Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani revealed on Sunday that President Donald Trump may not agree to testify or be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller because his “recollection” of the truth “keeps changing.”
“This is the reason you don’t let the president testify,” Giuliani told ABC host George Stephanopoulos. “Our recollection keeps changing, or we’re not even asked a question and somebody makes an assumption.”
Asked about shifting explanations for statement on Trump Tower meeting, Rudy Giuliani tells @GStephanopoulos:
"This is the reason you don't let the president testify. Our recollection keeps changing, or we're not even asked a question and somebody makes an assumption." pic.twitter.com/DLQsGbfGhA
President Donald Trump’s lawyer flatly admitted that the White House is waging a fierce information campaign against special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The aim: to delegitimize the probe in the eyes of voters and lawmakers in Congress.
Rudy Giuliani, asked about the near-daily attacks on the probe, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, “They are giving us the material. I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have the material. … It is for public opinion.”
“Because eventually, the decision here is going to be: impeach, [or] not impeach,” he continued. “Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. So our jury … is the American people. And the American people … Republicans largely, independents pretty substantially, and even Democrats now question the legitimacy of it.”
Trump in recent days has ratcheted up his attacks against the Russia investigation, the Justice Department and the FBI. He has claimed that the FBI had “infiltrated” and “spied” on his 2016 presidential campaign when the agency reportedly used an informant to make contact with Trump campaign advisers who allegedly had suspicious contacts linked to Russia. He also demanded the Justice Department investigate the accusations and turn over any relevant documents to Congress.
Meanwhile, Democrats who attended a classified briefing about the informant with top DOJ officials last week said they saw “no evidence to support any allegation that the FBI or any intelligence agency placed a spy in the Trump campaign.” Top Republicans who also attended the briefing have remained silent, however.
Asked Sunday by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he believed the Russia probe is legitimate, Giuliani said, “Not anymore.”
“I did when I came in, but now I see Spygate,” Giuliani said, using Trump’s preferred term for describing revelations that an FBI informant made contact with two of his campaign advisers as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling.
“I know 50 years of investigatory experience tells me they don’t have a darn thing because they would’ve used it already and they wouldn’t be off on collusion, they wouldn’t be off on Manafort, they wouldn’t be off on Cohen,” Giuliani added.
During a heated exchange with reporters Friday, President Donald Trump insisted that he’s “not changing any stories” related to the $130,000 hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels just days before the November 2016 presidential election.
“We’re not changing any stories. All I’m telling you is this country is right now running so smooth and to be bringing up that kind of crap and to be bringing up witch hunts all the time, that’s all you want to talk about,” Trump told reporters just before boarding Air Force One to Dallas.
Moments later, the president instructed reporters to “take a look at what I said” in April when he took questions from reporters aboard Air Force One about the Daniels payoff. So, what did the president say less than one month ago regarding his knowledge of the $130,000 payment? Here’s the exchange from April:
Here's what Pres. Trump said in April on Air Force One about the Stormy Daniels payment:
Reporter: "Mr. President did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?"
Reporter: “Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?”
Trump: “No, no. What else?”
Reporter: “Why did Michael Cohen make it if there was no truth to her allegations?
”
Trump: “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney and you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.”
Reporter: “Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?”
Trump: “No, I don’t know. No.”
The exchange left little room for interpretation as to whether Trump knew about the payment or not. Thus, it left no wiggle room for the president to now say that “we’re not changing any stories” after Trump’s outside lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that Trump repaid the $130,000 hush money sum to his longtime attorney Michael Cohen.
Whether or not Giuliani had “his facts straight” when made that comment is irrelevant. Even if Giuliani was not correct, the fact remains that the Trump team’s story about the hush money payment did, in fact, change between April and this week. Trump cannot say one moment that he didn’t know about the payment, only for his lawyer to go on national television weeks later and say the exact opposite. Again, even if Giuliani was misinformed, he still changed the narrative in the national media and, like it or not, the narrative in the media is the story.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Saturday blasted President Trump for ignoring a court order demand to release a memo drafted under former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s guidance that outlined a plan to implement a travel ban without making it seem as if it was directly aimed at Muslims.
A federal judge in Detroit ordered the Trump administration to turn over the memo by May 19, according to reports. The ACLU said Saturday that Trump did not meet the deadline on Friday.
“If, as the administration claims, the Executive Order is not a Muslim Ban, then why is the administration refusing to turn over the Giuliani memo? What is in that document that the government doesn’t want the court to see?” Miriam Aukerman, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, said in a statement.
The ACLU along with Arab American Civil Rights League (ACRL) challenged the president’s travel ban on nationals from several Muslim-majority countries in federal court earlier this year.
According to the statement, both groups will not hesitate to “return to court to compel production of the memo.”
Nabih Ayad, founder of the ACRL, argued that the memo will help “shed light on the intentions behind the President’s Executive Order.”
