Rudy Giuliani can’t get his story straight on Michael Cohen — and Fox News anchor Chris Wallace is calling him out on it.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Wallace confronted Giuliani, who serves as one of President Donald Trump’s attorneys, on his flip-flopping about Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer.
In May, Giuliani called Cohen an “honest, honorable lawyer,” Wallace noted. “But now you say, quote, your words... ‘a pathological liar’ who’s been lying for years. So what happened?”
Giuliani said his shift stemmed from the revelation that Cohen had been “surreptitiously recording his clients” — referring to the tape of Cohen and Trump discussing a payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who’s alleged she had a long-running affair with Trump before he became president. The tape was released last week and initially aired on CNN.
“Obviously if I knew that, I never would’ve said he was a reputable lawyer,” Giuliani said. “I would’ve said he was a scoundrel.”
“I knew nothing bad about Michael Cohen until all of this started to happen in the past couple weeks,” Giuliani insisted.
Giuliani must not have been following previous news accounts about Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer for more than a decade and was targeted by an FBI raid in April.
Cohen had reportedly compared himself to Tom Hagen, the fictional consigliere of the Corleone crime family in “The Godfather.” His business ventures are the subject of considerable interest from federal investigators, The New York Times reported in May, while Giuliani was still defending him.
And Giuliani months ago corrected a Cohen falsehood. Cohen claimed in February that he had paid Stormy Daniels, a porn actress who also has said she had a brief affair with Trump, $130,000 out of his own pocket, and Trump in April claimed he didn’t know about the payment. Giuliani later admitted that Trump had repaid Cohen.