“Truth isn’t truth.”
So said former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on August 19, defending President Donald Trump on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd.
With those words, Giuliani may have provided the most succinct and accurate summary yet of the public-relations approach of the Trump White House. Truth isn’t truth; say what you want. As of August 1, the Washington Post fact-checking team had identified 4,229 false claims by the president in just 558 days—more than 7 each day. And that’s just Trump’s statements.
Even if you assume that some of those assessments are too aggressive or otherwise uncharitable to Trump, it’s a staggering figure. Throw out half of them and you’re left with more than 2,000 false statements in Trump’s young presidency.
Trump and his team have lied about everything from the inaugural crowd size to porn-star payoffs, from the elimination of the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons to the Trump Tower meeting. The president lies about matters big and small, important and meaningless. It’s a defining characteristic of his presidency—perhaps the defining characteristic.
As soon as those words came out of Giuliani’s mouth, the Meet the Press moderator understood their likely virality. “This is going to become a bad meme,” Todd predicted.
“Don’t do—don’t do this to me,” Giuliani protested, previewing coming protests from Trump defenders that his “truth isn’t truth” was being taken out of context.
Giuliani clarified his point. The president is at risk of a “perjury trap” if he provides an interview to the special counsel and his team—even if the president tells the truth.
“Donald Trump says I didn’t talk about Flynn with [former FBI Director James] Comey,” Giuliani hypothesized. “Comey says you did talk about it. So tell me what the truth is.”
He continued. “We have a credibility gap between the two of them. You’ve got to select one or the other. Now, who do you think Mueller’s going to select? One of his best friends, Comey, or the president who he has been carrying on a completely wild, crazy, unorthodox investigation.”
As a narrow, theoretical supposition designed to win debating points, this isn’t an unreasonable argument. Mueller might well give more credence to Comey’s argument than Trump’s, given his relationship with his successor at the FBI. But Mueller isn’t going to charge Trump with perjury solely on the basis of conflicting versions of an exchange by these two parties. It’s absurd to pretend he would. And Rudy Giuliani, a career prosecutor, knows this. The immediate context for Giuliani’s comment isn’t exculpatory. It’s damning.
Giuliani isn’t always this subtle. Later in the interview, the president’s lawyer attempted to downplay the significance of the Trump Tower meeting. In the space of a few moments, he deployed the Trump team’s main rationalizations for the meeting. The meeting was “originally for the purpose of getting information about, about Clinton. It turned out to be a meeting about another subject and it was not pursued at all.” And, “any meeting with regard to getting information on your opponent is something any candidate’s staff would take.”
His first claim is based on the word of those most potentially at risk, including people who have been dishonest about other aspects of the meeting. His second is highly disputable. But it’s where he went from there that created more problems.
Here is the exchange:
CHUCK TODD: From the Russian government?
RUDY GIULIANI: She didn’t represent the Russian government. She’s a private citizen. I don’t even know if they knew she was Russian at the time. All they had was her name.
CHUCK TODD: They didn’t know she was Russian, I think they knew she was Russian, but okay.
RUDY GIULIANI: Well, they knew it when they met with her, not when they set up the meeting. You, you told me, you, you asked me, you know, did they show an intention to do anything with Russians? Well, all they knew is that a woman with a Russian name wanted to meet with them. They didn’t know she was a representative of the Russian government and indeed, she’s not a representative of the Russian government.
This is false. On June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone, a British publicist, emailed Donald Trump, Jr, on behalf of a client. The entire exchange is here.
Goldstone wrote to notify Don Jr. that “the Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Don Jr. responded less than 20 minutes later, writing: “Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?”
So Giuliani’s representation was exactly backwards. The Trump team was told twice in the initial email that the information on Clinton would come from the Russian government. And Don Jr. signaled his enthusiasm—“I love it”—immediately. This was before any mention of the lawyer or her name.
On June 7, Goldstone emailed Don Jr. again, this time reporting that his client “asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday.”
So, contrary to Giuliani comments, individuals on the Trump side of the Trump Tower meeting had been told: (a) the Russian government wanted to provide the campaign with sensitive information; (b) Russian government representatives would be providing the information; and (c) it was part of an effort to boost Trump’s candidacy.
Why would he claim otherwise? Why would he say things so easily proven false by the public record?
Maybe Giuliani, a former associate attorney general of the United States and a longtime U.S. attorney, was unfamiliar with the basic facts of a major point in the case involving his client, the president of the United States.
Perhaps he’s come to believe that the truth isn’t important in and of itself—especially if it’s problematic for his client.
Or, maybe, like so many undergraduate philosophy majors, Giuliani doesn’t believe in objective truth at all.
“Truth isn’t truth.”
