Rudy Giuliani suggested Friday that the president was generalizing when he said that ‘flipping’ should be outlawed and did not mean that Justice should stop offering incentives for suspects to cooperate.
‘The President is not a lawyer,’ Trump’s attorney told the New York Daily News, indicating that the president may not have understood the legal ramifications of what he was proposing.
Giuliani explained, ‘I don’t think he’s against the idea of cooperation.’
‘He’s against the idea of getting people to lie,’ Giuliani said.
Rudy Giuliani suggested Friday that the president was generalizing when he said that ‘flipping’ should be outlawed and did not mean that Justice should stop offering incentives for suspects to cooperate
Trump disparaged the practice in an interview a day after learning that his ex-attorney Michael Cohen had copped to eight crimes, including two that Cohen says he committed at the direction of the president, to cut down on his expected amount of jail time.
Trump said he understands why someone in Cohen’s position would want to turn on a former boss or friend: ‘In all fairness to him, most people are going to do that, and I’ve seen it many times.
‘They make up lies,’ he said. ‘They make up things and now they go from 10 years to they’re a national hero. They have a statue erected in their honor. It’s not a fair thing, but that’s why he did it.’
The president said that ‘flipping’ on an associate to broker a better deal, like he claimed Cohen did to him, is ‘not a fair thing, but that’s what he did it,’ and the Justice Department should consider making the process illegal.
‘This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail,’ he said. ‘They flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair.’
Trump disparaged the practice in an interview a day after learning that his ex-attorney Michael Cohen had copped to eight crimes, including two that Cohen says he committed at the direction of the president, to cut down on his expected amount of jail time
Fox conducted its interview with Trump on Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours after Cohen pleaded guilty to fraud charges and campaign finance violations. The very same hour, a jury convicted the president’s ex-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, on eight of 18 counts of fraud in a financial crimes case.
The president adamantly claimed in the interview that he is innocent of the crimes that Cohen said in a guilty plea that he committed at the ‘direction’ of an unnamed presidential candidate.
‘He made the deals,’ said Trump of payments to two women, Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. ‘Later on I knew.’
He noted that he wasn’t personally ‘charged with anything’ even though Cohen all but named him as a conspirator.’
‘Liar’: Michael Cohen was seen near his New York apartment on Thursday after Trump suggested he had made up elements of his guilty plea
Trump said that Cohen ‘made a very good deal’ for himself with prosecutors, ‘a great deal,’ in fact in order to escape greater charges.
‘Because he was in another business, totally unrelated to me, where I guess there was fraud involved and loans and taxi cabs and all sorts of things. Nothing to do with me,’ Trump said. ‘Michael Cohen had I guess a taxi business and somebody reported him for some things in his taxi business and that’s how this started.’
He claimed Cohen made a deal with the government to wiggle out of the other, unrelated charges.
‘People make up stories,’ he said, in order to shave time off their sentences. ‘It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.’