his own admission, making claims about law. for example, no campaign collusion and then saying i haven t gathered all the facts. he says things with potential motive for what the president did. it might have been a campaign finance problem. stormy daniels reembeimbursemend in terms of public relations strategy, donald trump a lawyer. coming out, doing everything on the fly. talking on tv a lot but wit a plan in and vance and without being backed up by facts. in a legal situation, the facts come out eventually if what rudy giuliani says is not true it crea creates embarrassment for the white house. how much concern is this? a sense that rudy giuliani, look you could make the argument that anybody who goes to work for this white house could have a short shelf life. we have certainly seen evidence to support that, and yet as you
we are going out to solve one campaign finance problem but opening up other doors. the president tweeted initially backing up rudy s account which was forget everything we said before. the president knew about it. the president reimbursed michael cohen for it. forget everything we have said in the past and the president knew about the payment. with his money reimbursed. instead the president says this. rudy is a great guy but he just started a day ago. he really has his heart into it. he is working hard. he is learning the subject matter. when rudy made the statement, he had just started and wasn t totally familiar with everything. key point. giuliani has issued statements to clean things up. all he has cleaned up is he says it wasn t about the campaign but about saving the family from
prosecutors have the financial paper trail of these transactions and know who paid what. so to speculate for a second, you can imagine if they know where the money is coming from and it is obviously coming from the president, that lays out this campaign finance problem which ken was talking about. so i think that rudy was trying to clean it up but made a second problem in cleaning it up. it just goes to show you how tangled this web is. are you saying that the intent perhaps was to acknowledge that the payment was made, that donald trump had made the payment, but not to take that extra piece and say it was a week before the election, what were we going to do? exactly. he is trying to cage it and say, okay, yes, the president made this payment, he paid for it but it was not related to the election. i think that was the effort that was going on here. you can see from the first day of coverage that they thought that that was going to cleaver th clear them on the election law violati
did he do anything illegal even with this information? i don t know that he necessarily did. i think the campaign, if this was an expenditure related to campaign activities they should have reported it on their list of expenditures, but the president may say, well, this is a personal matter and i settled this because i needed to protect my family. this is that s the last refuge of most scoundrels, is i m going to protect my family from the terrible thing i did. i have to believe giuliani said this because they believe this takes the campaign finance problem off the table. this wasn t a payment from the trump organization. it wasn t a payment by michael cohen on behalf of the trump organization. it was a personal expenditure by the president. thereby he paid michael cohen back. the problem is there s so much else about this giuliani interview that does not seem to adhere to any script they d want him to follow. i was watching it i was
call them legal fees when they re really a subterfuge for paying off a porn star. it doesn t get you, it doesn t get you out of the campaign finance problem. and it actually makes things a lot worse for cohen. because once again, lawyers don t do this. and so, i m not even sure what the intelligent design was supposed to be behind the comments. but i do think that what we may be seeing, is something we ve been waiting for, the president is going to have to tack back from many of his public statements, he s now going into a formal litigation posture. and many of these past denials cannot stand in depositions or grand juries or whatever forum he finds himself in. this may be the painful process of tacking the ship. to turn it you know 180 degrees.