stare at the rudy giuliani performances long enough, if you rewind tape and if you try to think it through, you can sometimes find, not only sometimes, what that was all about, like, what the mission was. and it seems to me the more i stared at it, yesterday s mission was perfectly normal. normaliz normalized the idea that donald trump was talking to michael cohen and others, possibly, during the presidential campaign, throughout the presidential campaign, about trying to build a trump tower in moscow. yes. i think, lawrence, the key element here is that you have to do it in phases because if you listen to rudy for long enough, your brain is reduced to mush. true. you reconstitute your brain into a functioning organ and then you apply it and make sense of what he s trying to do. i think on first pass, your reaction to it is that the back and forth between buzzfeed and the special counsel s office late last week was an unequivocal win for the president in a sense that it allowed h
about donald trump s personal attorney, michael cohen, about what he will say when he testifies next month in a congressional hearing. buzzfeed reported that michael cohen will testify that he was actively engaged in discussions with russians about a trump tower project through much of the presidential campaign. and yesterday, rudy giuliani not only confirmed that aspect of the buzzfeed story, but he took it a step further and included the possibility of discussions of a trump tower in moscow right up until the returns were coming in on election night and that those discussions at any moment could have involved donald trump, himself. rudy giuliani, of course, has no doubt read the answer that president trump s lawyers wrote in response to robert mueller s question about this, and so it is very likely that rudy giuliani s answer is a preview to what we will see, if we ever get to read president trump s
what he will say when he testifies next month in a congressional hearing. buzzfeed reported that michael cohen will testify that he was actively engaged in discussions with russians about a trump tower project through much of the presidential campaign. and yesterday, rudy giuliani not only confirmed that aspect of the buzzfeed story, but he took it a step further and included the possibility of discussions of a trump tower in moscow right up until the returns were coming in on election night and that those discussions at any moment could have involved donald trump, himself. rudy giuliani, of course, has no doubt read the answer that president trump s lawyers wrote in response to robert mueller s question about this, and so it is very likely that rudy giuliani s answer is a preview to what we will see, if we ever get to read president trump s written answer. and rudy giuliani s tour of the sunday morning shows, he was, of course, asked about the most
buzzfeed. so it s really tough to figure out the tactical wisdom behind giuliani s choices, but, perhaps, it is to try to draw the sting from some really damaging information that would be coming to all of our attention fairly soon. i need a second here. i m just making the same note that every hollywood scriptwriter of courtroom drama is doing right now. draw the sting. draw the sting. we re going to hear that in dialogue pretty soon. and, john heilemann, the way that giuliani chooses to do this is one of the other mysteries of trump world. but when you look at what his job is, which is to go out there and either assert the ridiculous, or withdraw the r ridiculous that he s previously asserted in favor of what he knows is a coming revelation, there s not a lot of people who d be willing to do that job. no. i mean, look, you re basically, you know, with every trump story, i know we ve talked about
now back giuliani wants us to forget we ever heard that, forget we ever heard from donald trump s mouth from the day i announced to the day i won. and so the method that giuliani is employing here risks apparently risks madness at every moment. yeah, so i did my best, lawrence, to try to come up with some kind of a theory that was reasonable and rational for why giuliani was trying to draw the sting, but then as you note, he takes that stinger and reinserts it into his own arm. so it s it s but here s the other thing that might be going on, lawrence. listen, the american people love a smoking gun. right? and i think we saw that vividly play out with the buzzfeed reporting because that sure looked like a smoking gun when, you know, it was reported that the president told cohen to lie to congress. smoking gun. now, it was a momentary win. i don t know if it was it