On Saturday night, ABC News aired a recording of a phone call Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani made to their studios following the bombshell revelations of the prior week by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. It’s hard to imagine how any legal team or defendant thinks they can deflect blame and guilt for something that they’re on a recording saying, but incredibly, that’s exactly what Giuliani attempted to do.
In the call, the former New York Mayor reiterated that he and Donald Trump had “warned” Michael Cohen about speaking publicly on numerous occasions, which is already an odd thing to do. It was Trump’s legal team, not Cohen’s, that waived attorney-client privilege on the tapes — presumably because it would have been more harmful for a judge (or in this case, the court-appointed “special master” who reviewed seized evidence from the Cohen raid) to determine that the recording wasn’t privileged in the first place because it sounded like a crime was being committed.
But it was the threat that Rudy made that was the most confusing of all when he said that Cohen was:
…in grave danger of being disbarred.”
The reason that’s odd is that it’s not really a threat Michael Cohen is likely to take very seriously — he had only Trump as a primary client anyway, so it really isn’t like he had much of a legal career. And Cohen is still young — only 51 years old — and a lifetime in prison probably looks a lot less appealing to him than just losing his law license.
But the especially strange part of Giuliani’s threat is that it is open, blatant, public witness tampering. Giuliani said “we’ve made it clear” to Michael that he shouldn’t be speaking up, and that he could lose his license to practice law. There isn’t a courtroom in the world where a threat like that isn’t outright witness tampering.
Watch the ABC segment with Rudy’s call-in here:
Featured image via screen capture
