President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said Saturday that he didn’t know Trump’s then-longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen very well when he defended Cohen’s character earlier this year.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Giuliani told ABC News. “A few months ago he wasn’t telling all of these lies.”
He said that he also did not know that Cohen secretly recorded his clients, adding, “I didn’t know him very well.”
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Giuliani had called Cohen “an honest, honorable lawyer” during an ABC News interview in May.
Giuliani quickly changed his tune on Trump’s former fixer, attacking him as a “pathological liar” during a Thursday night appearance on CNN.
Giuliani was responding to a CNN report this week detailing Cohen’s claims that then-candidate Trump had prior knowledge of a Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and several Trump campaign officials, including his son Donald Trump Jr., ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump and others close to him have long maintained that the president didn’t know about the meeting until The New York Times reported on its existence in July 2017.
“There’s nobody that I know that knows him who hasn’t warned me that if he’s backed up against a wall he’ll lie like crazy, because he’s lied all his life,” Giuliani said of Cohen on Thursday.
The conflicting claims have put Cohen’s and Trump’s credibility on the line.
Trump has been condemned on numerous occasions for making false or misleading statements. Cohen, meanwhile, once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, and had a reputation for threatening Trump’s critics with lawsuits.
Barbara Res, a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization who has been critical of Trump, told The Hill that “nobody” considers the president credible.
A Trump loyalist told The Hill that Cohen “is a total scumbag who claims to be loyal but is a serial liar who will end up in jail.”