The apparent self-contradiction was immediately seized upon by Ms Daniels’ attorney to claim the presidential team is engaged in “a cover-up” and “making it up as they go along”.
On Sunday, however, Mr Giuliani was challenged over how his statement seemed to contradict Mr Trump’s earlier denial of knowledge of the payment to Ms Daniels.
Mr Giuliani responded by saying the talk of a $35,000 a month retainer was just “rumour” – despite him having been the one who discussed it four days earlier as if it were fact.
In the same interview Mr Giuliani effectively raised the possibility that other women might have been paid off by Mr Cohen on Mr Trump’s behalf, saying: “I have no knowledge of that, but I would think if it was necessary, yes.”
The former New York City mayor was immediately followed on the same Sunday news programme – ABC’s This Week – by Ms Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti, who said: “What we witnessed by Rudy Giuliani may be one of the worst TV appearances by any attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.”
Mr Avenatti added: “I think it is obvious to the American people that this is a cover up, that they are making it up as they go along, they don’t know what to say because they’ve lost track of the truth.”
“I can’t believe that that actually just happened,” Mr Avenatti told This Week host George Stephanopoulos. “It’s a train wreck”.
Mr Giuliani’s made his first reported statement to BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.
He was quoted as saying that Mr Cohen had “complained to some people” after the 2016 presidential election that he had not been fully paid by Mr Trump.
Mr Giuliani reportedly said that at some point Mr Trump had met Mr Cohen, assured him: “We’ll cover your expenses,” and agreed to pay him $35,000 a month for a year-long period that started in early 2017.
This, however, seemed to contradict what Mr Trump said on 5 April, when the president was asked by reporters on board Air Force One if he knew about the payment to Daniels, and replied: “No.”
So on Sunday, Mr Stephanopoulos challenged Mr Giuliani about the apparent contradiction, reminding him of what he told BuzzFeed and asking: “So the president did know about this [payment to Ms Daniels] after the campaign?”
“Can’t say that,” Mr Giuliani replied. “This is more rumour than it is anything else.”
“But that’s what you said,” Mr Stephanopoulos interjected. “You said that to BuzzFeed.”
Mr Giuliani answered: “But here’s the – but here’s the – well, yes, I mean that... that’s one of the possibilities and one of the rumours. The reality is...”
Mr Giulliani: “Well, maybe I did. But I – right now, I’m at the point where I’m learning, and I can only – I can’t prove that. I can just say it’s rumour. I can prove it’s rumour, but I can’t prove it’s fact. Yet. Maybe we will.”
Mr Stephanopoulos: “But – but you’ve said as a matter of fact on Hannity [a Fox News programme] and BuzzFeed, you talked to the Washington Post about it.”
Mr Giuliani: “I don’t know – I don’t know how you separate fact and opinion.”
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Mr Giuliani eventually denied saying the retainer had specifically been to cover Mr Cohen for paying Ms Daniels.
He told Mr Stephanopoulos: “The retainer agreement was to repay expenses, which turns out to have included this one to the woman [Ms Daniels] that you saw on Saturday Night Live last night, trying to make more money.”
Mr Stephanopoulos then asked: “You did call it a settlement payment. The president did make these payments to Michael Cohen over the course of 2017, according to you. Then why on 5 April did the president deny any knowledge of the payments when in fact, he had made the payments?”
Mr Giuliani replied: “Well I don’t know – I don’t know when the president learnt about it, he could have learnt about it after, or not connected the whole thing at that time.”
“The reality,” Mr Guiliani added, “is those are not facts that worry me as a lawyer.
“Those don’t amount to anything, what is said to the press. That’s political. What matters to me as a lawyer is...”
Mr Stephanopoulos interrupted to ask whether it was OK to lie to the press, to which Mr Giuliani replied: “Gee, I don’t know.”
“I don’t think that this president has done that,” he added. “But in any event, that’s not the crime. The crime is: was it a campaign contribution?”
The $130,000 payment to Ms Daniels, who claims she had a sexual liaison with Mr Trump in 2006, was made days before the November 2016 election, but both Mr Giuliani and the president are adamant it did not violate campaign finance laws.
Others, however, have said the suggestion that Mr Trump reimbursed Mr Cohen raises potentially problematic questions about whether the money represented a repayment of an undisclosed loan or could be seen as a reimbursement for a campaign expenditure.
Countering such potential legal concerns seemed to be the most important thing to Mr Giuliani, who said the timing of when Mr Trump discovered Ms Daniels wanted money to keep quiet was irrelevant.
“Don’t know and doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “There are two relevant legal things: number one, it was not a campaign contribution because it would have been done anyway. This is the kind of thing that I’ve settled for celebrities and famous people.
“And number two, even if it was considered a campaign contribution, it was entirely reimbursed out of [Mr Trump’s] personal funds, which I don’t think we’ll even get to, because the first one’s enough. So… case closed for Donald Trump.”
This echoed what Mr Trump said in an uncharacteristically legalistic tweet on Thursday, when he stated: “Mr Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement [which is] very common among celebrities and people of wealth.” The tweets dismissed Ms Daniels’ claim of a sexual liaison as “false”.
Mr Giuliani had reportedly been brought in to provide a more aggressive edge to Mr Trump’s legal representation.
On Friday, Mr Trump said he was “a great guy” who would “get his facts straight” once he had learned all the details of the myriad of legal issues the president was facing.
Kellyanne Conway, the presidential adviser who has previously been mocked for her use of the term “alternative facts”, also discussed the Stormy Daniels issue on Sunday.
Ms Conway told CNN that when Mr Trump said on 5 April that he hadn’t known of the payment to Ms Daniels, he meant he didn’t know about the payment at the time it was made, not at the time the question was asked.
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