A livid Rudy Giuliani tore into President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Thursday for being a turncoat and serial liar after his bombshell assertion Trump knew in advance — and approved — of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his eldest son and Russians supposedly peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton.
In a bitter rant during an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Giuliani said he "expected something like this" from Cohen, comparing him to Benedict Arnold.
"He's been lying all week — he's been lying for years," Giuliani declared. "The tapes that we have demonstrate any number of very serious lies by him back a year and a half ago, including his fooling people, hiding tape recordings, telling them they weren't recorded, lying to their face, breaking faith with them, taping his client, which is a disbarable offense."
"I don't see how he has any credibility," Giuliani continued. "This is basically if he had a trial — and there won't be a trial here — but if he had a trial, you would say, 'which lie do you want to pick? You want to pick the first lie, the second lie, or maybe some new lie?'
"There's nobody I know that knows him that hasn't warned me if his back is up against the wall, he'll lie like crazy, because he's lied all his life."
Giuliani said it is not a question of "what happened in the room" between Trump Jr. and the Russian, but "what did the president know . . . and when did he know it?"
"It would have to be people in the room with the president that can corroborate Cohen, which there won't be, because it didn't happen," Giuliani said. "Then it becomes a credibility contest between two or three witnesses who say one thing and Cohen who says another."
"There's no doubt in my mind that he's just not credible," the former New York City mayor said. "I would not accept him as a witness as a prosecutor. If [special counsel Robert] Mueller has any other kind of case, this is the kind of witness that can really destroy your whole case, because any finder of fact loses confidence in the case – when you rely on a guy like this, when you rely on a guy where before you're finished with him, you're going to have such a string of lies, you just can't trust him.
"You put him in this kind of pressure, and what's his history been? His history has been lying under pressure."
Giuliani explained Trump's years-long trust in Cohen as "part of the human condition."
"We all make mistakes about people that turn out to be disloyal to us," he said. "Benedict Arnold was disloyal to George Washington . . ."
But he said Cohen's disloyalty crushed Trump.
"The president was completely shocked," Giuliani said after Cohen declared he had taped a conversation when the pair talked about a hush payment to a Playboy model who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
"He wasn't angry. President Trump can get angry sometimes. He was disappointed, almost like a father who has been betrayed by his son," Giuliani said.
"He had no reason to distrust Michael," Giuliani added, adding Cohen "was bitter about" not being selected for work in the Trump administration.
"That's going to be on tapes, without getting into the detail of that," he hinted. "And he's very, very jealous and bitter . . . which also comes across on the tapes. So, you got a whole scenario here that's really, really sick."
At the end of the interview, Giuliani took a light-hearted attitude toward the allegations.
"I'm not angry. I am upset about the lying that's going on, and I'm getting upset that this thing is being carried to ridiculous extents now," he said, adding, when Cuomo jokingly asked him not to "bang on my table," that "I did not bang on your table. I got upset about the way every single thing is construed against the president."
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