Washington Post: “The president also asked Giuliani to clean up some of his misstatements publicly, complaining he created a weekend of news, including negative cable chyrons, at a time when Trump wanted public attention focused on Mueller disputing a BuzzFeed report that Trump had asked Cohen to lie to Congress.”

“The recent tensions between Trump and Giuliani highlight the unique role he plays for the president. Even though Trump has been frustrated with Giuliani’s performance several times since he became his lawyer in April, he continues to get a longer leash than most of the president’s aides and surrogates. That’s because Giuliani, whom he considers a friend, is doing what Trump wants — serving chiefly as his public defender rather than his pragmatic legal counsel — and because the president would struggle to replace him after being turned down by several high-profile attorneys reluctant to represent the mercurial Trump.”

“Rudy Giuliani’s latest media blitz, which was filled with a dizzying array of misstatements and hurried clarifications, agitated President Donald Trump and some of his allies, who have raised the possibility that the outspoken presidential lawyer be at least temporarily sidelined from televised interviews,” the AP reports.

“The president told advisers that he felt his lawyer had obscured what he believed was a public relations victory: the special counsel’s rare public statement disputing portions of a BuzzFeed News story that Trump instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie before Congress… The president told confidants that Giuliani had ‘changed the headlines’ for the worse and raised the possibility that Giuliani do fewer cable hits, at least for a while.”

Rudy Giuliani told the New Yorker he knows the BuzzFeed story about President Trump telling Michael Cohen to lie to Congress is false.

Said Giuliani: “I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails, and I knew none existed. And then, basically, when the special counsel said that, just in case there are any others I might not know about, they probably went through others and found the same thing.”

When pressed on the tapes, he backtracked: “I shouldn’t have said tapes. They alleged there were texts and e-mails that corroborated that Cohen was saying the President told him to lie. There were no texts, there were no e-mails, and the President never told him to lie.”

When pressed again: “No tapes. Well, I have listened to tapes, but none of them concern this.”

In a remarkable CNN interview, Rudy Giuliani suggested it was possible — and would be “perfectly normal” — that Trump talked to Michael Cohen before he testified about him to Congress, Jonathan Swan observes.

“It’s not ‘perfectly normal’ for subjects of or witnesses in a Congressional investigation to discuss testimony directly with each other. If witnesses or subjects are talking to each other, the government can always claim one is trying to influence the others’ testimony. That’s why lawyers counsel against doing it.”

New York Times: “The government-run Bahrain News Agency featured a photo of Mr. Giuliani meeting in a royal palace with King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. The story said the king discussed ‘Bahraini-U.S. relations’ with Mr. Giuliani, who was described as leading a ‘high-level U.S. delegation.’ But Mr. Giuliani was not in Bahrain, a country with a record of human rights abuses, on official business.”

“He was there to seek a lucrative security consulting contract with the government. The trip was part of a concerted push Mr. Giuliani has undertaken in the last few weeks to win business from governments around the world — including in Africa and South America — for a firm he owns called Giuliani Security and Safety.”

Said Giuliani: “I’m probably the most ethical person you ever met.”

“I don’t care about my legacy. I’ll be dead.”

— Rudy Giuliani, in an interview with the New Yorker.

Jeffrey Toobin: “Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a ‘witch hunt’ and the prosecutors as ‘thugs.’ He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.”

“This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked ‘squeegee men’ off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along.”

“Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ In Giuliani, the President has found him.”