“And if those intentions support the public statements that Mr. Giuliani made about looking for a legal explanation for a ban on Muslims, the court needs to know this,” Ayad added.
Rudy Giuliani’s paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation’s top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling.
Since leaving the New York mayor’s office, Giuliani has made millions as a lawyer and consultant, including for some clients at odds with U.S. foreign policy. When some of those ties surfaced amid Giuliani’s own presidential bid in 2007, they were considered to pose an unprecedented number of ethical quandaries for a potential commander in chief.
Now those concerns have no doubt been eclipsed by Donald Trump’s own web of business entanglements, which are still not completely known to the public. Giuliani’s participation in Trump’s transition and contention for the job of secretary of state poses a direct challenge to Trump’s promises to root out Washington self-dealing and ban his administration’s officials from lobbying for foreign governments.
In 2011, an exiled Iranian political party called the Mujahedin e-Khalq, known as the MEK, paid Giuliani to give a speech in Washington calling on the State Department to remove the group from its list of terrorist organizations. The MEK recruited a host of other formal officials to its cause and succeeded in reversing the terrorist designation in 2012.
A subsidiary of Giuliani’s consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, advised Qatar’s state-run oil company on security at a natural gas plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Qatar is a U.S. ally that hosts a major American military base but once stifled an attempt to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who went on to mastermind the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the 9/11 commission report.
The same subsidiary, Giuliani Security & Safety, provided security advice to a Singapore gambling project on behalf of a partnership that included a tycoon close to the North Korean regime who is considered an organized crime figure by the U.S., according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. “I think the person involved, if it’s correct, was a 1 percent owner that had no involvement with us, we never worked for, had nothing to do with,” Giuliani told NBC’s Tim Russert at the time.
Giuliani Partners also advised TransCanada, which sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline that President Barack Obama rejected but Trump has said he wants to approve. And Giuliani helped the maker of the OxyContin painkiller, Purdue Pharma, settle a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with a fine.
The Houston-based law firm Giuliani joined as a named partner in 2005 lobbied in Texas for Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company then controlled by President Hugo Chavez, The New York Times reported in 2007. The firm also did work for Saudi Arabia’s oil ministry, according to The Associated Press.
The law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, lobbied at the federal level during Giuliani’s time there for energy companies including Southern Company, Duke Energy, Energy Future Holdings, Arch Coal, Chesapeake Energy and NuStar Energy, records show. It also represented Cornell Companies, a private prison operator that later merged with GEO Group. Giuliani never personally registered as a lobbyist. He left the firm for rival Greenberg Traurig this year, and currently is on leave.
Giuliani’s assistant at Greenberg Traurig and the Trump transition didn’t answer requests for comment.
The Clinton Foundation has been hounded by Republican suspicions of selling access to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and the nonprofit did accept big bucks from foreign governments. But Clinton’s defenders point out there’s no proof she ever made an official act to benefit a foundation donor, and, unlike Giuliani, she never personally profited from the foreign contributions to her charity.
When Giuliani ran for president, he reported assets of $18.1 million to $70.4 million.
Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate has recently dropped a series of hints that he knew in advance that the FBI planned to look at emails potentially connected to Clinton’s private server. The agency discovered the messages while investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) for allegedly sexting with a minor. (Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide to Clinton.)
Giuliani has bragged about his close ties to the FBI for months, mentioning in interviews that “outraged FBI agents” have told him they’re frustrated by how the Clinton investigation was handled. And two days before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was reviewing the newly uncovered emails, Giuliani teased that Trump’s campaign had “a couple of surprises left.”
“You’ll see, and I think it will be enormously effective,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
All of this has led to suspicion that someone in the FBI is leaking information to Giuliani and the Trump campaign. The Daily Beast’s Wayne Barrett explored those suspicions on Thursday, detailing how Giuliani’s ties to the agency date back to his days as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s.
Giuliani confirmed that notion Friday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
“I did nothing to get it out, I had no role in it,” he said. “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it, and I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.”
Giuliani also said he expected Comey’s announcement to come weeks before it did.
“I had expected this for the last, honestly, to tell you the truth, I thought it was going to be about three or four weeks ago, because way back in July this started, they kept getting stymied looking for subpoenas, looking for records,” he said.
FBI officials knew about the newly discovered emails weeks before Comey’s announcement, according to multiple reports.
Giuliani insisted he had nothing to do with Comey’s decision to announce the probe prior to Election Day ― a move that both Republicans and Democrats have condemned. He also insisted his information comes from “former FBI agents.”
“I’m real careful not to talk to any on-duty, active FBI agents. I don’t want to put them in a compromising position. But I sure have a lot of friends who are retired FBI agents, close, personal friends,” he said. “All I heard were former FBI agents telling me that there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI and it’s now at a boiling point.”
