President disputes lawyer’s account
Giuliani ‘clarification’ follows Trump’s rebuke
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump further confused his legal strategy on Friday, disputing an account from his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Trump paid $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, just a day after he’d confirmed the remarks.
Trump’s public rebuke — “He’ll get his facts straight” — forced Giuliani within hours to issue a “clarification” that cleared up little.
Trump also stepped up his attack against the special counsel investigating him and his associates, and hinted strongly that he would not submit to an interview with prosecutors — a decision that could provoke a constitutional contest that goes to the Supreme Court.
Giuliani had told multiple reporters this week that he had Trump’s backing when he disclosed, starting Wednesday night on Fox News, that Trump reimbursed personal attorney Michael Cohen for money given to Daniels just before the 2016 election, to silence her about an alleged affair. Trump last month had told reporters he was ignorant of the
payoff.
Legal experts had questioned Giuliani’s move to reveal the new information, which Trump himself affirmed in tweets on Thursday morning. Their disclosures suggested that Trump had lied previously and possibly violated federal law on reporting campaign and personal finances.
“He started yesterday,” Trump said Friday of Giuliani, who actually joined Trump’s team two weeks ago. “He’ll get his facts straight. He’s a great guy.”
Trump, speaking three separate times to reporters as he left for Dallas to address a National Rifle Association convention, said Giuliani agrees with him that the federal investigation of Trump and his associates is a “witch hunt.” Yet even as Trump went on to contest Giuliani’s other statements, he declined to specify which facts were wrong or to clarify any inaccuracies.
“Well, you’re going to find out, because, you know, we’re going to give a full list,” Trump said to reporters, adding that “there has been a lot of misinformation, really.”
He went on: “I say, you know what, learn before you speak. It’s a lot easier.”
The president bristled when a reporter asked why he’d changed his story on Daniels.
“I’m not changing any stories,” he snapped. “All I’m telling you is that this country is right now running so smooth. And to be bringing up that kind of crap, and to be bringing up witch hunts all the time — that’s all you want to talk about.”
Giuliani later issued a statement “intended to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days.” It did little, however, to change his original version of events.
During the NRA speech before a raucous and friendly crowd, Trump seized on a comments made earlier in the day by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in a federal courthouse in Virginia, to reinforce his own argument that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are exceeding their investigative mandate in a desire to implicate the president in wrongdoing.
Ellis seemed to side in a court hearing with Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who is challenging his indictments for bank fraud and tax evasion. Manafort argues that they relate to his lobbying work long before he joined the Trump campaign and therefore are unrelated to Mueller’s mandate to investigate Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 election.
“On CNN, they have a headline: ‘Judge in Manafort case says Mueller’s aim is to hurt Trump,’ ” Trump said. “You believe that?” he asked the vocally supportive audience, adding, “It’s called a witch hunt.”
In Dallas on Friday, months after the Parkland school shootings in Florida, Trump implored NRA members to elect more Republicans to Congress to defend gun rights.
Trump claimed that Democrats want to “outlaw guns” and said if the nation takes that drastic step, it might as well ban all vans and trucks because they are the new weapons for “maniac terrorists.”
“We will never give up our freedom. We will live free and we will die free,” Trump said, as he sought to rally pro-gun voters for the 2018 congressional elections. “We’ve got to do great in ’18.”
One of the Parkland student survivors, David Hogg, criticized Trump’s appearance in advance. “It’s kind of hypocritical of him to go there after saying so many politicians bow to the NRA and are owned by them,” Hogg said. “It proves that his heart and his wallet are in the same place.”
Trump rambled through a number of topics at the NRA event but steered clear of the Daniels payoff and Giuliani’s remarks.
Giuliani had said the president “didn’t know the details” of the payments to Daniels until the past two weeks — a timeline that could account for Trump’s previous denial and failure to report the expenditures.
In Friday’s clarification statement, Giuliani wrote, “My references to timing were not describing my understanding of the President’s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters.”