Nicolle Wallace mocks Rudy Giuliani for ‘making a mess’ of Donald Trump’s legal defense of Moscow hotel project
MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace ridiculed Rudy Giuliani's constantly evolving defense of President Donald Trump's negotiations with the Russian government over his desire to build a hotel in Moscow.
" Rudy Giuliani, making a mess out of Donald Trump's always-shifting story about his ties to Russia and his lies about how long Donald Trump engaged in negotiation over Trump Tower Moscow," Wallace explained.
"While one can never be sure what Rudy is up to, he clearly established a brand-new fact pattern as it pertains to the timeline of Donald Trump's discussions with his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, over that deal. Cohen had claimed in testimony to Congress that those discussions about Trump Tower Moscow ended in January of 2016 -- he later admitted that was a big, fat lie in a guilty plea to Robert Mueller. Now he's offering up a new version of events."
Giuliani said on "Meet the Press" on Sunday that negotiations could have continued through October or November 2016. Giuliani then went further in a New York Times interview, saying Trump's negotiations continued through election day.
"Rudy's latest comments stand in such stark contrast to the president's previous version of that story, Rudy had to spend the day today trying to clean it up," Wallace noted.
On Monday, Giuliani put out a new statement that conflicts with his previous claims.
"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 argued. "My comments did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions."
Wallace then read a tweet from prominent Republican lawyer George Conway, who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
"If Rudy is having a hard time keeping his facts straight, it may be because the party line on Trump's business with Russia has shifted 180 degrees since the start of the campaign, beginning with Trump's claim he nothing to do with Russia at all," Wallace noted.
"It would be funny if it wasn't so scary," she added.
"Even the possibility Trump could have been pursuing business in Russia throughout the campaign stands out against a backdrop of Russia friendly policy pronouncements that we know now contributed to the suspicions the FBI had about whether Donald Trump might be working for Russia," she continued. "Suspicions that led them to take the extraordinary step of opening a counterintelligence investigation into the president into the early months of his presidency."
"But before they even got to that point during the campaign, the president issued these, at the time, bizarre statements while pursuing a business deal with Russia," Wallace said, listing Trump's pro-Putin positions.
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