Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sunday defended the payment an attorney for President Trump made in 2016 to an adult-film star who had alleged a relationship with Trump, and said it was possible that that lawyer may have paid off other women as well.
The comment from Giuliani, the former New York mayor who recently joined Trump’s legal team, comes amid an ongoing furor over a string of assertions he has made regarding the 2016 payment to Stormy Daniels, why it was made and how much the president knew about it.
When asked during an interview on ABC News’s “This Week” whether Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, had made payments to other women, Giuliani said he did not know of any but acknowledged that this could have happened.
“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani said. “But I would think if it was necessary, yes.”
Giuliani has given a string of interviews and made a series of public comments in recent days regarding the $130,000 that Cohen gave to Daniels — who had spoken with journalists about her claims of an affair with Trump years earlier — just days before Trump won the presidency in 2016.
He revealed last week that Trump had reimbursed Cohen, a startling announcement that stood in direct contrast to the president’s own public claims weeks earlier. After making other remarks to the media — including seemingly connecting the payment to the presidential election — Giuliani then released a cautiously worded statement Friday trying to clean up his comments.
“The reality is, those are not facts that worry me as a lawyer … those don’t amount to anything, what’s said to the press,” Giuliani said. “That’s political.”
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Trump, said Sunday that Trump’s comments on Air Force One were him saying “he didn’t know when the payment occurred.”
“I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do,” Conway said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He didn’t know it at the time that the payment occurred.”
Conway said she has “no reason” not to believe Trump’s comments denying the affair, and she denied that the White House has a problem with credibility. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has been tracking Trump’s false or misleading public claims in office, and so far, it has found more than 3,000 such comments — an average of 6.5 claims per day.
Conway also said she did not know of any other payments made to women during the campaign that were similar to the Daniels transaction, saying “they didn’t cross my desk as campaign manager.”
In his interview, Giuliani again sought to argue that the payment was not a campaign contribution, saying it was “entirely reimbursed out of personal funds.” Experts have said that even if it was not made with campaign money, the timing of it raises questions, as does the fact that it was never revealed in financial disclosure forms.
Giuliani said he did not know the answers to numerous questions, including when Trump learned that Daniels would take money to remain quiet, whether Trump knew about it after the campaign and precisely when Trump found out about the payment.
He said the money was paid “to settle a personal issue that would be embarrassing” to Trump and his wife, and also argued that the amount of money made it seem like more of “a nuisance payment” than anything else.
“I never thought $130,000 — I know this sounds funny to people there at home,” he said. “I never thought $130,000 was a real payment; it’s a nuisance payment. When I settle this, when it was real or a real possibility, it’s a couple million dollars, not $130,000.”
Giuliani said that Cohen is no longer Trump’s personal attorney, adding that that would be a conflict. He also said that the possibility of pardoning Cohen — who is facing scrutiny from federal investigators exploring whether he committed bank fraud and wire fraud — has not been raised.
“Michael’s lawyers all know that that obviously is not on the table,” Giuliani said. “That’s not a decision to be made now; there’s no reason to pardon anybody now.”
Giuliani also spoke critically of Daniels, who made an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” the previous night, something he brought up three times during the interview. He said Daniels “was opportunistic” in seeking money before the election and suggested that she was just seeking “fame and fortune,” adding: “She’s become rich as a result of this. The $130,000 doesn’t mean anything.
“I do think it’s suspect that she waits until the very last minute with regard to the campaign, and where you could get the maximum personal damage against the president.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had told her story to multiple journalists over the years, including reporters from Slate and In Touch magazine, before signing the confidentiality agreement and a statement denying the affair. Daniels said she is being paid more nowadays for doing the same things she was already doing, but she pushed back against the notion that she was happy to be receiving so much notoriety because of Trump.
“This isn’t what I want to be known for,” Daniels said on “The View” last month. She said she has had to hire bodyguards, describing the situation as “overwhelming and intimidating and downright scary a lot of the times.”
Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Daniels, appeared on “This Week” after Giuliani and called the former mayor’s comments “a train wreck.”
“This guy’s all over the map over the last 72 hours on some very simple facts that should be very straightforward,” Avenatti said. “I think it is obvious … to the American people that this is a coverup, that they are making it up as they go along, they don’t know what to say because they’ve lost track of the truth.”
Legal experts have said Giuliani’s remarks in recent days may have exposed Trump to potential legal risks and could have compromised his attorney-client privilege with the president.
In his comments, Giuliani appeared to be trying to play down the payment, and he repeatedly argued that it did not amount to a campaign finance violation. A watchdog group filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department, alleging that the Daniels payment violated campaign finance laws.
“This state is the most unaffordable state in the country, the highest taxes, the most people in poverty,’’ Republican businessman John Cox said of why Republican voters will show up at the polls in California. | Rich Pedroncelli, File/AP Photo
SAN DIEGO – California Republicans have been called an endangered species in this “state of resistance” to the Trump administration, but they insist that their party will beat the odds in 2018 and take back the governor’s seat.
The conservative movement against California’s controversial “sanctuary state” law, a ballot measure to repeal Governor Jerry Brown’s gas tax, and deepening concerns about rising housing costs and homelessness are fueling Republican hopes for a longshot upset.
