Here’s an Idea: Stop Inviting Rudy Giuliani on Your Show

In normal times, inviting the president’s lawyer on a Sunday news talk show would be a constructive thing to do. These are not normal times, and nothing that comes out of Rudy Giuliani’s mouth is credible. Half of the time, it’s not even comprehensible. So why continue to give him a platform?

This is not necessarily a criticism of George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed Giuliani Sunday on ABC News’ This Week, but rather of Giuliani himself. While his client, President Donald Trump, was busy tweeting away like a mob boss about Michael Cohen being a “rat,” Giuliani was calling Cohen “pathetic” and a “serial liar.”

“You’ve got a serial liar who taped his own client and lied about it and deceived him,” Giuliani said, while implying that prosecutors had coached witnesses about what to say in the Trump-Cohen hush money case in exchange for immunity.

Giuliani then pushed the narrative that Trump didn’t instruct Cohen to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, an argument that’s so laughable it’s not even worth addressing.

Giuliani’s next tactic was to claim the payments to the two women ahead of the 2016 presidential election weren’t illegal. “I know what he [Trump] was concerned about and I can produce 20 witnesses to tell you what he was concerned about,” Giuliani said, implying that the payments had nothing to do with the campaign.

“Two weeks before the campaign,” Stephanopoulos countered. “You’re damn right,” Giuliani responded.

Just this week, Giuliani told the Daily Beast that, “Nobody got killed, nobody got robbed…This was not a big crime.” And let’s not forget that last May, Giuliani admitted the payments were meant to influence the campaign. “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said at the time on Fox & Friends.

Giuliani, as he is prone to do when he runs his mouth, fucked up again on Sunday. In trying to make the disingenuous argument that “collusion is not a crime,” Giuliani added (emphasis mine): “It was over with by the time of the election.” Whoops.

Giuliani then fielded, and dodged, a series of direct questions by Stephanopoulos about whether Trump knew Cohen pursued the Trump Tower Moscow deal into the summer of 2016; whether Trump knew about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower; and whether Roger Stone alerted Trump to the then forthcoming Wikileaks dump of emails related to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. None of his answers were satisfactory.

Giuliani eventually returned to attacking Cohen, leaving viewers with this lingering thought: “He’s changed his story four or five times,” he said, referring to Cohen. “So has the president,” Stephanopoulos replied. “The president’s not under oath,” Giuliani argued in response. And that tells you everything you need to know about this clown show lawyer who has no credibility left.