May 2, 2018

Rudy Giuliani Just Chose a Very Funny Time to Tell the Truth

Trump is not going to like it.

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press

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Michael Cohen’s client Donald Trump recently tapped Rudy Giuliani to be on his legal team, and tonight America’s Mayor went on the television show of Michael Cohen’s other client, Sean Hannity. The results weren’t great! Here’s how The Huffington Post put it:

In a sweeping interview on Fox News Wednesday night, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said President Donald Trump had repaid his lawyer Michael Cohen for his $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s going to turn out to be perfectly legal; that money was not campaign money,” Giuliani, Trump’s new lead attorney regarding issues related to the special counsel’s Russia investigation, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“Sorry, I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know,” Giuliani continued, saying that the payment was “funneled through a law firm, and then the president repaid it.”

Cohen has repeatedly said that he just paid the money himself out of the goodness of his heart or something, and Trump said last month that he knew nothing about it so oops?

You should watch the clip. Sean Hannity is all:

With good reason. If the president structured payments to Cohen over a period of time, as Giuliani suggested, “that’s a serious, serious problem,” Stormy Daniel’s lawyer Michael Avenatti told MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell in the immediate aftermath of the Fox appearance, raising the possibility that repayments could have been designed to avoid campaign finance scrutiny.

Watch the clip below:

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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