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Giuliani on whether Trump will sit down with Mueller: ‘Good luck — over my dead body’

By Gregg Re, Fox News–

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told “Fox News Sunday” that President Trump will sit down one-on-one with Special Counsel Robert Mueller “over my dead body” amid bombshell new revelations in the false statements case against ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whom Giuliani said was “railroaded” and “framed.”

In a spirited back-and-forth with host Chris Wallace, Giuliani also reiterated his claim that Trump initially “didn’t know about” the hush-money payments made to two women by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that prosecutors have alleged constituted campaign finance violations.

“Yes, this man is lying — is that a surprise to you, that Michael Cohen is lying?” Giuliani asked. “The man got up in front of a judge and said, ‘I was fiercely loyal to Donald Trump.’ Nonsense. He wasn’t fiercely loyal to him, he taped him. He sat there with [CNN anchor] Chris Cuomo, told him he wasn’t being taped, showed him a drawer and he lied to him and taped him for two hours.”

In April, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he didn’t know about Cohen’s $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, or how he got the money. But in a September 2016 tape recorded by Cohen, Trump apparently tells Cohen he was aware of a hush-money payment to buy the silence of another woman, Karen McDougal.

Playboy model Karen McDougal, left, sued to be released from a 2016 agreement requiring her to keep quiet about an alleged tryst she claims she had with Donald Trump, as Stormy Daniels said she passed a 2011 polygraph test.

Playboy model Karen McDougal, left, sued to be released from a 2016 agreement requiring her to keep quiet about an alleged tryst she claims she had with Donald Trump, as Stormy Daniels said she passed a 2011 polygraph test.

“There was an intervening conversation” after the payment took place and before the Air Force One comments, Giuliani said, that led to Trump reimbursing Cohen’s payment. The reimbursement could be legally significant because, while third parties like Cohen are limited in the amount they can contribute to a presidential candidate, candidates themselves have no such spending limit.

Top Democrats, including incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., have said any campaign finance violation by Trump “certainly” could be impeachable. But they have so far cautioned against pursuing impeachment based on campaign finance concerns alone, as top legal experts and a former Federal Election Commission chairmanhave said that obtaining a criminal conviction for such alleged violations is often extremely difficult.

While Cohen has pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws “at the direction of” Trump, he also pleaded guilty to a smattering of unrelated fraud and false statemens charges — and Trump has suggested his former attorney was simply seeking a lenient sentence. Last week, a tearful Cohen who lamented covering up what he characterized as Trump’s “dirty deeds” was sentenced to 36 months in prison.

MUELLER RELEASES FLYNN DOCS SHOWING FBI CONCERNS ABOUT BREAKING PROTOCOL TO  INTERVIEW HIM

Giuliani also suggested to Wallace that Trump had difficulty remembering the 2016 conversation while aboard Air Force One.

“That was a conversation he was asked, middle of the campaign — he’s working 18 hours a day. I wouldn’t be able to remember a lot of things that happened in September of 2016. … When he sat down with his lawyer, and went through it in great detail, and saw things that could refresh his recollection, we immediately corrected it. Nobody pushed us.”

“Over my dead body. But, you know, I could be dead.”

— Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, on a Mueller interview 

Trump tweeted Sunday morning that Cohen “only became a ‘Rat'” after the FBI raided his office in April. “Why didn’t they break into the DNC to get the Server, or Crooked’s office?” Trump asked, in an apparent reference to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Asked whether Trump — who has already provided written responses to inquiries from the special counsel — would meet with Mueller, Giuliani responded, “Yeah, good luck, good luck — after what they did to Flynn, the way they trapped him into perjury, and no sentence for him.” (Mueller has recommended Flynn receive no jail time, and Flynn is set to be sentenced Dec. 18.)

He added: “Over my dead body. But, you know, I could be dead.”

Flynn pleaded guilty this year to making false statements to FBI agents who broke the agency’s usual protocol by interviewing him at the White House without involving the White House Counsel’s office.

COMEY ADMITS SENDING AGENTS DIRECT TO INTERVIEW FLYNN WAS SOMETHING FBI ‘GOT AWAY WITH’

Flynn has since said in a bombshell court filing that top FBI brass pressured him not to bring a lawyer to the interview, which prompted the federal judge overseeing the case to demand all relevant documents from Mueller’s team for review. It remains technically possible for the judge to overturn Flynn’s guilty plea if he finds that it was coerced, or would represent a miscarriage of justice.

The agents who interviewed Flynn at the White House in January 2017 — including Strzok — said they did not initially think Flynn was lying.

The documents released by the Mueller team on Friday in response to the judge’s order reveal that the decision to interview Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador was controversial within the Justice Department. One FBI document said then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates “was not happy” when then-FBI Director James Comey informed her that the FBI planned to talk to Flynn.

The report also said several unnamed people back at FBI headquarters “later argued about the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn.” On Jan. 23, 2017 — just one day before the Flynn interview — The Washington Post, citing FBI sources, reported that the FBI had wiretapped Flynn’s conversations with Russian officials and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

While many sections of Mueller’s Friday filing are redacted, prosecutors apparently did not provide a so-called “302” witness report that FBI policy dictates should have been written contemporaneously with the Flynn interview. Instead, they provided a 302 report of an interview with Strzok months later on unrelated matters, in which Strzok also discussed his interview with Flynn and said he appeared to be telling the truth.

Strzok was removed from the Mueller probe for anti-Trump bias in late July 2017, after text messages surfaced in which he bashed the president and apparently coordinated media leaks detrimental to the White House.

By |2018-12-17T11:42:57-05:00December 16th, 2018|U.S. Politics|0 Comments

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