President Donald Trump's personal lawyer on Monday walked back the timeline he had offered a day earlier on when negotiations ended with Russian officials about a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow, calling his comments "hypothetical" and not intended to convey facts.
The latest statement from the lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was described as a clarification of remarks he made to The New York Times in an interview Sunday, as well as other remarks he made in interviews on Sunday television news shows.
Giuliani originally quoted Trump as telling him the negotiations over a Moscow skyscraper continued through "the day I won." He also said that the president recalled "fleeting conversations" about the deal after the Trump Organization signed a letter of intent to pursue it.
The confusion centers on how long Trump may have known of -- or was apprised of -- discussions about the Moscow tower proposal, which were led by his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
On Sunday, Giuliani told The New York Times that Trump had said the discussions around the proposed tower were "going on from the day I announced to the day I won." In television interviews the same day, he said that discussions about the tower may have continued up until November 2016 -- the month Trump was elected president.
But on Monday, Giuliani said in a statement that he was making hypothetical remarks.
"My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow 'project' were hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president," Giuliani said.
"My comments did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions," he added. "The point is that the proposal was in the earliest stage and did not advance beyond a free nonbinding letter of intent."
Cohen late last year pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the duration of the Moscow proposal; he had indicated initially that it stopped in January 2016.
Cohen has since admitted the Moscow project discussions continued well into the summer of 2016 and said in a guilty plea that he lied to lawmakers out of "loyalty" to Trump.
Giuliani on Monday also backtracked from previous assertions that Trump might have spoken to Cohen before the lawyer's congressional testimony.
Giuliani said he had confirmed the matter with previous members of the president's legal team, including former lead counsel John Dowd.
"The president never spoke with Cohen about the congressional testimony," Giuliani told the New York Daily News.
Giuliani acknowledged that Trump's legal team conversed with Cohen's lawyers -- and possibly Cohen himself -- before he went before the House and Senate intelligence committees in September 2017.
"Anything that happened between the lawyers would have been part of the joint defense agreement," Giuliani said, adding that all parties involved believed at the time that Cohen's planned testimony was truthful.
Giuliani's remarks came after he said on cable news shows that he wasn't sure whether the president spoke with Cohen before his testimony.
"I don't know if it happened or didn't happen," Giuliani told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday. "So what if he talked to him about it?"
Dowd, who stepped down as Trump's attorney in March, echoed Giuliani and said in a text message Monday that the president never spoke directly with Cohen before the testimony.
Dowd also said he never personally spoke with Cohen, but he wouldn't say whether he conversed with Cohen's attorneys.
Stephen Ryan, the lawyer who represented Cohen at the time of his testimony, did not return a request for comment.
A spokesman for Cohen declined to comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and Chris Sommerfeldt of the New York Daily News.
A Section on 01/22/2019