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The California Republicans who gathered here this weekend for their state party convention say that’s because the Democratic Party – which controls every statewide seat and both houses of the state legislature – has too often tested the patience of taxpayers. With voters preparing to start mail balloting Monday for the June 5 primary, Republicans are casting solidly-Democratic California — the world’s sixth largest economy and home to Silicon Valley — as a broken state hobbled with rising crime and taxes that are sending businesses and residents fleeing.
And they’re attacking the two Democratic gubernatorial frontrunners, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, as part of the problem.
“People look around and they ask why we have the highest level of poverty in the United States?’’ said Assemblyman Travis Allen, a conservative populist from Huntington Beach who has focused his run for governor on the issue of illegal immigration. “Why do we have this exploding homeless population? And what have the California Democrats done to fix it?’’
Wealthy GOP businessman John Cox of Rancho Santa Fe — who’s now in second place behind Democrat Gavin Newsom in the governor’s race in California, where the primary doesn’t take party into account — helped finance an effort to put before voters a ballot measure to repeal the state’s new gas tax, which is overwhelmingly unpopular with Republicans.
“I think the people of this state want better management and they want a businessperson. They’ve got one in the White House,’’ he said in an interview. “The politicians have just run this state into the ground.”
Cox ticks off a list of issues that he says will drive GOP voters to turn out at the polls: “This state is the most unaffordable state in the country, the highest taxes, the most people in poverty. It’s got the worst education system. We were just voted the worst business climate in the country. Regulations are a joke. Small business formation is at an all time low. Businesses are moving out left and right.”
“I don’t know at all how any politician can claim they have managed this state well — and I think the people know it,’’ he said.
Many Republicans, like Jim Brulte, the state party chair, resist the notion of Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi, who counter that the president’s unpopularity and current troubles – including the Stormy Daniels drama and Robert Mueller’s probe – will have a corrosive effect on GOP turnout in California that will help Democrats win back the House as well.
“You want to know why every word out of the Democrats’ mouth is Donald Trump?” Brulte said. “Because they don’t want the voters of this state focusing on what’s happening here. They owned the state, they broke the state – and Republicans, we’re the fix.”
Many Republicans this weekend at their San Diego convention, where “Make America Great Again” hats and “Repeal the Gas Tax” signs were snapped up, reserved their most intense ire for the SB54, the “California Values Act’’ — also known as the “sanctuary state” bill, which supporters say is aimed at protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants. Costa Mesa this week became the latest municipality in California to opt out of the bill, joining Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Simi Valley and Orange County among a crowd in what’s been called growing “revolution” against the measure.
Harmeet Dhillon, a member of the Republican National Committee and a civil rights attorney, told a packed crowd of Republicans Saturday that with the bill, California Democrats are attempting to unconstitutionally override federal jurisdiction and “force law enforcement into a more dangerous position that makes all of us a little less safe.”
“Californians are fed up,’’ said Dhillon, a former vice-chair of the state GOP. “We’re beginning to see a backlash with sanctuary city issues,’’ said Dhillon. “There’s a secret Trump support out there. Democrats feel very smug when they look at the polls, but people say one thing to the pollsters and another to other voters.”
But California State Senator Kevin de Leon, the author of SB54 — and a regular target of GOP candidates — told POLITICO the Republican playbook aims to mislead voters and pump up anti-immigrant sentiment this weekend is merely a desperate attempt to energize a weakening voter base.
“Like Trump, these fake patriots lie about what the bill does,’’ he said. “The fact is, SB 54 expressly exempts dangerous and violent criminals and promotes public safety by having local law enforcement focused on keeping communities safe, not enforcing federal immigration laws. By wide margins Californians see through Trump’s lies and reject his race based immigration policies.”
De Leon said, “Pro-Trump Republicans are out of step with California values. Try as hard as they might they cannot turn back the clock to 1994,’’ adding: “We simply refuse to go back.”
But Lanhee Chen, a former advisor to U.S. Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, says Republicans hoping for some wins this year in an overwhelmingly Democratic state may get traction — by using the bill to point to “a number of examples of gross mismanagement and public policy in California,’’ some of them related to immigration.
Along with fears generated by some high profile crimes like the Kate Steinle murder, there has also been a sense “that urban blight in California has gotten really bad,’’ with homeless encampments mushrooming in Democratic cities like San Francisco and Oakland. “Those law-and-order issues resonate with voters in the Republican party — and independent voters as well,’’ Chen said.
That’s why party activists may be banking hopes on their chances of beating one of the Democratic “flawed candidates”– such as Newsom or Villaraigosa, who have both been the focus of independent expenditures efforts hammering away way at past sexual transgressions of both men. Chan says some Republicans believe that may create “an opportunity for a Republican to sneak in here.”
But Steve Frank, a longtime party activist and publisher of California News Views — a conservative website — cautions that if Republicans really want to take back the governor’s seat in California, they need to follow the example of the man in the White House, who got there despite the predictions of pundits.
“Trump had a message — and he had solutions,’’ said Frank, who hasn’t endorsed either Cox or Allen. Neither of the Republican candidates has gained traction, he said. “They have headlines, but no solutions.”
