Rudy Giuliani suggested on Sunday the public may never see the rebuttal report he and the rest of President Trump’s legal team wrote countering special counsel Robert Mueller’s most damning findings from the federal Russia investigation.
“Number one, we haven’t done so because we planned to do it if we needed to. So far we don’t think we need to. That may become necessary, whether they go ahead with the hearings or not, whether other issues are raised by different people,” Giuliani, Trump’s lead personal attorney, said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
The former New York City mayor indicated he was finalizing the document last week, which reportedly focuses on Mueller’s findings on obstruction of justice.
“There’s probably a point at which we will use it. Right now we think the public debate is playing out about as well as it can. Why confuse it — it raises a lot of issues that maybe we didn’t have to respond to,” Giuliani said.
In a fiery exchange with host Chris Wallace, Giuliani said concerns related to how Mueller did not “exonerate” Trump of obstruction of justice for his cataloged efforts to thwart the special counsel’s inquiry were a misnomer.
“You can’t exonerate. Exoneration means proving a negative,” he said.
Giuliani also qualified comments he made earlier in the interview about some of former White House counsel Don McGahn’s testimony with respect to Trump asking him to fire the special counsel. He originally referred to McGahn’s recollections as “two or three pages of lies and distortion.”
“I think this is a product of not telling the full story,” he said.
