Lanny Davis, an adviser for Michael Cohen, questioned Rudy Giuliani’s mental health Thursday as the row over President Trump and his legal team’s attacks on Cohen’s family intensifies.
Trump used a recent Fox News appearance and his Twitter account to encourage federal investigators to look into Cohen’s father-in-law, Fima Shusterman. In one of his freewheeling interviews over the weekend, Giuliani condoned Trump’s behavior on CNN, describing Shusterman as a “criminal.”
Davis told MSNBC on Thursday that Cohen’s family could take legal action against Giuliani for his remarks.
“It’s certainly actionable because he just lied,” Davis told the network of Giuliani, who is Trump’s lead personal lawyer. “He’s mentally unstable, you can see it in his face much less his words. He’s a prosecutor who would prosecute what he just did.”
“Mr. Giuliani can be indicted and certainly criminally investigated for doing what he just did, that is prima facie a crime to threaten a witness before Congress,” he said later in the segment.
Davis on Thursday called on Congress to officially reprimand Trump for his statements regarding Shusterman.
“That is called witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and the House of Representatives and the Senate need to move to protect Mr. Cohen by voting a resolution of censure that you can criticize Mr. Cohen, but don’t attack a man’s family and intimidate a witness before Congress,” he said.
Shusterman reportedly loaned millions to a Chicago cab company owner mentioned in the FBI warrants used to raid Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room in April 2017 for an investigation led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York. He also pleaded guilty to income tax fraud in 1993.
Cohen was subpoenaed on Thursday to sit down with the Senate Intelligence Committee sometime in mid-February. He was due to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Feb. 7, but on Wednesday postponed his testimony because of “ongoing threats.”
Trump’s former fixer was sentenced to two months in federal prison in December after he pleaded guilty to “knowingly and willfully” making “a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement and representation” to the House and Senate Intelligence committees in 2017 about Trump Organization negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow before the 2016 election. Those two months, handed down through a case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, will be served concurrently with the three years he received as part of the campaign finance violations and tax and bank fraud case he faced last year in New York.
