Trump taking the Fifth explored

Giuliani repeats perjury-trap fear

WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani, after his first week as President Donald Trump’s lawyer, tried again Sunday to straighten out his client’s story. But Giuliani raised new questions about whether 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.

Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor hired by Trump to smooth communication between the White House and the special counsel, Robert Mueller, instead painted Mueller as an outof-control prosecutor bent on trapping Trump into

committing perjury.

“I’m going to walk him into a prosecution for perjury like Martha Stewart?” Giuliani asked, referring to the lifestyle maven convicted in 2004 of lying to investigators and obstruction in an insider trading case.

The president, he said, could defy a subpoena to testify.

“Not after the way they’ve acted,” Giuliani said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “I came into this case with the desire to do that, and they just keep convincing me not to do it.” Such an interview would be a “trap,” he said.

“Every lawyer in America thinks he’d be a fool to testify,” Giuliani said, adding that Trump in the end “may testify” if the right agreement can be worked out with Mueller.

“We don’t have to,” Giuliani said. “He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have.”

Although Giuliani said Trump wouldn’t have to comply with a subpoena from Mueller, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor, said on CNN there would be no way for Trump to dodge a subpoena.

Joseph diGenova, a Trump defender and former U.S. attorney, said on Fox News Sunday that if a subpoena is issued, “the

president should fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Giuliani, who met with the special counsel’s office shortly after joining the legal team last month, said he and another lawyer, Jay Sekulow, agreed that the president should not speak to Mueller. But he acknowledged that he had little, if any, control over the president, who said as recently as Friday that he still wanted to speak to the special counsel.

“How can I ever be confident of that?” Giuliani said, when asked whether Trump would not invoke his right to avoid self-incrimination. “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.”

Giuliani also repeated a call for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to shut down the special counsel investigation once and for all.

It was Giuliani’s first extended television appearance since Trump criticized him last week for not having his “facts straight” about payments made to a pornographic film actress, Stephanie Clifford.

He revealed last week that Trump had reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, in direct contrast to the president’s own public claims weeks earlier. After making a series of other remarks to the media — including seemingly connecting the payment to the

presidential election — Giuliani then released a cautiously worded statement Friday trying to clean up his comments.

Giuliani said it was possible that Cohen had made additional payments to other women on the president’s behalf.

“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani said when asked about other payments, “but I would think if it was necessary, yes.”

Giuliani told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that he was still getting up to speed on Trump’s legal issues. “I’m about halfway there” in getting up to speed on the facts, Giuliani said Sunday.

Giuliani created a furor last week when he contradicted the president about the payment to Clifford. Speaking on Fox News, Giuliani said Trump reimbursed Cohen for a $130,000 payment that Cohen has said he made to Clifford, to keep her from making public a story about an affair she claims she had with Trump — a claim that he denies. When asked in April by reporters traveling on Air Force One whether he knew about the payment, Trump said he did not.

On Sunday, Giuliani said he was still trying to establish when Trump learned that Cohen had paid Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels. But he added that as a legal matter, it did not matter since the payment did not violate federal campaign finance rules.

Asked about the discrepancies between his account and

the president’s statement, Giuliani said: “Those don’t amount to anything — what is said to the press. That’s political.”

In his interview, Giuliani again sought to argue that the payment was not a campaign contribution, saying it was “entirely reimbursed out of personal funds.” Experts have said that even if it was not made with campaign money, the timing of it raises questions, as does the fact that it was never revealed in financial disclosure forms.

Giuliani did not shed much new light on the nature of the payments themselves. He said Cohen “made payments for the president, or he conducted business for president, which means he had legal fees, moneys laid out and expenditures.” But he characterized the sum Clifford received as a “nuisance” payment.

“I never thought $130,000 was a real payment,” Giuliani said. “People don’t go away for $130,000.”

On Sunday, Giuliani tried to clarify what Trump called a “retainer.”

“The retainer agreement was to repay expenses, which turns out to have included this one,” Giuliani said.

Later in the day, he met with the president at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., to discuss developments and legal strategy.

“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,” Giuliani said in an interview afterward with The Washington Post.

“Everybody’s reacting to us now and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do,” he said.

“We’ve made a deal this weekend: He stays focused on North Korea, Iran and China, and we stay focused on the case and we’ll bother him when we have to,” Giuliani said.

SEARCHING FOR ‘TRUTH’

Appearing after Giuliani on ABC’s This Week, Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called 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.”

“He now expects the American people to believe that he doesn’t really know the facts,” Avenatti added. “I think it is obvious to the American people that this is a cover-up, that they are making it up as they go along.”

He said “there’s no question this had everything to do with the campaign,” and that he has evidence that Trump knew about the payment at least in the months after the campaign and before the president denied knowing about it while speaking to reporters on Air Force One last month.

Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that Trump was telling reporters in April that he didn’t know

about the payment “at the time.”

“I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do,” Conway said. “He didn’t know it at the time that the payment occurred.”

Conway also said she did not know of any other payments made to women during the campaign that were similar to the Daniels transaction.

“What they’re trying to sell American people is just not believable, and they can’t even keep their facts straight or their lies straight,” Avenatti said on ABC.

Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press whether he’s trying to win a case or take down a president, Avenatti said he was trying to win a case and “search for the truth.”

“Ultimately, the American people and others that are far more educated and powerful than us will decide whether the president is fit to remain in office,” Avenatti said. In his third interview of the day, on CBS’ Face the Nation, he said comments from Giuliani and others would help his efforts to depose Trump in the civil case around Clifford.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Landler and Noah Weiland of The New York Times; by Ros Krasny, Mark Niquette, Joe Light and Ben Brody of Bloomberg News; by Mark Berman and Robert Costa of The Washington Post; and by Zeke Miller of The Associated Press.