President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani made several eyebrow-raising claims on behalf of his client across a series of live television interviews since Sunday.
Here are six of the least cogent talking points from Giuliani in the past 24 hours.
1: Trump ‘Doesn’t Have to’ Explain His Own Tweet
Giuliani would not provide an explanation for Trump’s Monday tweets regarding “conflicts of interest” on the part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller when asked to do so by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on New Day.
There is No Collusion! The Robert Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt, headed now by 17 (increased from 13, including an Obama White House lawyer) Angry Democrats, was started by a fraudulent Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. Therefore, the Witch Hunt is an illegal Scam!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2018
Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2018
….Also, why is Mueller only appointing Angry Dems, some of whom have worked for Crooked Hillary, others, including himself, have worked for Obama….And why isn’t Mueller looking at all of the criminal activity & real Russian Collusion on the Democrats side-Podesta, Dossier?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2018
Partial transcript below.
CAMEROTA: How can the president make this claim and not support it?
GIULIANI: He doesn’t have to.
CAMEROTA: Why is it up to Robert Mueller to have to support the president’s tweet?
GIULIANI: Because he has the conflict, not the president.
CAMEROTA: What’s the conflict?
GIULIANI: I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I know exactly what the conflict is. I have a good idea what it is. It’s one that would have kept me out of the investigation.
CAMEROTA: What does that mean?
GIULIANI: What it means is, that I would have had a personal interest, a personal dispute with the President of the United States before the investigation that really precluded me from being in it.
2: Cohen Taping Trump Is Like Brutus Killing Caesar
Giuliani waxed Shakespearean during this same New Day interview. He likened Michael Cohen’s release of surreptitiously recorded meetings with Trump to CNN’s Chris Cuomo to Marcus Brutus’s betrayal of Julius Caesar and Iago’s contrivances against Othello.
Partial transcript below.
CAMEROTA: The fact that President Trump for more than ten years worked mostly with this fixer, this close confidant who you now say it is a pathological liar, a lifelong liar, what does that say about the president’s judgment?
GIULIANI: [Donald Trump] turned out to have a close friend betray him like Iago betrayed Othello, like Brutus put the last knife into Caesar. I think they both trusted those people. It happens in life, Alisyn, that you get double-crossed. I’m not going to mention them; I’ve had people that I work with under tremendous stress, remarkable people who turn out to be terribly disloyal and dishonest.
3: ‘Collusion Is Not A Crime’
Giuliani repeatedly said Monday — in two separate morning interviews — that “collusion” is not a crime.
“I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime; collusion is not a crime,” he told Fox & Friends.
Then on New Day, he said: “Four months, they’re not going to be colluding with Russia, which I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians.”
Giuliani also told the New York Times in December: “There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime.”
4: ‘We’d Like to Get This Over by September’
“We’d like to get this over with by September,” Giuliani declared on New Day.
“I do believe that Mueller does too. He said something in our meeting with him — the last meeting we had with him where he — where he thought that September was the date to get their report in.” he continued. “It makes sense. It’s before — well before the — well, not well before, but enough before the November election so that you can’t say you interfered with it one way or the other.”
Giuliani told the New York Times in May that Mueller wishes to end “the Russia inquiry” by September, a claim subsequently denied by a Reuters report via an anonymous source “familiar with the probe.”
In a June interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Giuliani tentatively accepted the premise of a July 4th deadline for Trump to make a decision over whether or not to sit with Mueller for an interview. Trump has not yet publicly indicated a choice either way.
Trump’s previous lawyer Ty Cobb repeatedly made inaccurate predictions of forthcoming dates for the conclusion of Mueller’s special counsel.
5: We Waived Attorney-Client Privilege over Cohen’s Recordings After They Were Leaked, but We Actually Wanted Them Leaked
Giuliani told Fox News Channel’s Ainsley Earhardt that he decided to waive attorney-client privilege over Michael Cohen’s surreptitiously recorded audio of a meeting with Trump following Cohen’s leak of the recording to CNN’s Chris Cuomo via Lanny Davis.
Giuliani then said he wanted the audio clips to be publicly available, describing them as advantageous to his client.
Partial transcript below.
EARHARDT: He can’t be disbarred because you waived the right. You listened to all of them and you said, “You can release them.”
GIULIANI: No. We waived them only after he released them.
EARHARDT: What? He released them and then you waived it?
GIULIANI: Yeah. He gave out a leak to the press. The New York Times ran the first story — Maggie Haberman and Mike Schmidt — they’ve categorically said it wasn’t the Trump people who leaked it. Well, the government didn’t have it. There is only one other people who had it.
EARHARDT: But why did you even waive if it was already released?
GIULIANI: Because he’s innocent, completely innocent. There’s more on the tape. He did nothing wrong. The other stuff on the tape is equally as useful to the president, and we were hoping we could sucker them into getting out the other tapes, because they’re really, really good.
6: Davis May Try Linking Trump To Kennedy Assassination
“Lanny Davis may claim that he knows about the Kennedy assassination and that Trump is somehow involved in it,” Giuliani quipped to Fox New Channel’s Steve Doocy. “It’s wild and crazy stuff.”
In May of 2016, Trump accused Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) father of associating with Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy in 1963.
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