Rudy Giuliani jumps in and makes the AT&T bribery scandal even worse for Donald Trump

| 9:05 pm EDT May 12, 2018
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The bribery scandal involving AT&T, Donald Trump, and his fixer Michael Cohen is already so profoundly ugly, the only way it could get even uglier for them would be if Rudy Giuliani decided to jump in and try to help them. So of course, that’s precisely what’s now happened. Giuliani has made things so much worse that he’s already trying to walk back the damage he just did to Trump.

AT&T now admits that it hired Cohen as a “consultant” for the express purpose of trying to get Donald Trump to side in its favor on its proposed merger with Time Warner. The Trump administration has been fighting against the merger for quite some time, but the administration has tried to insulate Trump all along by claiming that he had played no role in the decision. Then Rudy Giuliani opened his mouth.

Rudy confessed to the Huffington Post that Donald Trump did in fact oppose the merger between AT&T and Time Warner. It’s unclear if Giuliani mistakenly thought that this admission would make Trump look less guilty for having taken AT&T’s bribes, or if he was reverting back to his earlier strategy of simply confessing to Trump’s crimes. In any case, after Giuliani’s words once again blew up in Trump’s face, Rudy then went on CNN this morning and tried to insist that Trump did not play a role in the government’s decision to fight the merger.

Donald Trump’s defense, weak as it may have been, was that AT&T’s payoff to Michael Cohen couldn’t have counted as a bribe because Trump wasn’t involved in making any government decisions about AT&T. Rudy Giuliani just blew up that defense. And if you’re wondering if perhaps this was part of some kind of secret evil genius plan by Rudy, we learned that wasn’t the case when he ended up having to walk it all back.