Speed Reads

rudy can't fail

Rudy Giuliani thinks he's nailing it?

The only thing that is clear after five days of Rudy Giuliani going on TV to explain what his client President Trump knew about the $130,000 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels and when "is how little has been cleared up," The Washington Post says. From his initial bombshell on Hannity that Trump had paid back the $130,000 to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to his suggestion on Sunday that Cohen might have paid off other mistresses and the $130,000 was just a "nuisance payment," Giuliani has raised at least as many questions as he has answered.

He apparently doesn't see it that way. "We all feel pretty good that we've got everything kind of straightened out and we're setting the agenda," Giuliani told The Washington Post. He said he met with Trump at a golf club in northern Virginia on Sunday — Trump's 111th trip to a Trump golf course as president — to discuss legal strategy. "Everybody's reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that's what I came in to do," Giuliani said. "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." (Trump has only one scheduled event on Monday, a national security briefing at 11 a.m.)

Some outside lawyers were baffled at Giuliani's assessment. Giuliani was "just erratic, unpredictable, aimless," Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University, tells the Post. "I couldn't tell what he thought he was going to accomplish." "Ironically, Giuliani continues to think that he's covering the tracks of the president in the snow but he's actually walking around in cement," legal analyst Laura Coates said Monday on CNN's New Day, "and every single footprint is being followed by the investigators in Manhattan." Peter Weber