Rudy Giuliani May Have Just Set a World Record for

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Dec 17, 2018 at 1:26 PM 92

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Rudy Giuliani May Have Just Set a World Record for Self-Owns on Sunday Television

The Presidential Lawyer is absolutely relentless—in mendacity and incompetence.

By Jack Holmes
Dec 17, 2018

Sunday was another banner day for spokesfabricators in service to Donald Trump, American president. Face the Nation played host to Stephen Miller, the Santa Monica Gargamel, who apparently came directly from his new barbershop in an industrial paint plant.

Meanwhile, Presidential Super Lawyer and Cyber Expert Rudy Giuliani, still recovering from having his tweet "invaded" by someone with "a disgusting anti-President message," joined George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week. What followed was a spectacular series of own goals.

First, Giuliani went out of his way to admit the President of the United States has been lying constantly about the hush-money payments his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to Trump's various alleged mistresses at the height of the 2016 election.

But it's no big deal, Giuliani kindly explained, because the president isn't under oath when he's lying, then continually changing his story when his lies are exposed by further investigation.

GIULIANI: "[Cohen] will say whatever he has to say. He has changed his story 4 or 5 times."

ABC: "So has the president."

GIULIANI: "The president is not under oath." pic.twitter.com/MBVkvoaSsE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2018

The subtext here is that the United States president has no obligation to tell the truth unless legally compelled to do so. This doesn't seem like a great standard for the leader of the country, especially when federal prosecutors have assessed that these were crimes Cohen committed at Trump's direction, and a federal judge accepted Cohen's guilty pleas on that basis.

Giuliani continued along this line in a separate Sunday interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace, in which he declared Trump would sit for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller "over my dead body." The message seems to be that Giuliani would die before putting the president in a situation where he was under oath and, as a result, had to tell the truth for any extended period of time.

Also, have you noticed that the president and his associates continually talk about whether people are going to "flip" or, in this case, "sing"? Is it supposed to reassure the public everything is above-board when you continually use mob lingo when talking about your business and your running buddies?

Giuliani said more than once that the hush-money payments were not crimes, which first of all just flies in the face of reality: Again, federal prosecutors and a federal court have assessed them to be crimes. Cohen is going to jail for, among other crimes, those crimes.

But do you remember when Trump denied the affairs, then denied knowledge of the payoffs, then denied any involvement in the payoffs? It wasn't that long ago. Now he happily admits they were "simple, private transactions," and his lawyer has pivoted to claiming they weren't criminal. Which they were.

Elsewhere, Giuliani offered some (presumably expert) advice into how much Trump would pay someone off if they had a real affair, and how much he'd pay off somebody who was just being a nuisance:

GIULIANI on hush payments: "The amount of $ is consistent w/harassment, not truth...when it's true & you have kind of money that the president has, it's a $1m settlement. When it's not true, you give $130k or $150k. They went away for so little $, it indicates their case is weak" pic.twitter.com/BmY8SoIri2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2018

Again, all class from the Presidential Lawyer here. But there's no reason to believe a word of this: Giuliani has already admitted they've continually lied to the public about these payoffs. Why would anyone believe them now?

The hush-money deals weren't the only topic on which Giuliani sought to move the goalposts. In vintage fashion, he attempted to claim that there was no collusion and also that collusion is not a crime, anyway, so what's the big deal? You've got to cover all your bases.

But in the process, he also spilled that "The Moscow Project" continued into November 2016—the farthest into the election anyone has yet claimed that negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow went on:

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