President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani says his nearly two-month absence from TV is intentional, but has nothing to do with his last performance on air.
Giuliani has not made a TV appearance since Jan. 20, when he went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “State of the Union.” He told Axios that he has been absent because the Trump administration expected special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to be nearing completion.
“About a month to a month-and-a-half ago we decided, because we thought the Mueller report was imminent in the next four or five days, that it would be better not to comment until the report was filed or made public,” Giuliani said. “Obviously those days have now expanded way beyond four or five days.”
In fact, following reports in recent weeks indicating Mueller was winding down, the special counsel’s office said Friday that former Trump campaign official Rick Gates is still helping “several ongoing investigations.”
During his last appearance in January, Giuliani said discussions between Trump and his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen regarding a potential Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016.” He added that the talks could have taken place “up to as far as October, November” 2016.
The next day Giuliani backtracked those comments, saying in a statement they “did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions.”
Since then, Giuliani has not appeared on any network shows. One source told Axios that Trump did not want him on TV for a while after his last round of interviews. But Giuliani pushed back on that claim, saying he is unaware of any instance in which the president criticized his TV performances. He said that in addition to waiting for the Mueller report to come out, the decision not to appear on TV is a way “not to upset the apple cart, not to create unnecessary, additional, needless friction” with Mueller and his team.
Giuliani cited a desire not to spark further animosity between the administration and the special counsel.
“We’ve had, over a period of time, after we were very tough, we’ve had some what we regard as very fair decisions, and some that aren’t as fair,” he said. “So we see that there’s the capacity to go either way.”
[Byron York: With Mueller office emptying, dramatic predictions remain unfulfilled]
