As the story was breaking of Michael Cohen’s willingness to testify to Donald Trump’s knowledge of the Trump Tower Collus-i-thon, one man seemed suspiciously ready to leap on the nation’s TV screens and demean Trump’s former attorney—his current attorney.
Rudy Giuliani: I expected something like this. The man has been lying all week. Or for two … He’s been lying for years. … There’s nobody that I know that knows him that hasn’t warned me that if his back is up against the wall he’ll lie like crazy because he’s lied all his life.
But the new fixer’s complaints about the old fixer stand in marked contrast to what Giuliani had to say about Cohen just two months ago.
Giuliani: He doesn’t have any incriminating evidence about the president or himself. The man is an honest, honorable lawyer.
The fact that Giuliani was Rudy-on-the-spot to condemn Cohen after the story broke on CNN leads considerable credence to the idea that Giuliani and/or Trump was involved in leaking the story to the media. Though the motivation for leaking such information would be … obscure, at best. If Donald Trump genuinely did not know about the Trump Tower meeting, then planting a story that Cohen said Trump did know, might be damaging to Cohen’s value as a witness. However, for that to work, Cohen would have to provide some kind of validation to the story, and even more importantly, Donald Trump would have to be innocent. And even Steve Bannon said months ago that the odds of Trump not knowing in advance about the Trump Tower meeting were “zero.”
So the best that could be achieved by floating the story in public would be to possibly complicate the life of federal prosecutors who would find it much harder to come up with twelve Americans who didn’t already know that Trump is a crook, even if they check under every stone and search deep in abandoned mines. And just to make the plot of using a massive public story to obstruct justice extra stealthy, this comes one day after Giuliani insisted that Donald Trump does his obstructing on the sly.
Giuliani: If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly.
Which Trump then double-underlined by both mentioning how Robert Mueller was looking into his Twitter account, then following it up by threatening Michael Cohen. On Twitter.
Seriously, all of this stuff may seem super-clever to Trump and Giuliani. Look here. No there. I would never cry wolf. Not wolf. Never wolf. Because that would be so wrong. Wolf.
So far, all that Giuliani’s clever “defense” of dumping Trump’s garbage on the national table has achieved has been … Trump’s garbage on the national table. He hasn’t brokered any kind of deal with Mueller. He hasn’t settled or blocked the lawsuit from Daniels. And he’s not doing Trump any good if his scheme is to spill this out in advance of Cohen testifying to Trump’s guilt in court.
Yes, Trump’s knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting may be “old news” by the time Robert Mueller submits his final report. But Mueller tacking on the words “conspiracy” and “obstruction” will make it all extremely fresh again.
All that Rudy is accomplishing is … it’s not clear he’s accomplishing anything, except making it clear that the guy who hires “all the best people” has hired a blowhard to follow a crook.