represents himself as the president s attorney earlier today i did a search in all of the southern district to see if he was the attorney on any case. he is not. he is named as a defendant in 40 cases, but he s not representing anybody in court. at one point giuliani told a reporter i m not acting as a lawyer. i m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life of straightening up government. tonight he pointed out that he is an attorney. he is all over the place. he is. one of the things that happened to nixon in water gate, i asked the water gate prosecutors, did nixon ever have an attorney who you thought was competent? and all of the prosecutors said never. he never really did come up to the level of being well-represented in their eyes anyway. i think that s what we re seeing with rudy giuliani. trump has good civil lawyers. i don t think he has good criminal representation and has no idea how the law works.
receiving a complaint that fingered the president and the attorney general for possible wrong doing, magire first consulted the offices of those two men, the justice department and the white house. you first went to the office of legal counsel. and then you went to the white house counsel? no, no, no sir. we went to the white house first to determine, to ask a that s all i want to know. you went to the white house first. so you went to the subject of the complaint for advice first about whether you should provide the complaint to congress? reporter: he said he would not discuss his private conversations with president trump, but he did make one exception. did the president of the united states ask you to find out the identity of the whistle-blower? i can tell you emphatically no. republicans today largely took a different approach, trying to under mine it all,
we don t have to wait on the courts. we have the president copying to the act. he has admitted to the crime. the words in the transcript that he released shows the president trying to leverage u.s. dollars that are not his to seek a benefit for his election. so i really encourage my colleagues to move swiftly to hold the president accountable. in the questioning of the drerk of national intelligence today, you raised the possibility that the transcripts of other calls with foreign leaders could have also been moved in a similar fashion which is also indicated or suggested by the whistle-blower. is there a realistic way to actually find that out? we will need more whistle-blowers to come forward. of course, we are going to do our responsibility in congress to try to seek the transcripts which are not protected and should not be classified. but you can can only imagine a leopard doesn t change his spots. if he s acting this way with the president of the ukraine who he just had a conv
complaint, about a week after trump s call with the ukrainian leader, giuliani travelled to madrid to meet with an adviser about the cases they had discussed. i never knew about the $250 million military aid. when you read the conversation, there is no mention. there is no mention of military aid. there is no quid pro quo. the president of the ukraine says i wasn t pressured. end of case. this case is anything but over. the complaint says multiple u.s. officials told the whistleblower they were deeply concerned about giuliani s actions and that state department officials including two ambassadors had spoken with giuliani in an attempt to contain the damage to u.s. national security. in response, giuliani told cnn at no time did either one of them say they wanted to contain the damage. it s all vintage giuliani. since signing on with the white house for the russia investigation, he has given
house that this complaint had come in. the justice department? notified the white house? the intelligence agency notified the white house. this is all happening much more quickly than we thought because it s not for another week or so that the inspector general for the intelligence agencies begins the formal notification saying that we have a referral. we want you to investigate. do we know how much the intelligence agency or the justice department told the white house about this whistle-blower complaint? we know they were notified that it had to do with the phone call because the justice department sends lawyers over to the white house to review the transcript of the president s phone call. we know that happens in the days said right after they learn about this. the lawyers come back to the justice department and notify other officials. we have been told previously by justice officials that attorney general bill barr gave knowledge of this much later and learned his name was m