Sunday, May 06, 2018

Giuliani pleased with his media tour: ‘Everybody’s reacting to us now’

Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sunday said Trump still has confidence in him and believes the media blitz “all worked out.”

“I’ll give you the conclusion: We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda."
(WaPo)

Somebody is in need of an intervention.

This is from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, reeling after a chaotic first week as President Trump’s lawyer, tried again on Sunday to straighten out his client’s story. But Mr. Giuliani raised new questions about whether Mr. Trump had paid hush money to other women and suggested the president might invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
...
“I’m facing a situation with the president and all the other lawyers are, in which every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify, I’ve got a client who wants to testify.”
[Umm, Trump.]
...
It was one of a several startling admissions by Mr. Giuliani...Mr. Giuliani said it was possible that Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, had made additional payments to other women on the president’s behalf.
...
Mr. Giuliani told the ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos, that he was still getting up to speed on Mr. Trump’s legal issues — a fact that became apparent as the interview went on. [Ho-ho-ho] As was the case during his interviews last week, Mr. Giuliani seemed to speak largely off the cuff. He speculated freely and contradicted himself, sometimes from one statement to the next.

He said, for example, that Mr. Mueller would be to blame if Mr. Trump refused to testify because his office had leaked a list of questions that the special counsel would like to ask him. But then he admitted he did not know who leaked the questions, which were reported by The New York Times.
...
Asked about the discrepancies between his account and the president’s statement, Mr. Giuliani said: “Those don’t amount to anything — what is said to the press. That’s political.”

...
Appearing after Mr. Giuliani on the same program, Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called Mr. Giuliani’s interview an “absolute unmitigated disaster” and “one of the worst TV appearances by any attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.”

That is my reaction to Giuliani's statements also. Lawyers do this, we evaluate each other. Even as the lawyer for a party opponent, Avenatti is not gleeful, he is clinically evaluating Giuliani as a fellow lawyer representing a client. Avenatti's evaluation is dead right, Giuliani was an "absolute unmitigated disaster."