You all probably know that last night in an interview on Fox, Rudy Giuliani stated that Trump knew about Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels, and that Trump repaid Cohen. That is a total contradiction of Trump’s own statement that he knew nothing about the payment.
It’s possible that Giuliani didn’t know what Trump’s team’s statements have been on this. Maybe he was ignorant that the claims have been that Cohen did it, Trump didn’t know. But I’m having a hard time believing that Giuliani hadn’t heard any of this.
Or, maybe one of the prosecution teams has found proof of repayments to Cohen, and Giuliani was trying to be the first to release the news, to correct the record. Maybe declaring “Trump paid him back” is an effort to block campaign finance violation charges.
So what do you all think? Interview gaff, or preemptive “we didn’t do anything wrong” statement?
Bonus question: if it was a political gaff, does it get Giuliani fired?
I’d vote for deliberate. Not paying Cohen back puts Cohen hot water (campaign finance laws and unethical lawyer behavior). I assume they want to keep him happy, if they can.
Now that we know Cohen was being tapped, I would assume it was a weak attempt to get ahead of the part where Trump asks if he ever deposited those checks he sent.
I am unsure. If it was deliberate, it seems clumsy and ham-fisted. If accidental, that’s what you get when you hire a guy who never saw a camera he didn’t like and a microphone he didn’t want to wear out.
I can’t get this picture out of my head- imagine Rudy is Col Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and Mueller is Martin Sheen’s character:
Guiliani: “Are my methods… unsound?”
Mueller: " I see…no…method…at all"
I know Avenatti thinks this is great news. Trump is tied to the entire thing now. Face it, when you resort to hiring Rudy to be your lawyer, you know LegalZoom failed you.
I don’t know if Rudy’s comments were planned or idiotically off-hand (I would guess the latter). Either way, they don’t seem to have helped.
What I really want to know is, why would Rudy snack on nuts right before going on hannity’s show? He spent the whole time picking things out of his teeth.
Which is worse? Campaign finance violation charges (the $130k came from Trump’s election campaign), or charges that Trump tried to structure/hide the repayment to Cohen, by making multiple payments of under $10k, to keep them from being reported? Giuliani did state that Trump repaid Cohen over time. I can’t imagine Trump not able to repay $130k all at once, so what other reason would there be for repaying over time?
I think they made the calculation that admitting Trump had an illicit affair with a porn star and used Cohen to pay her off to keep it quiet so he could win an election was better than admitting that Cohen paid her off to be quiet with his own money as an illegal campaign contribution.
His followers don’t care about the affair or the coverup, so it’s really about avoiding the charges of illegal campaign contributions.
Just wanted to hijack this long enough to express my appreciation of the idea of a business named the “House of Ill-Fitting Dentures.” Kinda like a mortuary named “Death & Stuff.”
Never said she’s shocked by it. But with every new revelation, she seems more and more outwardly peeved that all of this shit is coming out into the open. Remember when the Stormy thing broke? She cancelled a trip she was supposed to take with the Philanderer-in-Chief. And she released a picture commemorating the family’s one-year anniversary in the White House…without the president in it. And as news snowballs, there are videos and pics of her rejecting his attempts to touch her in public.
The more public this becomes, the more mortified she (I would presume) becomes by it all, especially for their young son. Despite the lack of humanity in Trump, there are still human beings with real lives and emotions and whatnot involved with this turd.
Hence, I can’t imagine this bodes well for his marriage.