Trump press secretary Hope Hicks did not immediately return a request for comment.
I thought Donald Trump said we should vote for him to stop the corruption and collusion?
This is very serious stuff.
Reps. Elijah Cummings and John Conyers, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, penned a scathing letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz Friday, urging him to probe the bureau for leaks in light of Giuliani bragging about obtaining leaked information from former agents.
“It is absolutely unacceptable for the FBI to leak unsubstantiated — and in some case false — information about one presidential candidate to benefit the other candidate,” Cummings and Conyers said in the letter. “Leaking this information to former FBI officials as a conduit to the Trump campaign is equally intolerable.”
Media
WATCH: Rudy Giuliani admits that Trump campaign had advanced warning from the @FBI about Comey's letter. pic.twitter.com/7AOJopgQOB
Top Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani claimed Sunday that Democrats could steal a close election by having dead people vote in inner cities, while vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said the ticket will “absolutely accept the result of the election.”
“I’m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,” the former New York City mayor told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “You want me to (say) that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.”
But he did say the amount of cheating would only impact extremely close races — noting, for example, if either Trump or Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by “5 points,” the cheating he alleges would occur would be negligible and not change the outcome.
Giuliani was backing up Trump, the Republican nominee, who has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail — without providing evidence — that his race against Clinton is being rigged.
Trump tweeted Sunday: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD”
But Pence told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that he will accept the Election Day results.
“We will absolutely accept the result of the election,” he said. “Look, the American people will speak in an election that will culminate on November the 8. But the American people are tired of the obvious bias in the national media. That’s where the sense of a rigged election goes here, Chuck.”
Tapper pushed back on Giuliani, saying even Republicans had debunked the conspiracy theories pushed online that low vote totals in Philadelphia in 2012 for Mitt Romney were the result of a rigged process.
Giuliani said as a prosecutor, he remembers an election in Chicago in which 720 supposedly dead people voted — and that 60 dead people cast ballots in his own mayor’s race.
He said elections fraud would only make a difference in a 1 to 2 percentage point races.
He also said that only Democrats do it, because it happens in inner cities.
“I can’t sit here and tell you that they don’t cheat. And I know that because they control the polling places in these areas. There are no Republicans, and it’s very hard to get people there who will challenge votes. So what they do is, they leave dead people on the rolls and then they pay people to vote as dead people, four, five, six, seven” times, Giuliani said.
“I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat. They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities, they’d do as much cheating as Democrats do,” he said.
Tapper said: “I think there are a lot of elections experts that would have very, very strong disagreements with you.”
Giuliani responded: “Well then they never prosecuted elections fraud.”
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and also a top Trump ally, said on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump’s concerns about election rigging are “not about election officials at the precinct level.”
However, he also urged Trump voters to monitor polling stations.
“I remember when Richard Nixon had the election stolen in 1960, and no serious historian doubts that Illinois and Texas were stolen. So to suggest that, we have, you don’t have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality,” Gingrich said.
Rudy Giuliani has spit out so many conspiracy theories and out-right lies, he is starting to conflate them all together. So not only does he not have any evidence for the two originating conspiracy theories, he would also not have any evidence for this new one he just invented, that dead people are voting in Philadelphia and Chicago, either.
First Giuliani is claiming that dead people are voting in elections, and to this there is a kernel of truth. For example earlier this year an investigation by CBS in Los Angeles uncovered 215 instances of voter impersonation since 2004 of people who have since deceased voting in local elections. However, unlike alt-right website like Breitbart who try to blow it way out of proportion calling it ‘hundreds‘, those numbers are so low compared to the 4.8 million registered voters in Los Angeles to hardly be a concern in a county that is so deeply blue it is often a target to conservatives. And while Rudy tries to paint this as a Democrat conspiracy, keep in mind in that report while 146 of the voters were indeed Democrats, 86 were registered Republicans.
And second, ever since the 2012 election there have been internet claims of voter fraud in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where 0 votes were cast for Mitt Romney. Even Sean Hannity jumped into these waters a few times, all of which have been debunked over and over again. In the 59 divisions of Philadelphia, the average number of registered Republicans in these divisions was 17 people. The Philadelphia Inquirer sought out these voters after the election and found that many people moved, some were registered incorrectly, and others just plain didn’t vote.
Former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani accused Hillary Clinton of failing to honor the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that took down the World Trade Center, incorrectly suggesting at one point that she lied about visiting Ground Zero in the aftermath.
“Don’t tell me, if you said that, that you remember September 11, 2001. I remember September 11, 2001,” Giuliani said during a Donald Trump campaign rally here in Florida. “Yes, you helped to get benefits for the people who were injured one day. But I heard her say she was there that day. I was there that day, I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton there.”
