After the president’s freewheeling lawyer cleans up yet another set of public comments, the West Wing’s patience is wearing thin.
Rudy Giuliani has a growing list of enemies in the White House — which now includes his boss, President Donald Trump.
Trump was apoplectic after a pair of weekend media interviews by his personal lawyer, in which Giuliani said that the president had been involved in discussions to build a Trump Tower in Moscow through the end of the 2016 campaign — a statement that enraged Trump because it contradicted his own public position, according to two sources close to the president.
Giuliani’s statement was the latest in a series of remarks over several months that has required walk-backs or reversals, and Trump spent much of Sunday and Monday fuming to aides and friends about his lawyer’s missteps. Most of those people share Trump’s frustration, noting that the former New York mayor often appears to lack a mastery of the facts of Trump’s legal headaches.
Giuliani’s public remarks — typically made in sporadic clusters of freewheeling media interviews — have long exasperated White House aides, including the president’s in-house lawyer handling the Russia investigation, Emmet Flood. The latest fracas comes at a time of maximum vulnerability for the president and his legal team. Special counsel Robert Mueller has no deadline for finishing his work, but many outside observers see him as nearing the end of his probe into 2016 Russian election meddling and whether it was coordinated with Trump or his campaign.
Asked who in the White House is responsible for handling Giuliani’s missteps, a White House aide said, “Handling Rudy’s f— ups takes more than one man.”
Giuliani, who represents the president pro bono, pushed back on the notion that Trump is frustrated with him. “We’ve known each other for 30 years. And I haven’t heard him complain,” he told POLITICO. “And nobody in the White House would complain to me. They just do it behind my back.”
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Rudy Giuliani has a growing list of enemies in the White House — which now includes his boss, President Donald Trump https://t.co/qici7mVMD3
— POLITICO (@politico) January 23, 2019
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