‘Truth Isn’t Truth’ — Rudy Giuliani Tries Out New Defense Of Trump, Stunning Chuck Todd On ‘Meet The Press’
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now a lawyer and public spokesperson for Donald Trump, tried out a new line of defense for his client during an appearance on the NBC TV program Meet The Press Sunday morning, prompting the show’s host Chuck Todd to warn Giuliani that his statement was about to become “a bad meme,” Politico reported.
The exchange came as Todd pressed Giuliani on why he believed that Trump should not allow himself to be interviewed under oath by Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani insisted, as he has on previous occasions per CNN, that Mueller would attempt to set a “perjury trap” for Trump if Trump were to testify in the Special Counsel’s investigation into collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
Mueller is also investigating whether Trump committed the crime of obstructing justice by taking steps to deliberately impede the investigation, as The New York Times and other outlets have reported.
In the Meet The Press interview, Todd attempted to ask Giuliani why Trump would be concerned about a “perjury trap” if he did not intend to lie to the Special Counsel.
“When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani replied, as seen in the video excerpt from the Sunday program, below.
“Truth is truth,” Todd told Giuliani in the interview.
“No, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani responded. “Truth isn’t truth.”
The puzzling statement, however, reflected an ongoing theme in Giuliani’s interviews in defense of Trump. In a CNN interview on Tuesday, Giuliani insisted to interviewer Chris Cuomo that “facts” are “in the eye of the beholder.” And in a May interview with The Washington Post, Giuliani said that Mueller and his investigators, “may have a different version of the truth than we do.”
Trump himself has also advocated a similar interpretation of facts, saying in a speech last month, as Inquisitr reported, “Remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
As early as January 23, 2017, as CNN reported, just three days into Trump’s term, Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway declared that the administration would present its own “alternative facts.”
But what is a so-called perjury trap? According to legal expert and former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, in an interview with National Public Radio, “it means is that the prosecutor calls you in to testify not because they’ve got some legitimate investigative reason to have you testify but simply to try to sort of trick you or trap you into some kind of a lie that they could then charge you with.”
With regard to Giuliani’s claim that Trump should not be interviewed by Mueller due to a “perjury trap,” Eliason dismissed Giuliani’s defense. “It doesn’t apply here at all. There’s no suggestion that Mueller doesn’t have a legitimate reason for wanting to talk to the president,” the Georgetown University law professor explained. “The president is at the center of everything that he’s investigating, and he hasn’t testified or given an interview yet at all.”
