Trump Goes on the Record: Rudy Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About – By Tina Nguyen (Vanity Fair) / Feb 1 2019
The president tells the Times that his perpetually “incorrect” attorney misspoke.
As much as Donald Trump appears to enjoy Rudy Giuliani, the relationship is not without its difficulties. “Rudy hates the job,” a Republican briefed on Giuliani’s thinking told my colleague Gabriel Sherman last month. “Trump is very hard to deal with.” Trump, in turn, has occasionally exploded at his personal attorney for his bewildering, confessional television appearances. “Trump is screaming. He’s so mad at Rudy,” a source close to the president said after Giuliani participated in a rambling Q&A with The New Yorker. Several people close to Trump have suggested that he fire Giuliani before he does any more damage.
These tensions have largely played out behind the scenes, in the West Wing. But on Thursday, the president addressed the latest controversy surrounding Giuliani directly. “Rudy has been wrong,” Trump claimed in his first sit-down interview with The New York Times in over a year, contradicting his attorney’s shifting statements regarding efforts by the Trump Organization to build a luxury high-rise in Moscow during the 2016 election.
While Giuliani has since walked back his comments about the Moscow development, his original conjecture—that Trump was involved in conversations about the real-estate project up until November 2016—created a massive political headache for the White House. In late January, Giuliani told the Times that the talks were “going on from the day [he] announced to the day [he] won,” then immediately told Meet the Press that it was an “active proposal” through the very end of the election.
On Thursday, Trump attempted to repair the damage by tossing his attorney under the bus. “So let me tell you about about Trump Tower Moscow,” he told Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker, who were accompanied in the Oval Office by the paper’s publisher, A. G. Sulzberger. “This was a very unimportant deal. This was a very unimportant deal. No. 1. No. 2, this was a deal, the only thing you heard is through Rudy [Giuliani]. Is that what you heard? Through Rudy?”
“More recently we heard through Rudy, he quotes you,” said Baker.
Trump responded by making it exceedingly clear that Giuliani did not know what he was talking about:
Rudy was incorrect. No. 1, he was incorrect, and we’ve explained that, he was wrong. Rudy has been wrong. A little bit. But what has happened is this. I didn’t care. That deal was not important. It was essentially a letter of intent or an option. I’m not even sure that they had a site. And if you look at where that was sent to, that was a Michael Cohen thing. If you look, I always say, Why don’t you bring this up, to Jay Sekulow, good guy. I think it was sent to almost like a public address for Moscow. If you take a look at it. Take a good solid look. The original letter or something was sent. They didn’t even have anybody to send it to. But that deal is just like other deals. I was doing other deals. I was running for president, but I was also running a business.
Even that admission is problematic, of course. Throughout the 2016 election, Trump claimed that he had “nothing to do with Russia,” despite his senior campaign staff meeting with a Russian lawyer peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton, and a longtime adviser making nice with WikiLeaks. As the Times recently reported, there were more than 100 contacts between Trump, his associates, and Russians before the inauguration. In a string of indictments, special counsel Robert Mueller has described a vast web of interactions between people in Trump’s orbit and Russians seeking to influence the 2016 election.
Given all that has come to light, the president’s narrative has shifted. Sure, his real-estate company had business with Russia during the campaign, he has said, but it was only speculative. (BuzzFeed has reported that the Trump Tower Moscow project would have netted the Trump Organization some $300 million in profit—among the most lucrative deals he might ever have made.) Where’s the crime?
TIMES: Clearly there was a hope of having money. That was the reason you were pursuing it, right?
TRUMP: My point is this—It was a free option to look at a deal, to look at deals. That was not like, “I’m going to buy a property in Moscow. I’m going to do—or I’m building a building in Moscow.” Now, I would have had every right to do a deal. That’s what I did. That’s what I did.
Rudy was wrong in that he went—I think what Rudy was looking at, I think, was that in the statement I made to the Mueller group, we talked about during that period of a year, up until the election, we talked about that. So he may have been referring to that.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/donald-trump-rudy-giuliani-wrong
