Morning Joe panelists were incredulous over the many television appearances yesterday by Rudy Giuliani.
"He told the Daily Beast last night he was heading off a story from the New York Times," Mika Brzezinski said.
"Quoting from the report, Giuliani said that journalists included Maggie Haberman who reached out to the alleged pre-meeting meeting. Giuliani said he and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow spent a great deal of time on Sunday trying to run the story down. He says he believes they managed to, quote, shut it down and helped kill the story, yet speculated the journalists found other reasons not to run the item.
"For her part, Maggie Haberman said, 'We don't talk about sources but I have lost the thread of what the mayor is talking about.
"Yet in his third and final interview yesterday. Giuliani rambled on and out without much follow-up at all. He backed off his flatout denials that senior Trump aides discussed the Russians' offer in an earlier meeting," she said.
They then rolled the tape of Rudy's interview. Scarborough laughed.
"Rudy Giuliani is debating himself. So in the morning on CNN, he raised the idea of the second meeting. That came out of the blue to a lot of people," Willie Geist said.
"They said, what second meeting? He put that on the table, he says to preempt a New York Times story we haven't seen yet and Maggie Haberman says, 'I don't know what he's talking about. Then 12 hours later at night on Fox News, he's shooting down the idea he raised earlier on CNN."
"He was killing a story he single-handedly brought to life," Jim VandeHei said.
"Non of us were talking about the story. He's talking about the story. he says, again, we shoot it down just in case we don't know about something -- they know whether they did it or not, Mike," Scarborough said.
"It is just like Donald Trump lying about adoption, getting everybody together on Air Force One to cover up the real meaning of the Don Jr. meeting, which Don Jr. said his father didn't know about. Got a little perjury issue there if in fact we find out that Donald Trump -- all of these people say it is no big deal if Donald Trump knew about the meeting, it's a big deal for Don Jr. because he committed perjury if that's the case.
"But, you know, it is just like Trump lying about that meeting means that something went on in that meeting that they wanted to hide, and now you've got Rudy saying, well, but, you know, we're not gonna say it didn't happen."
