Giuliani: President ‘doesn’t remember’ when Trump Tower Moscow talks stopped

Rudy Giuliani asserted Wednesday that President Trump “doesn’t remember” how long discussions within his company about building a property in Moscow went on and that they could have ended as late as November 2016. 

“The simple fact is he doesn’t remember how long it went,” Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, told Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on his radio show Wednesday, according to a transcript and audio posted by Real Clear Politics. 

{mosads}“And he says as far as he’s concerned, it could be anywhere up to November of 2016. But if you ask him to pinpoint the dates, he’d say to me 2015 and 2016 merged together,” Giuliani continued.

Giuliani was specifically referring to the president’s written answers to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election and is probing Trump’s business links to Moscow as part of that inquiry. 

Giuliani said Wednesday that there is “no perjury involved by saying he and Cohen discussed the Moscow proposal,” referring to Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime personal lawyer who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and agreed to cooperate in Mueller’s probe in November.

Giuliani also argued that Trump wasn’t doing business in Moscow by contemplating building a Trump Tower there. He dismissed revelations that Trump signed an Oct. 28, 2015, letter of intent jump-starting negotiations for the property development, as CNN reported last month. Giuliani had previously claimed no one had signed the letter.

“I knew there was a Moscow project. I still don’t know how long it went, and I don’t consider it a Moscow project. I consider it a letter of intent without any money every being put up, nonbinding, which is the earliest stage of, you know, taking a look at a project,” Giuliani said.

“He wasn’t doing business in Moscow. Did he — was he down the road looking at a project that had about 50 other steps to go through before it became a project? He probably was doing that in eight countries,” he said.

There has been increased public scrutiny of the Trump Moscow proposal since November, when Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about discussions surrounding the project within the Trump Organization.

Cohen had told congressional committees that the discussions dried up in January 2016, when in reality they extended to as late as June 2016, at which point Trump was the presumptive GOP nominee for president.

Prosecutors said Cohen lied in order to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1,” referring to Trump. Cohen is said to have discussed the proposal with Trump on at least three occasions and briefed members of his family on it.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, acknowledged that talks about the project occurred in 2015 and 2016 but said he was only “peripherally aware” of them in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in fall 2017.

Giuliani suggested Wednesday that Cohen would have a better recollection of the talks than the president because “the Moscow thing was his project.” Giuliani also asserted that Cohen is not telling the truth about certain unknown subjects, echoing Trump, who has deemed his former lawyer and confidant a “rat.”

“We can’t predict what he’s lying about,” Giuliani said.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Trump Jr.’s remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee.