Does it bother anyone that President Trump has been caught lying? Does it bother anyone that this is not new? Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar?
These questions are again front and center before the country. People will answer them differently, depending on their views about Trump. Some will condemn the behavior. Some will condone it. Many, no doubt, will try to look away, even if that has become more and more difficult. The questions won’t go away. They are part of the fabric of this presidency.
Thanks to Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and current member of the president’s legal team, Trump has been exposed flat out about the $130,000 in hush money that his attorney Michael Cohen paid to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) to cover up an affair that the president denies having with her.
In a remarkable exchange with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel on Wednesday night, Giuliani almost casually dropped the bombshell that, of course, the president reimbursed the money Cohen paid to Daniels, despite a long string of comments from the president and Cohen asserting otherwise.
Even Hannity, long a defender of the president in all manner of controversies, was caught by surprise. “They funneled it through a law firm and the president repaid it,” Giuliani explained. “Oh, I didn’t know that. . . . He did?” Hannity replied. The host apparently hadn’t long ago processed the fact that the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements about the hush money were false. Now they are inoperative.
The circumstances of the transaction — a retainer to Cohen that could be used for whatever — provide the president the ability to claim lack of knowledge. On Thursday morning, Trump blasted out three tweets in defense of himself, describing how common such arrangements are “among celebrities and people of wealth.” Are they common among presidents of the United States?
Cohen had claimed that the money came from his personal finances. “The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank,” he said in a statement in March.
[Giuliani disclosures contradict the president]
Trump had claimed that he knew nothing about any of it. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” he told reporters in early April on Air Force One, when asked why Cohen had made the payment. Asked whether he knew where the money had come from, he said, “No, I don’t know.” Asked whether he had ever set up a fund from which Cohen could draw money, Trump didn’t respond.
On Wednesday night, Giuliani said there are many instances in which lawyers do things for clients without letting them know, “like I take care of things like this with my clients” because “these are busy people.” On “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning, Giuliani, still claiming there was no affair between Daniels and Trump, credited Cohen with good lawyering. “Cohen made it go away,” Giuliani said. “He did his job.”
That, apparently, is how things work with celebrities and people of wealth. Time to move on.
Trump isn’t the first president to tell lies. Bill Clinton lied about his relationship with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky when he wagged his finger and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Other presidents have lied about events and policies. So this president has some company. But from serial exaggerations to disregard for the facts (his claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in 2016) to obvious falsehoods, deliberate or unconscious, Trump has a pattern and practice that is often breathtaking in its audacity.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported this week that during Trump’s presidency, the number of “false or misleading claims” has now reached 3,000, an average of 6.5 per day.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders decided not to try to decipher or explain or acknowledge the contradictions between the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements and what Giuliani said Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Citing “ongoing litigation,” she said, “I don’t have anything else to say.” What else is there to say after the truth finally catches up with the lies?
[Trump adds to his legal team, signaling possibly more combative phase]
The Stormy Daniels episode wasn’t the only instance in which Giuliani provided a new account of events. He also offered a new explanation for the president’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. It was the third attempt to describe a dismissal that ultimately led to the ongoing Russia investigation being turned over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Recall the sequence of events a year ago when Comey was suddenly fired while on a trip to California. The initial account from the White House was that Trump fired Comey after receiving a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein criticizing Comey for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It was, of course, Rosenstein who selected Mueller to oversee the inquiry and it is Rosenstein who is now the target of the president and House conservatives, who want him removed.
That cover story crediting the Rosenstein memo for the firing lasted until the president sat down with NBC’s Lester Holt. He told Holt, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”
Giuliani provided yet another version to Fox News, saying Comey was dismissed because he “would not, among other things, say that he [Trump] wasn’t a target” of the Russia investigation. Trump, by his own admission, was irritated that Comey would not publicly clear him. Perhaps Giuliani’s explanation is partly consistent with Trump’s comment to Holt — it was in one form or another “the Russia thing” that cost Comey his job.
Mueller’s team and Trump’s new legal team appear headed for a major collision over the terms of a possible interview with the president, one that could lead to the Supreme Court for adjudication. Trump allies fear what could happen if the president is required to answer questions verbally, given his tortured relationship with the truth, which is why many have said he should not agree to do so.
There are also potential legal ramifications involving the payment to Daniels, now that the facts of the transaction are becoming clearer. Campaign finance and other lawyers will sort through the possibilities.
All of this will play out in the coming weeks or months. In the meantime, the question of the public’s tolerance for the president’s behavior remains in the forefront. After nearly three years in the political arena, Trump has shown his ability to withstand controversies of many kinds. That may continue to be the case. But that doesn’t make the uncomfortable questions about truth and the president any less important.