"This is where we are: When one of the president's lawyers tells the truth, it's blockbuster news. That's what happened Wednesday night when Giuliani, a relative newcomer to President Trump's ever-rotating legal team, went on Hannity for what should have been another softball interview. To everyone's surprise, Giuliani announced that President Trump reimbursed his attorney Michael Cohen the $130,000 Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) was paid to keep silent about an affair she says she had with Trump.
"Which means that Giuliani admitted that Trump lied about this, the White House lied about it, and Cohen didn't exactly lie about it, but carefully chose his words to fool everyone into thinking something that was false. Good work, Rudy!"
Here's how Giuliani explained it to Hannity and his listeners, then repeated it later to other outlets. Giuliani says it was all perfectly legal; the money was not campaign finance money, and there was no violation of campaign finance rules.
As I understand it, Cohen was paid a regular retainer fee from the Trump Organization (but not the campaign). The retainer supposedly was part fee for Cohen's services but was also a fund that he could use to make hush payments and take other actions to "fix" problems for Trump. And Trump did not necessarily know about what he was doing at the time Cohen was doing it.
Cohen has been careful to parse his words to give impressions without actually saying things he could be held accountable for as lies. For example, here's what Cohen said about the Stormy Daniels payment:
"In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds [retainer fee he had been paid or would be paid later?] to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford. Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly." [I'm not sure how he can claim the 'indirectly' as true, but all the other might pass as true. And Cohen can claim that he, himself, violated no campaign finance violation; but it's unclear whether Trump himself might be vulnerable to that charge, since he was making a lot of contributions to his own campaign, which he reported (as far as we know); but not this one.]
Rudy first appeared on Sean Hannity's show on Wednesday night to make this revelation -- and at that time he claimed that the $130,000 payment had nothing to do with the campaign. However, Giuliani went back on "Fox and Friends" the next morning and made a conflicting statement. Trying to explain why the payment was made when it was, Giuliani said:
"Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton . . . Cohen didn't even ask. Cohen made it go away. He did his job."
Waldman concludes: "There you are. . . . All this helps explain why Trump's lawyers keep quitting. Not only is he a difficult client who won't take sensible legal advice, his past and present are littered with legally questionable actions you're going to have to clean up, and chances are that he has lied about them, so you're going to have to deal with that too. You'll have to go on Fox to reassure his supporters that everything is under control, but doing so means that you might wind up digging the hole he's in even deeper."
And so . . . Rudy Giuliani, the aging ex-mayor and lawyer turned sleazy fix-it man and Fox TV pundit, as well as avid Trump supporter. Just what's called for for this sleazy, clean-up job. Don't expect Rudy to argue before the Supreme Court whether a sitting president can be compelled to testify. That's the job for the other new lawyer, Emmet Flood with a stellar reputation for high level, white collar cases.
However, if somebody in Trump's semi-sane world can't keep Giuliani off Fox TV, they may come to regret involving him at all. In fact, he's already, with his blathering, created more problems. Saying things like: the Mueller investigation won't go after Ivanka -- "she's off limits because she's his daughter and she's a woman." Now Jared is another matter, because he's a man "and men are disposable." [followed by that toothy Giuliani grin.]
* * *
Another big news flash: Federal investigators in the New York office handling the Cohen case, have had a wire tap on Cohen's phone, sources told NBC News. It's not clear when it began, but it was at least prior to the raid and was part of the evidence to support the request for those search warrants. Sources also said that it was still in place and likely would have picked up the call from President Trump to Cohen following the raid. However, it's the kind of tap that records only the meta-data of the calls -- who, when, etc. -- not the content. Still, a lot of useful information for investigators.
Ralph
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