Just a day after he gave a rambling interview that may have implicated Donald Trump in two separate federal crimes and given Robert Mueller’s team a heap of new material, Rudy Giuliani, legal mind extraordinaire, is scrambling to set the record straight. In an interview with NBC News, the newest addition to Trump’s legal team explained that when the president denied knowing anything about Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels—“no,” he answered last month when a reporter asked whether he was aware the cash had changed hands—it was because he’d only recently learned that the funds he sent to Cohen were intended to reimburse him for the hush money. “I don’t think the president realized he paid [Cohen] back for that specific thing until [his legal team] made him aware of the paperwork,” Giuliani said, adding that Trump’s response to the revelation was, “Oh my goodness, I guess that’s what it was for.”
Rudy’s feeble attempt at damage control came after he admitted to Sean Hannity on Wednesday that Trump was aware of the payment to Daniels. He dug that hole even deeper in a subsequent interview, asking, “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton? . . . Cohen made it go away.” (Per the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, a monetary sum can’t be used “for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office” in any way—including to stave off potentially damaging revelations about affairs with porn stars!) Giuliani reversed course on Thursday, claiming to NBC that “If there was no campaign, Cohen would have made the same payment in the same amount to prevent personal embarrassment and heartache to [Trump’s] wife.”
Scoffing at the theory that his controversial publicity spree had caused irreversible damage to Trump’s legal position, Giuliani framed his admissions as part of an elite strategy concocted between himself and the president: “I wanted to get out in front of the Special Counsel and the Southern District [of New York] because at some point they would realize this information and leak it,” he said.
If the president was looped in, however, his staff was not. “The first awareness I had was during the interview last night,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Thursday of Giuliani’s disclosure, while staffers were reportedly left “scrambling” to manage the fallout, and “expressed a mixture of exasperation and horror,” with one simply texting a Washington Post reporter “a string of emoji characters in response, including a tiny container of popcorn.” Evidently, emojis were in heavy use Wednesday—per The Wall Street Journal, “another official, asked about the thinking behind Wednesday’s announcement, responded by text only an emoji of a man shrugging.”
Cohen himself, who has recently expressed bewilderment at Trump’s counterproductive interviews, was caught off guard by Guiliani’s, too. Such were the depths of his displeasure, in fact, that they could not be contained by the broad lexicon of the emoji keypad. “He said, ‘look, there’s two people that know exactly what happened, myself and the president, and you’ll be hearing my side of the story,’” said Donny Deutsch, who spoke to Cohen on Thursday night. “And he was obviously very frustrated with what had come out yesterday.”
By Friday morning, even Trump had seemingly cottoned on to the fact that his newest lawyer’s pronouncements could make his life more difficult. “Rudy is a great guy, but he started a day ago,” the president told reporters, though Giuliani’s start date was actually two weeks earlier. “He’ll get his facts straight.” Whether those facts would be of the “alternative” variety or not, the president declined to say. As if to prove the point, he boldly denied ever having told reporters that he hadn’t known about the payment to Daniels, despite video evidence to the contrary. “You take a look at what I said,” he added. “You go take a look at what we said.”
