CNN's Jake Tapper tries to sort out Rudy Giuliani's confusing account of Trump and Michael Cohen
CNN's Jake Tapper made a valiant effort to extract clarity from President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, in an interview on State of the Union Sunday.
Trump "did not have discussions with" his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, before Cohen gave false congressional testimony, Giuliani said, adding, "certainly [Trump] had no discussions with [Cohen] in which he told him or counseled him to lie."
But with his next breath, Giuliani allowed that some discussions may have happened after all. "If [Trump] had any discussions with [Cohen], they'd be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them, which they all believed was true," he said.
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Tapper pressed Giuliani to recognize he'd "just acknowledged that it's possible that President Trump talked to Michael Cohen about his testimony" after denying exactly that, and Giuliani responded with a wealth of answers.
Such a conversation "would be perfectly normal," Giuliani said, before emphasizing that he personally does not know whether it occurred and noting that even if he did know, he might not be able to talk about it because of attorney-client privilege.
All that said, Giuliani concluded, it's "not significant" whether such a conversation happened — which it didn't. Unless it did. Rudy Giuliani doesn't know, and if he did, it's possible he couldn't tell you.
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