CNN anchor Jake Tapper declared on Friday that President Trump’s “credibility gap” turned into a “credibility chasm” this week after one of his lawyers contradicted the president’s previous statements about a hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels.
Kicking off his show, Tapper played a clip of Trump speaking at the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum, during which the president railed against the special counsel investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia.
“That is the latest ammunition being used by the president as he tries to battle various investigations at the end of a week where a presidential credibility gap seemed to become a credibility chasm after the president’s own attorney, Rudy Giuliani, undermined the previous insistence that he knew nothing about fixer Michael Cohen’s payment to a porn star with whom President Trump allegedly had an affair,” Tapper said.
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Tapper’s comments came two days after Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, revealed that the president had reimbursed his longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment to Daniels a month before the 2016 election.
Giuliani’s comments contradicted Trump’s previous claim that he knew nothing of the payment to Daniels, which was intended to keep her from going public with allegations that she had an affair with Trump more than a decade ago.
Trump confirmed in a tweet on Thursday that he did reimburse Cohen, but insisted that Daniels’s allegations were false and that the money she received was not at all tied to his presidential campaign.
Giuliani issued a statement on Friday seeking to clarify his previous remarks, saying that the payment would have been made regardless of whether Trump was running for public office.
Giuliani also said that when he discussed the reimbursement, he was speaking only about his understanding of the situation, and that it was not based on anything Trump had told him.