Rudy Giuliani, now a member of President Trump’s legal team, said Thursday that while Trump reimbursed his lawyer Michael Cohen for his payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, Trump didn’t find out what those payments were for until late April.
“He didn’t know the details of this until we knew the details of it, which is a couple weeks, maybe not even a couple weeks, 10 days ago,” Giuliani said on Fox News.
Giuliani said he realizes his revelation about Trump’s reimbursement was a “surprise” to many people when he made it late Wednesday. But he said when Cohen made the payment in late October 2016, Trump was in the midst of closing out his presidential campaign, and when Trump reimbursed him over the next several months, he was not going over the details at the time of that relatively small amount.
“I don’t want to, you know, demean anyone, but $130,000 isn’t a lot of money. It’s not when you’re putting $100 million into your campaign,” Giuliani said.
“It isn’t pocket change, but it’s pretty close to it,” he said, adding that the reimbursement was unrelated to the campaign because it happened after the campaign.
Giuliani also defended the payment as a reasonable way to keep Daniels from spreading false rumors about her supposed affair with Trump, to keep her from trying to “shake him down for a couple million bucks” near the end of the campaign.
“Cohen made it go away, he did his job,” Giuliani said, adding that paying $130,000 to make it go away was “cheap.”
In a separate interview with Fox Business Network, Giuliani said Daniels and her lawyer are about “money, money, money, money, money.”
“They sold out cheap because the allegations aren’t true,” he said. “She’s written a letter and signed it, saying it was untrue. The president has said it was untrue, and they cannot produce a scintilla of independent evidence.”
