When Rudy Giuliani wasn’t blowing up the White House’s account of payments made to a porn star who claimed to have slept with President Trump, or exchanging an old set of legal liabilities for Trump with some new ones, his one-two punch of Fox News interviews Wednesday night and Thursday morning allowed him to workshop some of the arguments Trump’s legal team could be making if its showdown with Special Counsel Robert Mueller escalates.
“You can’t possibly not feel, as a citizen of the world, that his negotiations with North Korea are much more significant than this totally garbage investigation,” Giuliani said on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday.
The smear campaign against Mueller and the Department of Justice is taking on some sharper elbows, now that a confrontation over whether Trump should have to sit down for an interview seems nigh.
The former New York mayor, who joined Trump’s legal team a few weeks ago, cycled through a whole bunch of anti-Mueller talking points. Here are some of the things he had to say:
Comey is such a liar, Rudy is ashamed of that one time he hired him.
Ex-FBI Director James Comey is a “liar,” a “disgraceful liar,” a “pathological liar,” Giuliani said. Comey refused to tell the world that Trump wasn’t the target of an investigation, which is why it was totally fine that Trump fired him, Giuliani argued.
According to Giuliani, Comey’s even a “bigger liar” than that “situational liar” Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who was also fired under pressure from Trump.
Giuliani even told Hannity he was “embarrassed” that he hired Comey when he was prosecutor in Manhattan, which also was brought up in his Fox and Friends interview.
“Did you have to say that? The president keeps saying that: Didn’t you inflict this guy on us to begin with?” Guiliani said.
We already know Mueller probe is biased in favor of that liar Comey, so why should we cooperate?
Point 1. that Comey is liar, leads to point 2. that Mueller is biased against Trump because he’s taking Liar Comey at his word.
“It’s real simple. The American people can follow this along with me. Are they objective?” Giuliani told Hannity. “Right now, a lot of things point in the direction of, they made up their mind that Comey is telling the truth and not the President.”
Guiliani appears to have drawn this conclusion from the questions Mueller’s investigators have told Trump’s lawyers they’d like to ask the President, as well as from the fact that Mueller is a “friend” of Comey’s.
“James Comey seems to be their core of their investigation,” Giuliani said.
How dare Mueller try to trap Trump with his questions?
Giulani referenced the questions that Trump’s attorney’s jotted down in March, and were leaked this week, from their discussions with Mueller’s team about potential interview topics.
“When you look at those questions — about, what does the President think, what does the President feel, what what does the President really desire — those are all questions intended to trap him in some way in contradicting what is in fact a very, very solid explanation of what happened,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani’s “very, very solid explanation” of Comey’s termination is in fact at odds with the reasoning the White House offered at the time.
“He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani told Hannity.
Besides, Trump has more important things to do
Trump, who regularly live-tweets the very television shows on which Giuliani appeared, is way too busy saving the world to sit down to prep for a Mueller interview.
“I could not go to the President of the United States and say, take two days off to get ready for that and screw the whole thing with North Korea,” Giuliani told Hannity “How can any American do that? He’s our President. He is going to negotiate, I believe, a nonnuclear situation on the Korean peninsula! And you’re going to interfere with that?”
Trump deserves the treatment that the Clintons got when they spoke to the feds
It wouldn’t be a Fox News interview without an extended conversations about the Clintons.
Guiliani defended his demand that a Mueller interview of Trump not last more than two or three hours by arguing that that’s the treatment Bill Clinton got when he testified for a grand jury. (Bill Clinton’s taped interview actually lasted well over four hours, while Hillary Clinton’s voluntary FBI interview lasted three and a half hours).
“I’m not going to let him be treated worse than Bill Clinton, who definitely was a liar under oath,” Giuliani told Hannity. “He’s being treated much worse than Hillary Clinton, who had no right to any of that stuff. So, I’m not going to let him be treated worse than Hillary Clinton. I think Jay and I will insist that they’re going to have to treat him the same way as Clinton. Two and half hours, we end. We walk out. Give us your questions in advance.”
The ‘stormtroopers’ raiding Cohen made it less likely for Trump to cooperate
Giuliani described last month’s FBI raid on Michael Cohen as “big stormtroopers coming in and breaking down his apartment and breaking down his office.”
He told Hannity that the raid was “one of the reasons we would hesitate to cooperate any further.”
“Before they raided a lawyer’s office, which will turn out to be an outrageous violation of attorney-client privilege… the chances [of a Trump-Mueller interview] were pretty good,” Giuliani reiterated on Fox and Friends.
The government is the real criminal here
Giuliani claimed that the only crimes exposed by Mueller’s investigation — which has produced nearly a half-dozen guilty pleas and a handful of indictments — are those committed by the government.
“There’s been too much government misconduct. The crimes now have all been committed by the government, and their agents, the lies by Comey…it’s terrible!” Giuliani told Hannity.
In ‘the interest of justice,’ Sessions and Rosenstein should end the investigation
Somehow, in Giuliani believes that the top Justice Department officials should shut down the Russia investigation instead of allowing Mueller to force Trump to sit for an interview.
Giuliani said doing so would be “in the interest of justice.” He also bashed Sessions for recusing himself from the probe.
“I know the President is heartbroken over this. It isn’t that he’s angry, he’s heartbroken. He never expected this from Jeff,” Giuliani said. “The two of them can redeem themselves, Sessions and Rosenstein: They should order the investigation over.”
