On Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani told the Wall Street Journal that he would not recommend that Donald Trump talk with special counsel Robert Mueller. But on Wednesday morning, Giuliani reversed course in an interview with the Washington Post.
“I guess I’d rather do the interview. It gets it over with it. It makes my client happy,” he said. “The safe course you hear every lawyer say is don’t do the interview, and that’s easy to say in the abstract. That’s much harder when you have a client who is the president of the United States and wants to be interviewed.”
This follows weeks during which Giuliani has suggested that any attorney would be a “sucker” to let Trump talk with Mueller, saying that any such conversation would inevitably turn into a “perjury trap” in which Mueller would attempt to trap Trump by asking him questions and checking his answers against known facts. Giuliani has also claimed that the special counsel can’t indict, or even subpoena, Donald Trump—ideas that seem to run counter to something known as the Constitution.
It’s not clear why, on the same day Donald Trump upped his attack on the investigation with the Stupid Pizzagate accusations, Trump would suddenly be anxious to sit down with Mueller. Based on the Vanity Fair article explaining the state of “thinking” within the Trump White House, it’s entirely possible that Trump believes he has the investigation on the ropes.
Trump may also be the only one who believes the words that have been coming out of Rudy Giuliani’s mouth when he claims that Mueller had promised to limit the length and scope of any Trump meeting down to the topics that are Giuliani approved. Whatever the reason, Trump seems to be at the charged up and confident end of his see-saw personality.
… Giuliani said the president sometimes seesaws on whether he wants to do an interview. “There have been a few days where he says, ‘Maybe you guys are right,’ ” Giuliani said, referring to Trump attorneys who have warned against an interview. “Then he goes right back to, ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ ”
He should. He really should. And now is a really good time.
After all, Donald Trump’s interview schedule has some free time, now that the days formerly dedicated to his Nobel Prize not-winning meeting seem to have opened up.
But while Trump may be momentarily ready to go, Giuliani is still worried about that perjury trap.
“They may have a different version of the truth than we do,” Giuliani said.
No one else seems to be running the same version of truth that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are using. After all, the non-alternative facts really do have a liberal bias.
But the odds that Trump will actually pop into Mueller’s chair any time soon are about as likely as … anything else that Rudy Giuliani says.