Trump, allies mull sidelining Giuliani from TV after latest media blitz: report

President Trump was bothered by Rudy Giuliani’s recent media blitz, during which the president’s personal attorney made a number of comments and statements that required clarifications and cleanups, according to multiple reports.

The Associated Press reported that Trump believed Giuliani’s gaffes had taken attention away from what he believed to be a positive development when the special counsel’s office issued a rare statement pushing back on a BuzzFeed News report that the president directed his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

While Trump has not considered firing Giuliani, the AP reported that the president raised the possibility that the former New York City mayor make fewer cable TV appearances for the time being.

{mosads}Politico reported that Trump was particularly angered by Giuliani’s comments on Sunday, when he said that Trump remembered having conversations about a Trump Tower in Moscow “throughout 2016.” Those comments contradicted the president’s past statements.

Giuliani on Monday maintained that his comments about the timeline were “hypothetical.”

Giuliani told Politico that he hasn’t heard Trump complain, and contested the idea that the president was frustrated with his performance.

Giuliani joined the president’s legal team in April 2018. Since then, he has made news during a number of television appearances, at times contradicting the president’s public statements.

In addition to walking back his comments about the Trump Tower timeline, Giuliani said in an interview on CNN last week that he “never said there was no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, claiming only that Trump himself was not involved in collusion.

He sought to clarify those comments the next day, issuing a statement that he has “no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.”