fox news and rudy guiliani who just joined the team, not a white house employee, says the president actually did reimburse michael cohen for the payment, and then the president repeats on twitter the next morning. you can see why the white house is scrambling and have no idea how to handle this. i talked to several people today in the white house that said they were totally caught off guard by what rudy guiliani said of course and they really feel like he has undermined the defense strategy they used for weeks, not just on stormy daniels but also james comey and the russian investigation. now they feel this situation is really out of their control because they can t control rudy guiliani going and speaking with the president, which he did before the interview, and sean hannity says this stuff, they can t control that. so the president is telling guiliani what he wants him to say, guiliani says it, and the white house is left in the remember, it s not that he s doing a bad defense str
one lie, one change, things changing constantly, he said this, no, now he s saying that. the rest of the world is going oh my god, what has happened to america and what will it mean to me in my country. world leaders i m sure watching this around the world as you started off your show are going what in the world is happening in america and what will it lead to, what toss it mean in terms of international relations and diplomacy and economy. it is a very serious problem. do you think the president broke the law, that he himself broke the law with the payment to stormy daniels? well, i don t know all of the details but i know there are cases without congressional campaigns in which money was funneled into a campaign surreptitiously, secretly. it is entirely possible that the
payments from the president and he has denied all these allegations. the president strongly, clearly, consistently denied the underlying claims. the president denied the allegations, we have spoken about this issue extensively. i don t have anything else to add. did you know about the $130,000 payment to stormy daniels? do you know where he got the money? no. what do you think about guiliani s strategy in all this? we know he said he spoke to the president before, jeffrey, he spoke to him after the initial appearance. what do you think about what he s done here? well, i think at some level he had no choice because i think the key event we have to remember is that michael cohen s office was searched by the fbi, so the trump people had to know that the records underlying the transactions, the reimbursement
absolute lie on videotape aboard air force one, and i think it is an absolute disgrace. this morning, the president posting a series of tweets to explain himself, writing he reimbursed cohen through the monthly retainer he paid to him for services, insisting money from the campaign or campaign contributions played no role in this transaction. guiliani arguing no laws were broken. just trust me, they re going to come up with no violations there. not so says the nonpartisan watchdog group common cause which filed complaints against trump and cohen with the federal election commission and department of justice in january. rudy guiliani admitted donald trump reimbursed koenmichael co for the payment to stormy daniels and confirmed it via tweet. this means donald trump is perhaps on the hook for criminal violation of federal campaign finance law. no good lawyer would do this.
two things, bri. one back to the tweet. he says none of the money is from the campaign. that s not what we re talking about. we are talking about whether in kind contribution was made to the campaign, not that someone reached into a slush fund of campaign money and took it out, it is whether the 130,000 was a gift to the campaign in terms of what mayor guiliani said, exactly. this is a situation where he s going on fox and friends this morning, saying cohen did his job. but if doing his job is nipping something in the bud three weeks before the election, that doesn t prove that it is a campaign finance violation, but that s exactly what the theory of the case is, that this was done to support the campaign effort in the home stretch. and then in the tweets, the president paints stormy daniels as an extortionist and denies the affair even happened. take it as a one, two. you look at stormy daniels, when you look at karen macdougal, both seem incredibly credible,