Rudy Giuliani has established himself less as a legal counsel for President Donald Trump and more as his incompetent, bumbling attack dog. This week, he freaked out on the New York Daily News when pressed for his response to CNN uncovering that he’d told them a bold faced lie.
He’d claimed that no one signed the letter of intent meant to facilitate an eventual Trump Tower Moscow — but in fact, the eventual president himself signed it back in 2015. The project has come under renewed scrutiny recently thanks to confirmation that negotiations were ongoing as late as mid-2016, and maybe even later, despite the fact that Trump consistently claimed he had nothing to do with Russia.
The president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the length of negotiations for the project, and for that and other crimes he was recently sentenced to three years in prison.
Trump’s defended himself by asserting the sought building was “very legal and very cool” — and somehow, Giuliani came up with a defense that holds even less water than that.
Pressed over the fact that CNN obtained a copy of the project’s October 28, 2015, letter of intent signed by both Donald Trump and Russian developer Andre Rozov, Giuliani ranted to the Daily News:
‘I don’t think I said nobody signed it… How could you send it but nobody signed it?.. That was the end of it. It means nothing but an expression of interest that means very little unless it goes to a contract and it never did.’
He added that the letter was “bullshit,” but dismissing concern over your client’s actions as manufactured outrage because you say so isn’t likely to hold up in court.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s team learned this the hard way this week when they stepped into a federal courtroom arguing that their client hadn’t been duly safeguarded from committing the perjury to which he’s pleaded guilty. All other parties involved, though, asserted that their defense was utter nonsense and Flynn is not an idiot and knew lying to authorities was a crime. In outrage, the judge got Flynn to repeat that he was guilty multiple times during his recent sentencing hearing.
Is that really the path Giuliani wants to continue on with the president?
He’s tried a stunt like this before. He claimed that collusion is not a crime — although it very much is, even if it’s not known by that term. Multiple interests in the Russia scandal have at this point been held liable for “conspiracy against the United States,” a charge from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team that’s been upheld in court.
That doesn’t even cover his blatant lies. How is he even still on the president’s legal team at all? How is anyone supposed to take him seriously when he neither cares for sticking to the truth in the first place nor returning to the truth when faced with an error?
At the very least, he’s at home on the Trump team. President Donald Trump has been documented to have lied thousands upon thousands of times since taking office, repeating some lies dozens of times.
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