Giuliani becomes aggressive new face of Trump legal team

Jonathan Lemire
NEW YORK, US.- Rudy Giuliani, once known as “America’s Mayor” and hailed for helping unite a wounded city after Sept. 11, has become the aggressive face of President Donald Trump’s forceful new legal team. 

Giuliani, who is bonded with the president by a particular brand of New York bravado, has escalated Trump’s attacks on the Department of Justice, pushed for strict limits on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and upended White House legal strategy. 

Giuliani and Trump cut out senior West Wing aides this week as they hashed out plans to combat what they see as an existential threat to his presidency. But on Friday, Trump suggested that Giuliani may have stepped out of line — at least in one area.

The president told reporters that the former New York City mayor still needed to “get his facts straight” on one of the legal fronts facing Trump, the $130,000 payment that his personal attorney Michael Cohen made to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to buy her silence about a sexual tryst with Trump. 

Trump said Giuliani was “a great guy but he just started a day ago” and that he was still “learning the subject matter.” It remained to see what impact Trump’s brushback would have on Giuliani, who had quickly become the dominant figure on the president’s reshuffled legal team as his political inner circle is stocked with familiar, TV-ready faces.