It’s been two weeks since Rudy Giuliani joined President Donald Trump’s legal team, and already he’s adopting his client’s habit for haphazardly tossing bombshells.

In an interview Wednesday night with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, the former New York City mayor let slip that Trump knew about the $130,000 in hush money that longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels who alleges she had affair with Trump. “They funneled [the money] through a law firm, and the president repaid it,” Giuliani said, by way of explaining that the payment “not campaign money” and was “perfectly legal.”



Giuliani was attempting to defuse a key legal question: whether Cohen broke campaign-finance laws in paying Clifford. If the money was connected to Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign, then it may count as an in-kind campaign contribution by Cohen—one that apparently went unreported to the Federal Election Commission and exceeded the legal limit for individual donations under federal law.

Cohen already faced an uphill battle in proving otherwise: He wired the money to Clifford on October 27, 2016, a full twelve days before the election, which strongly suggests a connection on its own. But then Giuliani, in a Thursday morning appearance on Fox and Friends, made things worse by admitting that Trump and his campaign benefited from Cohen’s payment. “Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani told host Steve Doocy. “Cohen didn’t even ask. Cohen didn’t ask. Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”

Journalists and legal experts quickly realized the significance of all these admissions. Trump, who confirmed his role in the payments on Thursday, had previously claimed that he didn’t know where the $130,000 had come from, and Cohen had disavowed any presidential involvement. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said in February. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”