May 4, 2018

Giuliani Attempts to Clean Up Explosive Statements on Trump’s Stormy Daniels Payment

Earlier, Trump indicated that his new lawyer would soon be getting his “facts straight.”

Anthony Behar/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Rudy Giuliani released a statement on Friday attempting to clarify explosive remarks he made just two days before, in which he said President Donald Trump had reimbursed $130,000 to his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels from publicly speaking about an alleged affair with the president.

The new statement from Giuliani, who recently joined Trump’s legal team to help him contend with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, repeated his original claim that the payment was not a campaign finance violation. It also tried to reframe his comments to Fox & Friends on Thursday, when he said of Daniels’ allegations, “Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton.” Some people interpreted those remarks as accidental confirmation that the payment was politically motivated and therefore in possible violation of campaign finance laws, which limit the amount people can contribute to candidates and require disclosures of those donations.

“My references to timing were not describing my understanding of the President’s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters,” it,” Giuliani, the former New York mayor and presidential candidate, said in the statement.

The statement is the latest development in an increasingly fraught legal situation concerning the president and the hush agreement with Daniels, which has since become a focus of a federal investigation targeting Cohen. It came just hours after Trump signaled to reporters Friday morning that Giuliani, the newest member of his legal team, would soon be getting his “facts straight” on the matter. (Prior to Wednesday, when Giuliani told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Trump had repaid Cohen for the $130,000 he gave Daniels to silence her, Trump had repeatedly denied having any knowledge of the payment.)

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago,” Trump told reporters. He added, “Rudy knows it’s a witch hunt, he started yesterday, he’ll get his facts straight. He’s a great guy.”

The intention of Giuliani’s shocking admission appeared to be to exonerate Trump of a campaign finance violation. Legal experts say it did the opposite, likely exacerbating Trump’s mounting legal woes by suggesting he might have failed to make the proper disclosures or even conspired to cover up the campaign contribution.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate