“Get this over with” – Rudy Giuliani admits he really is trying to take Donald Trump down
When Rudy Giuliani announced that he was informally joining Donald Trump’s legal team two weeks ago, promising to bring the investigations into Trump’s criminal scandals to an end within a week or two, and insisting that the best way to do it was to have Trump give an interview to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, we asked if Rudy was trying to hurry up and get Trump ousted. Now Rudy’s own words appear to all but confirm this.
Giuliani went on Fox News last night and confessed that Donald Trump really did reimburse his fixer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 in hush money that had been paid to Trump’s former mistress Stormy Daniels. This left jaws dropped in general, and it left Trump’s adversaries celebrating. It not only meant Trump had lied about the whole thing, it also meant Trump had committed multiple financial felonies. Now Rudy is explaining why he did it, and it reads like a confession of a different kind.
No one in Donald Trump’s orbit, from his political advisers to his legal advisers, had any idea that Rudy Giuliani was going to do what he did last night, according to a new report from the Washington Post. Now Rudy is explaining himself by asserting that he had Trump’s personal approval to do it this way: “[Trump] was well aware that at some point when I saw the opportunity, I was going to get this over with.” Let’s try to parse this.
If Rudy Giuliani were lying about having Donald Trump’a approval, Trump would have exploded at him on Twitter by now or fired him. So we know that Giuliani is telling the truth here. But Rudy is a former prosecutor who understands how the law works, and he knows that preemptively confessing to felonies does not get a client off the hook. All it does is speed up the client’s demise. For whatever reason, perhaps to try to head off the investigation before it takes him down too, Rudy really is trying to quickly get Trump ousted. He just admitted as much.
