by digby
Josh Marshall quotes one of his reader’s thoughts on Giuliani’s insane ramblings yesterday in which he blurted out that Trump was talking about Trump Moscow project all the way up to the election:
The last time Giuliani admitted a fact that was not publicly known, it was to get ahead of the Stormy Daniels story before it was disclosed in a likely indictment of Cohen. It seems safe to assume that he is revealing the fact that Trump was negotiating the Trump Tower Moscow deal/bribe in the closing days of the election for the same reason.
Cohen’s office was raided on April 9th and not coincidentally, Giuliani announced as Trump’s new lawyer on April 19th.
Looks to me like Giuliani is trying to construct a firewall here. Admitting the fact that the negotiations were taking place right up to the election so that he can deny the evidence that they continued after Trump won.
Also significant is the obvious lie that the Moscow Tower deal was known about. Like the Trump Tower meeting it was vociferously denied both before the election and after the inaugural.
Marshall says this, and I agree:
I think this is part right. We routinely say Giuliani is a bad lawyer for blurting out deeply damaging facts about his client. I think that’s half right. It seems clear that in private discussions Trump’s team has a running conversation about a very damaging set of facts, an effort to conceal a lot of those facts but also a parallel effort to stand up legal theories that those facts don’t equate to crimes. In Giuliani’s partial defense, the facts appear to be really, really, really bad and the relentlessness of the Mueller probe is making it extremely difficult to keep them secret. So standing up defenses on the law is both necessary and inevitable, as far-fetched as they may be.
What I don’t buy is that Giuliani is using the cover of fumbling, improvisational interviews to get these new facts out. Because he ends up conceding new facts that are deeply damaging, not absolutely necessary to concede at this point and forcing yet further revelations that can be strongly inferred from those admissions.
When Rudy says these things, it’s a window into conversations Trump’s legal team (such as it is) is having and has to have. But Rudy, like his generational peer boss, is unable not to think out loud, drift, ramble and admit critical facts.
There is no doubt in my mind that Giuliani’s ramblings are totally off the cuff. I remember what he used to be like and it wasn’t like this.
It does sound as if Trump had to admit to Mueller under oath that he had been doing the deal with Putin for Trump Moscow all the way to the election. And then, as we know, Russians were crawling all over the transition, the inaugural and the administration. For someone with Giuliani’s disordered mind it’s all very confusing and he blurted out something he didn’t need to say.
Remember: “three weeks before Election Day, Trump Jr. flew to Paris, where he attended a conference at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on ending the Syrian civil war. The event was hosted by an obscure French think tank whose founders have worked closely with Russia’s government, which plays a major role in the Syrian conflict.” It’s obvious they were trying to keep that ball in the air. And in doing so they left themselves open to blackmail.
Which explains the multiple private unrecorded face-to-face meetings:
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cheers — digby
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