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Friday, May 4, 2018

Abbreviated pundit roundup: "Bless you, Rudy Giuliani, you glorious fool."




A noun, a verb, and a damning admission. Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani couldn’t help worsening the situation for his already legally imperiled client by appearing on TV this week to dig the hole a little deeper. Here’s Paul Waldman’s take at The Week:
Bless you, Rudy Giuliani, you glorious fool.
This is where we are: When one of the president's lawyers tells the truth, it's blockbuster news. That's what happened Wednesday night when Giuliani, a relative newcomer to President Trump's ever-rotating legal team, went on Hannity for what should have been another softball interview. To everyone's surprise, Giuliani announced that President Trump reimbursed his attorney Michael Cohen the $130,000 Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) was paid to keep silent about an affair she says she had with Trump. Which means that Giuliani admitted that Trump lied about this, the White House lied about it, and Cohen didn't exactly lie about it, but carefully chose his words to fool everyone into thinking something that was false. Good work, Rudy!
Don’t miss Harry Litman’s analysis at The New York Times. Litman is a former United States attorney and deputy assistant attorney general:
This is not a big, clean Trumpian lie. It is messy and convoluted and falls apart when you spell it out: Trump didn’t know about the specifics, but he did repay because he did know about the general arrangement, but he didn’t really know because it’s just the sort of things lawyers do for clients and Mr. Cohen didn’t want to burden him since he’s a busy man. Got that?
Good luck bearing up under an aggressive cross-examination on all this. It may, in fact, come to that, because among the many problems with Mr. Giuliani’s story is that it makes him a witness to important facts in both the Cohen and Trump investigations.
It also, of course, indicates that Mr. Trump was lying when he said he had no knowledge that Mr. Cohen had paid Ms. Daniels. Presumably the calculation of Team Trump is that his base exacts no cost for even the baldest of lies, even one offered as the final you-can-believe-me truth after months of prevarication.

Adam Davidson at The New Yorker:

It’s impossible to know precisely what Giuliani thought he was doing in his various television appearances this week. I suspect he believed that it would be better for Trump, legally, if the Stormy Daniels payoff was cast as a private matter that Trump paid out of his pocket, as having nothing to do with the election and, therefore, nothing to do with campaign-finance laws.
One problem, though, was that Trump had said publicly that he knew nothing about the payoff. Aha!, Giuliani seems to have thought, we can say that Cohen’s monthly retainer from Trump was designed for just this sort of thing: to allow Cohen to take care of problems without bothering Trump with them. It would explain everything: the payoff that Trump didn’t know about but also authorized, the fact that Trump now seems to know about the payoff that he didn’t know about, and the idea that this was not a campaign-related expense. This is precisely the kind of too-clever idea that a lawyer should put to his colleagues before presenting publicly. Did Giuliani allow anyone around him to challenge the logical inconsistencies in his argument? (The Washington Post reporter Robert Costa has said that Trump and Giuliani are “running” their own strategy.) How can it be that the Stormy Daniels payment has been the subject of public debate for months, and yet Trump’s defense team still hasn’t settled on how it is arranging the known facts? The reason is this: everyone around Trump sees his role as performing publicly on Trump’s behalf, to earn the big man’s fickle favor. A shared narrative, repeated with discipline, would guarantee that Trump would find the performance boring and look to someone more forceful and creative.
Michael Daly at The Daily Beast says Giuliani sounds like a mob lawyer:

In interviews and in his book, Comey has said that Trump’s demand for loyalty reminded him of a mob boss. Giuliani, the onetime mob buster, has now ended up speaking like a mob mouthpiece.
As Giuliani should have learned when he did not get the job he wanted, Trump’s notion of loyalty is indeed enough like that of a mob boss that it carries no obligation for the Big Guy to be reciprocal.
Some people are a one-way street. Trump is a one-way boulevard.
As always, don’t miss Eugene Robinson’s piece:

That unpleasant odor wafting from the direction of the White House is the sour smell of panic, as the president’s lies threaten to unravel — and the law closes in.
To close on a different note, on the topic of gun control, Rep. Eric Swalwell has a piece at USA Today that’s worth a read:

Reinstating the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 would prohibit manufacture and sales, but it would not affect weapons already possessed. This would leave millions of assault weapons in our communities for decades to come.
Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons. The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs. [...]
Our courts haven’t found a constitutional right to have assault weapons, anyway. When the Supreme Court held in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that this right “is not unlimited” and is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

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