Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar? She said they met at a golf tournament in 2006 and had sex that evening.
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Giuliani told The New York Times that the total paid to Cohen since the end of the campaign was between $460,000 and $470,000, but he did not account for the money spent beyond Daniels’ $130,000, raising another question about the objective of those payments. “Then you also look at the statement by, and I think you put it up for your audience earlier, the statement by Michael Cohen about facilitating the payment, where he denied being reimbursed by the Trump Organization (or the campaign)”.
“These agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth”, Trump continued.
“I would get on my charger and go right into their offices with a lance. if they do, do Ivanka, which I doubt they do, the whole country will turn on them”, added Giuliani.
An attorney for President Donald Trump says the president didn’t know the full details of his personal lawyer’s arrangement with a porn actress until “maybe 10 days ago”.
Stormy Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, says if the revelations from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani are true about the $130,000 payment to Daniel, then “that’s a crime”.
Bedford’s comments also come as Trump made a decision to hire Giuliani to join his personal legal team April 19.
Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for Daniels, told CNN’s “New Day” on Thursday that he was “speechless” and “stunned” after hearing Giuliani’s revelation about the reimbursement. Time to move on.
“Giuliani is going to be dealing with all the existential threats to the Trump presidency”, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. Giuliani later suggested to The Wall Street Journal that while Trump had repaid the $130,000, Cohen had settled the payment to Daniels without Trump’s knowledge at the time. “Mr. Trump stood on AF1 and blatantly lied”.
Less than a week after Mr Trump and other US Senators came to the defence of Ms Huckabee Sanders over comedian Michelle Wolf’s White House correspondents’ dinner roast, top Republican Charlie Dent turned his back on the press secretary. So this president has some company.
“Hillary Clinton got that and he couldn’t get that”.
On Thursday, Sanders took issue with a reporter’s characterization that she had felt blindsided by Giuliani’s interview. Citing “ongoing litigation”, she said, “I don’t have anything else to say”. “So, there is no question that he would have had to have known about the allegation or the payment as of that date”.
Trump’s prevarications also made a mess of the even more consequential story of the firing of James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, in May of previous year. The investigation is an offshoot of the ongoing probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into potential collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian Federation and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe.
Recall the sequence of events a year ago when Comey was suddenly fired while on a trip to California. Here’s a timeline of Trump’s contradictory accounts.
It was, of course, Rosenstein who selected Mueller to oversee the inquiry, and it is Rosenstein who is now the target of the president and House conservatives, who want him removed. Then Trump himself told NBC’s Lester Holt that the real reason was “the Russian Federation thing” – that is, to relieve the burden of the FBI’s Russian Federation investigation.
The president’s self-proclaimed legal fixer has been surprised and concerned by Trump’s recent stance toward him, according to a Cohen confidant. Yet Giuliani undermined that argument by saying on “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning, “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton”.
The White House referred questions to the president’s personal legal team.
“Before last night, at least they could portray that Cohen was the lead on this and the campaign and Trump had nothing to do with it”, Hasen said.
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“After it was over, there was the opportunity to reimburse”, he added, saying, “the President reimbursed him out of non-campaign, non-campaign contribution money, private money, his money, and he did it over a course of 2017”. But that doesn’t make the uncomfortable questions about truth and the president any less important. That may continue to be the case.
