Oh Rudy, you crazy guy

Rudy says "the president denied the merger"

AT&aT was on the defensive all week. But then HuffPost published this interview with Trump's new lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Man, oh man.

Giuliani said "the president denied the merger," which flies in the face of everything the W.H. and the DOJ have said for months. All along, the government has said Trump was NOT involved in blocking the AT&T-Time Warner deal. Lawyers and P.R. people have tried to shut down all of the speculation about improper political interference. DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim denied it in a sworn affidavit. Now, all of a sudden, Giuliani says Trump was behind it?!

What Rudy was trying to do 

He was trying to defend the president against any suggestion that Cohen improperly influenced the administration. "Whatever lobbying was done didn't reach the president," Giuliani said. But then he went further, telling HuffPost's S.V. Date that "he did drain the swamp... The president denied the merger. They didn't get the result they wanted."

What's next?

Caveats: It is possible that Giuliani misspoke, or that he simply does not know what he's talking about. He was not working for Trump at the time the DOJ was reviewing the deal. Since he began representing Trump, he has had to change the story he has been telling in public about Stormy Daniels and what Trump knew or didn't know and when about the payment Cohen made to her. And he may simply have meant "the president" as a stand-in for "the administration."

So: Maybe he'll try to walk this back. But if he does, the questions about political interference have already been reignited, and he'll have further damaged his credibility in speaking for the president. Here's my full story...