WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani left open Sunday the possibility that Trump and former personal attorney Michael Cohen discussed Cohen's congressional testimony.
But, he added, "so what" if he did?
Giuliani said on CNN's State of the Union that he did not know whether Trump had discussed with Cohen a 2017 congressional interview at which Cohen lied about a Trump Tower real estate project in Moscow. Giuliani also acknowledged in a separate interview with NBC News that conversations about that project stretched throughout 2016, including possibly up until October or November of that year.
The question arose in light of a BuzzFeed News report from last week that said Trump had instructed Cohen to lie to Congress and that Cohen relayed that to special counsel Robert Mueller's team of investigators. Mueller's office took the unusual step of issuing a statement disputing the story. BuzzFeed said it stands by its reporting.
Giuliani said in interviews with CNN and NBC that Trump never directed Cohen to lie to lawmakers. But on CNN, he acknowledged the possibility that Trump and Cohen might have discussed Cohen's testimony, saying that while he had no knowledge of such a conversation, he wasn't ruling it out and that it would be "perfectly normal" anyway.
"I don't know if it happened or didn't happen," Giuliani said, later adding, "And so what if he talked to him about it?"
He also objected to BuzzFeed's coverage, telling CNN's Jake Tapper that the news site "should be sued, they should be under investigation. You've got a hysteria in the media that interprets everything against Donald Trump. What they did yesterday was truly fake news and disgusting."
Giuliani's suggestion that dialogue about the Trump Tower project could have stretched into the fall of 2016 extends the timeline for negotiations well beyond what the president has publicly acknowledged. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress by saying that he had abandoned the project in January 2016 even though prosecutors say he actually continued pursuing it into that June.
The new timetable would mean that Trump was seeking a deal at the time he was calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia imposed by the Barack Obama administration. He would have been seeking a deal when he gave interviews questioning the legitimacy of NATO, a favorite talking point of President Vladimir Putin of Russia. And he would have been seeking a deal when, in July 2016, he called on Russia to release hacked Democratic emails that Putin's government was rumored at the time to have stolen.
The Trump Tower Moscow discussions were "going on from the day I announced to the day I won," Giuliani quoted Trump as saying during an interview with The New York Times.
Giuliani said on NBC's Meet The Press that Trump recalled having conversations with Cohen about the project throughout 2016, though there "weren't a lot of them."
"The president also remembers -- yeah, probably up -- could be up to as far as October, November," Giuliani said. "Our answers cover until the election. So anytime during that period, they could've talked about it. But the president's recollection of it is that the, the thing had petered out quite a bit."
Giuliani made a similar comment last month on ABC News when he suggested that the president knew that Cohen was pursuing the project into 2016.
"According to the answer that he gave, it would have covered all the way up to -- covered up to November 2016. Said he had conversations with him but the president didn't hide this," Giuliani said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the panel planned to investigate why Cohen made false statements to Congress and determine what exactly Cohen and Trump might have discussed about his testimony.
"Congress has a fundamental interest in two things: first in getting to the bottom of why a witness came before us and lied, and who else was knowledgeable that this was a lie," Schiff said on CBS' Face the Nation.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Giuliani's revelation that Trump continued to discuss a Trump Tower Moscow throughout the campaign was "big news" to him and adds more grist to questions about the campaign's possible ties to Russia.
"Why two years after the fact are we just learning this?" asked Warner, who has been helping lead the only bipartisan congressional investigation of Russian meddling in the elections. "That raises a whole host of questions that the American public needs an answer to, and the Congress needs an answer to."
Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said last week that he's considering subpoenaing Cohen to testify before Trump's former lawyer reports to federal prison in March.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Tucker of The Associated Press; by Mark Niquette and Steven T. Dennis of Bloomberg News; by Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; and by Paige Cunningham of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/21/2019