President Trump, The Teflon President In American History; Rudy Giuliani's Role In Ukraine Front And Center In Impeachment Inquiry
LEMON: The president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is looking for an attorney himself. That comes as federal prosecutors investigate possible financial crimes connected to Giuliani's Ukraine work as well as possible foreign lobbying violations for those efforts. So far, President Trump has mostly stood by Giuliani in spite of what seems to be a series of unforced errors. CNN's Tom Foreman has more now. Tom?</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Don. Undeniably, there are people close to the president who fear the actions of the president's attorney could become a huge liability if impeachment keeps going forward, but a liability to Donald Trump or to Rudy Giuliani himself. That's the question.</s>RUDY GIULIANI, ATTORNEY TO PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, FORMER NEW YORK CITY MAYOR: Truth isn't truth. The president of the United States says, I didn't --</s>CHUCK TODD, MSNBC HOST: Truth isn't truth. Mr. Mayor, do you realize what --</s>GIULIANI: No. Don't do this to me.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): In the swirling storm of the Ukraine scandal, there is much or more than the president --</s>GIULIANI: Shut up, moron. Shut up.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, is at the center.</s>GIULIANI: You're just repeating spin. The prosecutor --</s>CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Oh. But you don't, right?</s>GIULIANI: The prosecutor --</s>CUOMO: You're not spinning anything. Go ahead.</s>GIULIANI: I'm not spinning a damn thing.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): Time has put him on its front page, calling him a shadow secretary of state, even as witnesses told Congress it was Giuliani who set up back door communications with Ukrainians, bypassing the State Department. Giuliani, who Trump wanted the Ukrainians to talk to when the president requested an investigation of Democrat Joe Biden, saying in that infamous phone call, if you could speak to him, that would be great, and Giuliani, who continues to claim with zero proof that Russian interference to help Republican Donald Trump was not the problem in the last election but meddling to help the Democrats was.</s>GIULIANI: It was actually real collusion. It involved the Ukrainians. The FBI did everything they could to keep this information away.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He has been a great crime fighter.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): The president's defense of Giuliani has been at times strong, at times tepid. Giuliani's behavior has careened into the surreal. For example, this week when he attacked Democrats for their probe into Trump's actions but simultaneously tweeted an admission that Trump did ask for a Ukrainian investigation, or when he apparently butt dialled an NBC reporter who overheard him complaining about Biden and looking for cash.</s>GIULIANI (voice-over): The problem is we need some money. We need a few hundred thousand.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (voice-over): Are you concerned that Rudy Giuliani could be indicted in all of this?</s>TRUMP: Well, I hope not.</s>FOREMAN (voice-over): But after two of Giuliani's clients, Soviet- born American businessmen were charged with circumventing U.S. election laws, Giuliani has been showing up in the media to defend the president less often, and sources say he's been shopping for an attorney of his own.</s>GIULIANI: Laura, this stinks.</s>FOREMAN: It is impossible to imagine Rudy Giuliani will stay out of the spotlight because like Trump, he clearly enjoys attention, but this kind of attention, maybe not so much. Don?</s>LEMON: Tom, thank you so much. You're right, maybe not so much. Let's discuss now with Shimon Prokupecz and Renato Mariotti. Gents, hello. Renato, you first. Rudy Giuliani's fingerprints are all over this Ukraine and impeachment inquiry. Today, top National Security Council official Tim Morrison testified. This is a quote. "Dr. Hill told me that Ambassador Sondland and President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were trying to get President Zelensky to reopen Ukrainian investigations into Burisma." So, do you expect Giuliani will be subpoenaed, Renato?</s>RENATO MARIOTTI, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Absolutely. We already know they had sought his testimony and he essentially gave the Democrats the middle finger. I suspect, you know, if push comes to shove, he's going to take the fifth. If I was his attorney, I would advise him to say nothing. Of course, he is not taking me up on that. He's been tweeting up a storm. But, you know, he really is at the center of this entire episode.</s>LEMON: Yeah.</s>MARIOTTI: So, of course, they're going to want his testimony for sure.</s>LEMON: So you're right about the tweets? So, last night, the former mayor tweeted this about the State Department number two official who testified Giuliani had been involved in the removal of a former ambassador to Ukraine. Here is what he said. He said, "the ambassador nominee doesn't know what he's talking about and shouldn't be incorrectly speculating. This is an orchestrated attempt to harass and hinder me in my role as Donald Trump's attorney." But he told the Atlantic's Elaina Plott a few weeks ago this. He says, "I'm not acting as a lawyer. I'm acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government." Shimon, is Giuliani acting as Trump's attorney or not? What is going on here?</s>SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: This is all why I think time and time again we keep hearing from the people who come before congressional investigators and testify they were all warned. What we keep hearing consistently is stay away from Rudy Giuliani. What was going on? What were they seeing? What were they feeling? What was going on with Rudy Giuliani? What was he doing? And if he was acting as the president's lawyer, why would he be involved in shadow -- what people are now saying the shadow State Department, trying to act out of his own interests? And whoever was guiding him, these two people, these two Ukrainians that he was working with, what exactly was going on? So it's still very unclear. I think that is why investigators are so concerned, why the SDNY, why the FBI has taken some of this on.</s>LEMON: So clearly, he got in Trump's ear, right, and then started telling him the stuff about Ukraine and then, you know, maybe Trump started buying into it, thought it was a good campaign strategy, what have you, to investigate. I mean, we shall see. That's what their -- part of what they're trying to figure out now at least when it comes to Giuliani. It's interesting that he would have Giuliani just going off as loose cannon freelancing this stuff. Shimon, you have some new reporting on what federal prosecutors in New York are looking into Giuliani's Ukraine business dealings as it relates to the 2020 election. What can you tell us about that?</s>PROKUPECZ: That investigation is still very much ongoing. Obviously, what we have been told is that the investigators, the prosecutors are very concerned about the timing here. We're getting into the 2020 election. They're very concerned about bringing charges close to the election. That is a concern to them. The other thing is this FARA charge, whether or not they would just charge that, which is his failure to register for the work that he's doing essentially on behalf of Ukraine. We have been told that they're a little hesitant to bring that charge. That charge -- they have had a hard time with it recently, trying to get convictions, they lost some high-profile cases, the Department of Justice with that charge. The point of this is that this is much bigger than just him not registering. And also, it's going to have to be something big. When you think about bringing charges against another lawyer, another president's lawyer, that is going to have to entail something much larger than just oh, well, he didn't register as a Ukraine -- as the fact that he's working for Ukraine.</s>LEMON: How much trouble is he in, Renato?</s>MARIOTTI: Whenever you're at the subject of a federal criminal investigation, you're in big trouble.</s>MARIOTTI: And Rudy Giuliani should be taking this a lot more seriously than he is.</s>LEMON: Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your time. Congresswoman Katie Hill is resigning today because of allegations of an improper relationship. But she didn't go out without a fight. You got to hear what she said, and we'll play it for you after this.