On July 8, 2017, former FBI Director, James Comey, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying Donald Trump asked him to go lightly on former National Security advisor, Michael Flynn.
At a private meeting at the White House, Comey told the senators that Trump praised Flynn as a “good guy.” Comey, testifying under oath, said Trump repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. According to Comey, Trump then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Of course, if Trump asked Comey to quash the ongoing investigation into Flynn, that would most likely constitute obstruction of justice.
In an interview on CNN this Sunday, Trump’s mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, said, “There was no conversation about Michael Flynn.”
It appears Giuliani has gone full Trump.
Giuliani told ABC News on July 8 about the Trump-Comey conversation, saying, “What he said was, ‘Can you, can you give him a break?’” On July 30, Giuliani was even more explicit about that version of events during an interview with Fox News, saying, “He didn’t tell him, ‘Don’t investigate him, don’t prosecute him.’ He asked him to exercise his prosecutorial discretion because he was a good man with a great war record.”
If you thought Donald Trump was the only one who could change his own narrative in the face of video evidence to the contrary, you’d be wrong.
It’s safe to say Giuliani’s main objective as Trump’s TV attorney is to obfuscate and confuse … to muddy the waters, if you will.
Gene Robinson of the Washington Post has written, “There is madness in Rudolph W. Giuliani’s incoherence on behalf of President Trump, but there is also method. He’s following the Trump playbook: Confuse, distract, provoke and flood the zone with factoids and truthiness until nobody can be sure what’s real and what’s not.”
While the Giuliani strategy seems to be working, especially with Trump supporters, it will have no impact on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
But Trump and Giuliani are betting they can sway public opinion enough to get 45 off the hook.
Giuliani gave the game away when he told CNN on May 27, “To a large extent…what we’re doing here, it is the public opinion, because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.”
It is obvious Giuliani doesn’t care about his reputation or looking like a legal hack. As it stands, the former federal prosecutor has turned out to be one of the few effective Trump picks.
Photo| palmerreport.com
