After a hectic couple of days, Rudy Giuliani stressed Sunday that he and President Trump are in a good place.
The recent addition to Trump’s legal team said that with Trump focused on foreign policy matters, he would stay focused on the legal front.
“We’ve made a deal this weekend: He stays focused on North Korea, Iran and China, and we stay focused on the case and we’ll bother him when we have to,” Giuliani told the Washington Post following a meeting with Trump at his golf club in Sterling, Va.
Giuliani has been engaged in a frantic media blitz ever since dropping a bombshell claim about the president’s involvement in a payment to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says she had an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump more than a decade ago. Meanwhile Trump, save for a trip to Cleveland to talk tax reform, has been relatively quiet, including, notably, on Twitter.
[Sam Nunberg gives Rudy Giuliani an ‘A’ for media blitz]
During that explosive Fox News interview with host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Giuliani suggested that Trump reimbursed his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to Daniels intended to keep her silent about the alleged affair. That appeared to directly contradict what Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in April, when he said he didn’t know anything about the payment.
Through a series of follow-up interviews and a statement, Giuliani has sought to walk back what he said on Wednesday. Putting it somewhat bluntly late Saturday, in another interview on Fox News, Giuliani claimed he is still learning the “facts.”
But his talk of the Daniels payment wasn’t the only thing he said that rocked Washington. In what had been a wide-ranging interview, Giuliani panned the FBI raid of Cohen’s home, hotel room, and office last month as Cohen is under investigation for possibly committing bank fraud, wire fraud, and violating campaign finance rules. In doing so, Giuliani condemned the FBI agents as “stormtroopers.”
That comment evoked the ire of former FBI Director James Comey, who had been another big target of Giuliani’s in recent days. “I know the New York FBI. There are no “stormtroopers” there; just a group of people devoted to the rule of law and the truth. Our country would be better off if our leaders tried to be like them, rather than comparing them to Nazis,” Comey tweeted in Giuliani’s direction.
Giuliani had also said that Trump fired Comey because he would not say publicly “that [Trump] wasn’t a target of the investigation” on Russian meddling. The former New York City mayor then attempted to distance himself from those comments on Friday, with a statement that argued removing Comey was “clearly within [Trump’s] Article II power.”
“It is undisputed that the President’s dismissal of former Director Comey — an inferior executive officer — was clearly within his Article II power,” Giuliani said. “Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation.”
Responding to the discord, veteran journalist Carl Bernstein accused Giuliani of trying to “throw bombs” into special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Despite the backlash, Giuliani told the Post on Sunday that in conclusion, “We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda,” adding that “everybody’s reacting to us now.”
Giuliani hasn’t been alone in the clean-up effort. In the media storm that followed the Hannity interview, questions were raised about possible campaign finance violations. Trump dismissed these concerns in a series of tweets Thursday, claiming a monthly retainer he gave Cohen was completely separate from his campaign.
“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction,” the president tweeted.
And despite being caught off guard, Trump’s team in the White House also rallied to the president’s side. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted during an interview Sunday morning that Trump’s denial in April was in reference to knowing when the transaction originally took place.
Not everyone was convinced of the reversal. The lawyer for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, tweeted last week that both Trump and Giuliani “are making it up as they go along.”
While Giuliani feels like his mission is accomplished, some are questioning whether his time at Trump’s side will be short-lived.
A White House source reportedly told Axios that there were “Mooch” references made in the West Wing last week in regards to Giuliani, a nod to Anthony Scaramucci, the fiery White House communications director that was fired after 11 days.
But in reacting to that report, Scaramucci said such talk is nothing more than left-wing “spin.”
“How the left spins things to hurt [Trump] and divide him from his smartest most loyal supporters. Don’t fall for it,” Scaramucci said in a tweet.
