Trump could defy subpoena, Giuliani says
President’s attorney: Other women could have been paid off ‘if it was necessary’
WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani, reeling after a chaotic 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 out-of-control prosecutor bent on trapping Trump into committing perjury. The president, he said, could defy a subpoena to testify.
“We don’t have to,” Giuliani said in a rambling, 22-minute interview on ABC’s This Week program. “He’s the president of the United States. We can assert the
same privileges other presidents have.”
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.”
It was one of a several startling admissions by Giuliani, during his 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. Giuliani said it was possible that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael 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.”
If Trump were to invoke the Fifth Amendment, he would undercut his long-standing claim that he has nothing to hide about his campaign’s ties to Russia. During the presidential campaign, he ridiculed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, when some of her aides invoked the Fifth Amendment during a congressional investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“The mob takes the Fifth,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in September 2016. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
After his interview, Giuliani met with Trump at his golf club in Northern Virginia.
Giuliani told the ABC anchor, George Stephanopoulos, that he was still getting up to speed on Trump’s legal issues — a fact that became apparent as the interview went on. As was the case during his interviews last week, 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 Mueller would be to blame if 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.
Giuliani referred repeatedly to a federal judge’s criticism of the special counsel’s fraud case against Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign. The judge, T.S. Ellis III, said Friday that the case seemed motivated by a desire to get Manafort to potentially incriminate Trump.
“There’s no question that the amount of government misconduct is accumulating,” Giuliani said. “Very embarrassing to my former Justice Department.”
Giuliani created a furor Wednesday 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.”
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.”
Giuliani accused Clifford of trying to make as much money as possible from her notoriety, noting that she made a cameo appearance during the opening skit on Saturday Night Live.
Giuliani’s admission Wednesday caught Trump’s staff off guard and prompted Trump to try to clarify the nature of payments he made to Cohen. The morning after Giuliani’s comments, Trump said on Twitter that Cohen “received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA.”
Seeming to chastise Giuliani, Trump said: “You know what? Learn before you speak. It’s a lot easier.”