Giuliani backs off Trump-Cohen talks
President Donald Trump did not speak with Michael Cohen before Cohen testified falsely before Congress about plans to develop a skyscraper in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, Rudy Giuliani said Monday, backing off previous assertions that such talks may have taken place.
The former New York mayor, who serves as Trump’s top lawyer in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, said he had confirmed the matter with previous members of the president’s legal team, including ex-lead counsel John Dowd.
“The president never spoke with Cohen about the congressional testimony,” Giuliani told the New York Daily News.
However, Giuliani acknowledged Trump’s legal team conversed with Cohen’s lawyers — and possibly Cohen himself — before he went before the House and Senate intelligence committees in September 2017 and falsely testified that discussions to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016.
“Anything that happened between the lawyers would have been part of the joint defense agreement,” Giuliani said, claiming all parties involved believed at the time that Cohen’s planned testimony was truthful.
Cohen has since admitted the Moscow project discussions continued well into the summer of 2016 and said in a guilty plea that he lied to lawmakers out of “loyalty” to Trump.
Giuliani’s latest remarks came on the heels of his going on multiple cable news shows saying he wasn’t sure whether or not the president spoke with Cohen before his testimony.
“I don’t know if it happened or didn’t happen,” Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “So what if he talked to him about it?”
Dowd, who stepped down as Trump’s attorney in March, echoed Giuliani and said in a text message Monday that the president never spoke directly with Cohen before the testimony.
Dowd also said he never personally spoke with Cohen but wouldn’t say whether he ever conversed with the former Trump fixer’s attorneys.
Stephen Ryan, the lawyer who represented Cohen at the time of his testimony, did not return a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for Cohen declined to comment.
Trump’s potential pre-testimony talks with Cohen have come under increased scrutiny since BuzzFeed News reported last week that the president directed Cohen to lie about the Moscow project in order to protect himself — an explosive allegation that prompted congressional Democrats to raise the specter of impeachment.
Mueller, who’s investigating whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians during the 2016 election, issued a rare statement disputing some “characterizations” and “descriptions” included in the BuzzFeed report.