While Clinton was not in New York on Sept. 11, she flew there on Sept. 12, in one of the few airplanes allowed to travel after the attacks. Pictures of Giuliani and Clinton inspecting the destruction together are widely available.
Clinton, who was a U.S. senator from New York at the time of 9/11, was in the District that day. The Pentagon was also attacked, and security officials feared the Capitol could also be targeted. Clinton flew to New York with fellow Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) soon after the attacks.
She describes that scene in detail in her book, “Hard Choices,” and refers to the “long sleepless night in Washington” before flying to New York on Sept. 12. She does not appear to have said publicly at any point that she was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.
She most recently described her experience in the aftermath of 9/11 during an interview with CNN last month in which she detailed finding out about the attack that day as she was en route to the Capitol.
“There weren’t that many survivors; the ones that did survive were grievously injured. The loss of life was overwhelming,” Clinton told CNN during the interview. “But it was also my job and the job of other officials to get our city and state and country what we needed.”
Earlier this year, Trump praised Clinton’s efforts after the attacks, saying in July she was “enormously supportive and enormously helpful.”
Giuliani has become a regular presence on the campaign trail and is an active TV surrogate for Trump. He said Wednesday that Americans “need a strong man, need an independent man, need a man who tells it straight.
“Sometimes really straight,” he added, laughing. “But boy, a heckofa lot better than being a liar.”
Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani on Sunday suggested that a man such as Donald Trump would be a better president “than a woman.”
“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails,” the former New York City mayor said on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.
Giuliani’s statements come on the heels of a week during which the Republican nominee has been criticized by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for comments he has made about women. At Monday’s debate, Clinton said Trump had insulted former Miss Universe Alicia Machado by calling her “Miss Piggy.” Trump and Giuliani both criticized Machado and tried to justify Trump’s comments about how much weight Machado had gained.
Giuliani told Stephanopoulos that Clinton was “programmed” to bring up Machado’s story.
“Then she mentioned the woman’s name, the model’s name, and then she made it appear as if [moderator] Lester Holt had brought it up. She had obviously been programmed to bring that up,” Giuliani said.
In addition, the Trump surrogate also said that if Clinton is going to attack Trump on how he “deals with women,” the GOP nominee’s campaign will discuss how the former secretary of state “deals with women.”
“We have to respond by how she deals with women, which is to take money from governments that kill women, take money from governments that stone women, take money from governments that have women who can’t drive cars,” he said. “Not just money, millions and tens of millions of dollars from countries in which women are treated like property and killed when they get raped.”
“And so now, basically, it’s ‘Don’t lecture me, Hillary, on feminism, because you’re a phony.'”The Trump and Clinton campaigns both released ads targeting women this past week.
Giuliani also claimed this was a “jobless” recovery. This is not factual at all. Over 15.1 million jobs have been created since Obama took office in 2009.
Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed that “anything’s legal” during war, including the theft of private property.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Giuliani said that the United States should have seized oil fields in Iraq following the 2003 invasion, to prevent the resource from falling into the hands of terrorists.
It is a position that Trump has argued for years, but it has only garnered serious attention since the former reality TV star became the Republican nominee for president.
Asked why such a move would not amount to theft, Giuliani scoffed. “Of course it’s legal,” he said. “It’s a war. Until the war is over, anything’s legal.”
This is patently false. The seizure of private property in war has been prohibited under international law for more than a century.
That Giuliani, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney, would dismiss decades of international law was unexpected, but it was in keeping with Giuliani’s recent adoption of many of Trump’s most unsubstantiated claims.
The tenor and tone of Giuliani’s media appearances on behalf of Trump have caused a number of his former colleagues to worry publicly that the former mayor of New York is throwing away his legacy.
Giuliani went on to claim that Trump never meant that the United States should have literally removed Iraq’s chief natural resource from the country, only that American troops should have remained in Iraq to ensure it was divided up evenly. “Leave a force back there and take [the oil] and make sure it’s distributed in a proper way,” he told Stephanopoulos.
“If that oil wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have the Islamic State,” Giuliani continued. “That oil is what makes the Islamic State so rich. Had we held that oil, made sure that it was equitably distributed within Iraq, we [could] have some say, some control over the distribution of it.”
For Trump, however, the notion of taking Iraq’s oil has always held an appeal as a sort of plunder. Speaking to Stephanopoulos in 2011, Trump explained: “In the old days, you know when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it. … You’re not stealing anything. … We’re taking back $1.5 trillion to reimburse ourselves.”
On the presidential campaign trail, Trump has moderated his statements, leaving out the part about Iraq reimbursing the United States for the cost of our blundered invasion of their country.
In addition, the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War provides that “any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”
For example, when Saddam Hussein (the former authoritarian leader of Iraq who Trump admires) invaded Kuwait in 1990, one of the justifications for international intervention was because Hussein seized and held Kuwaiti oil fields.
