts!
PoliticsThe brain trust over at Trump Legal HQ is catching up to speed on lawyering. They’re a team of legal sleuths about to blow the lid off this whodunnit and crack the case with crimefighting capers and a whole lot of trial balloons. That might not be what lawyers do, who knows, it’s trial by fire!
On Sunday, Trump legal team newcomer Rudy Giuliani made another truly incredible televised appearance on a talk show, this time on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti subsequently called it “one of the worst TV appearances by any attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.” It was.
If you missed it, last week Giuliani told Fox News that Trump personally repaid lawyer Michael Cohen the $130,000 hush money settlement which Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels–the one thing Michael Cohen has been very very very clear did not happen. Rudy!
Today, he admitted, he’s “learning.” Here are the highlights:
Rudy Giuliani: It depends on what you mean by “met her.”
George Stephanopoulos: Yeah well, there’s the picture right there, I just want to get that fact on the table.
He’s still in the fact-selection phase.
George Stephanopoulos: The other day you also told Buzzfeed that at some point after the 2016 election, Michael Cohen had complained to some people that he hadn’t been paid by Donald Trump, and then you said Cohen met with Trump and told him, and Giuliani said ‘We’ll cover your expenses,’ and they worked out this $35,000 a month retainer after that, so the president did know about this after the campaign.
Rudy Giuliani: Can’t say that. I mean, at some point, yes, but it could have been recently, it could have been a while back. Those are the facts that we’re still working on…This is more rumor than anything else. [Emphasis mine]
GS: But you said that to Buzzfeed.
RG: Well, yeah, that’s one of the possibilities and one of the rumors.
GS: You stated it as fact.
RG: Well, yeah, maybe I did, but right now, I’m at the point where I’m learning. [Emphasis mine]
Stormy got gipped:
RG: A hundred and thirty thousand dollars between a lawyer and a client who’s worth billions is not–I don’t like saying this–not a great deal of money. $1.3 million is a great deal of money. That’s the kind of money you would think of as a settlement.
There could be more actual settlements, or, he wouldn’t rule it out, per se.
He hopes Trump will not testify to the special counsel. It would be “a risk.”
RG: Every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify.
But then he told George that speaking with the press is “political” in nature, which means we all know we’re spitballing here, ya know?
This concludes week 67 of the Trump presidency.