Giuliani’s shifting story on Trump Tower talks
What happened
In a series of unfiltered interviews this week, President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani appeared to admit that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow continued through Election Day 2016, much longer than the White House has previously acknowledged. In an interview with The New York Times, Giuliani quoted the president as telling him that discussions about the Moscow project were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.” In another interview with NBC News, Giuliani said Trump may have spoken to his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen before Cohen testified falsely to Congress that discussions about the Russian tower ended in January 2016. Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. Giuliani later tried to walk his statements back, saying his comments were “hypothetical.”
Giuliani’s comments came after a BuzzFeedNews.com report that, citing two unnamed federal law enforcement officials, alleged Trump had personally directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow talks. BuzzFeed said that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence about the matter. But in a rare public statement, Mueller’s office called the report “not accurate.” The president was reportedly frustrated with Giuliani for taking the spotlight away from Mueller’s statement, which deflated Democrats who had touted the allegations as an impeachable offense. Giuliani’s flub came just days after he had to walk back another interview in which he said that while he stood by past statements that Trump did not collude with Russia, “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign” and Moscow.
What the editorials said
Mainstream journalists’ loathing of Trump “has become an obstacle to their professional credibility,” said the Washington Examiner. Mueller’s team debunked BuzzFeed’s “bogus scoop,” but not before it triggered yet another cable-news feeding frenzy. With no smoking gun proving that Trump colluded with Russia, the president’s opponents desperately wanted to believe that “selective leaks from anonymous sources” confirmed that he’d finally been caught doing something “unambiguously illegal.” This sorry incident should serve as “a lesson about jumping the gun on Mueller’s work.” Maybe Trump didn’t specifically instruct Cohen to lie to Congress, said The Washington Post. But thanks to Giuliani, it’s now clear that Trump secretly pursued business deals with a foreign adversary throughout his presidential run. All the while, Trump insisted he had no business in Russia, while simultaneously praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and advocating for warmer relations with Moscow. “Whether that was illegal, it was a profound betrayal of the voters.”
What the columnists said
Giuliani “is either a blithering imbecile or a subtle genius,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. The president’s attorney keeps blurting out damning confessions about Trump in freewheeling interviews and then frantically walking them back. Giuliani more or less admitted that Russia was dangling “a huge payout” in front of Trump during the campaign and could have blackmailed him by exposing his false statements. Perhaps Giuliani is trying to strategically release devastating information bit by bit so that voters feel underwhelmed when Mueller’s report is finally released. But it’s more likely that Giuliani is “just an idiot.”
Enough is enough, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. Mueller should come out and tell us everything he knows. For nearly two years, the nation has been gripped by uncertainty as the special counsel continues his secretive work. Meanwhile, “the void is being filled with partisan trash and dangerous discord.”
It’s not healthy for a prosecutor to become “a divine oracle, with the nation’s mood hanging on first his silence, then his statement.” The executive branch can’t do its job effectively with the specter of impeachment constantly hovering over the White House, said Andrew McCarthy in NationalReview.com. It’s past time “that the public was told exactly what the president is alleged to have done.”
Want the secrecy to end? Then House Democrats should impeach Trump now, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. While the Mueller investigation is a hushed affair, impeachment is an open, democratic process. “Even if the ultimate outcome is not Trump’s removal from office,” it will be worth it. Congress will be able to investigate the president, consider evidence, and potentially formulate charges—with the public watching every step. “Let’s stop waiting for Bob Mueller to come down from the mountaintop.”