ever said. rudy giuliani said she doesn t believe the accusations. what i read is don t speak for me, mr. giuliani, especially when it comes to my marriage and what i believe my husband may or may not have done. so every once in a while a spokesperson comes up from the first lady and her office where you see how she feels about things and that was an awfully big one yesterday. no doubt about it. so shannon, by the way, is writing about giuliani in her latest reporting. you say giuliani s impact on robert mueller s probe and the white house s defense strategy the not as significant as you might have thought. shannon reports rudy giuliani has yet to genuinely affect the course of robert mueller s russia probe. he asserted public opinion related to mueller s probe has turned in trump s favor. if we have such a bad strategy, how do we turn public opinion with a hostile press, he said. giuliani asserted mueller could not indict the president.
campaign. this strategy of being so outspoken carries risks and you hit upon one of them, that he is opening up the idea that other women may come forward, that i may be emboldened. he is setting up he almost could have sidelined scuttled a nuclear summit on the korean peninsula for his undisciplined and not well thought out remarks about that. but to the this is what the president wanted. my piece and what shannon wrote are nicely dove tailed because giuliani is not part of the legal strategy. he is not one in the room dealing with mueller s team. he s the public face of this. his belief is this is not going to be tried in the courtroom, this is going to be tried in the court of public opinion. that eventually this will get referred to congress and those lawmakers will have to make a decision. do they move to impeach this president? who are they going to listen to? potentially their voters and that s who giuliani is trying to influence. he s trying to soften the ground, he s t
justice department, he s not writing legal briefs or reviewing case law or making legal arguments to the special counsel. however giuliani says he is playing a different game. he is playing this game in the court of public opinion and he argues that that is the only one that matters at this point, that this is not going to be a case that is fought in court over obstruction of justice or collusion or whatever because of these guidelines the justice department has now that you can t indict a sitting president. we don t know if robert mueller will follow those but those are the guidelines rudy is operating in. so when he looks at his job as the lawyer, he looks at it as turning the public against this investigation. he is very clear and open about that, that this is a public relations play and that if he can do that he s confident that congress will not impeach the president if there are some charges that the justice department ends up referring to congress to deal with. gene robinson,
people suggest he fears that his life may be in danger if he cooperates with special counsel robert mueller. of course we also know, willie geist, about the meeting at trump tower with don jr. we know about the fbi warning both campaigns the hillary clinton campaign as well as the donald trump campaign this it had been a two-year effort by vladimir putin to interfere with american democracy and if any contacts, any attempts were made from russians trying to contact either hillary s campaign or trump s campaign that they should notify the fbi immediately. they asked that of the trump campaign after they had been meeting with one of putin s lawyers who suggested that russia had dirt on hillary clinton and they wanted to pass it along. let s not even talk about roger stone s back channels with
the trump team. there s no question. there haven t been leaks from the mueller team. there hasn t been a single leak from the mueller team and as a result it s speculation as to exactly what they re doing. but this whole idea of undermining mueller in particular. think about if it had been reversed. what if there was a democrat at the top as opposed to a republican and 13 republicans working for the answer would be well, it s a democrat at the top. instead you hear forget about the guy at the top, let s talk about the 13 democrats supposedly working for him. mueller is in charge of the investigation. mueller is making the decisions here. he is a republican, has been, don t mean he s going to side with republicans but it means the idea of trying to undermine his credibility based on politics is not sense. and it shows a desperation. and that s been the job of rudy giuliani. dan, you know the law but you know new york city very well. you have two guys, donald trump and rudy giulian