U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani tried to walk back his statement over the weekend that “truth isn’t truth,” writing on Twitter that it wasn’t meant to be taken as a “pontification on moral theology.”
Giuliani made waves on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, responding to a New York Times report that the president’s outside legal team was not aware of the extent to which White House counsel Don McGahn cooperated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation during the 30 hours of interviews he sat for.
Giuliani told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that the president should not sit for an interview with Mueller because he could end up trapped in a lie and charged with perjury.
“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 told Todd.
“Truth is truth,” Todd responded.
“No, no, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth.”
His words, taken in the vein of counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway’s much-mocked “alternative facts” argument from last year, quickly caught fire online. A day later, Giuliani sought to clear the air.
“My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic ‘he said, she said’ puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter.
Giuliani often acts as a surrogate for the president, appearing on television in his capacity as Trump’s lawyer to counter news reports about Mueller’s probe. The president has long complained about the special counsel’s investigation, branding it a “witch hunt” stacked with “angry Democrats,” even though Mueller himself is a registered Republican.