If you ask Rudy Giuliani, he’s a reasonable man. The leading face of Donald Trump’s defense in the Russia probe, Giuliani last week made an assertion that he spun as perfectly commonplace: that in the event of an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, questions about why Trump fired James Comey, and what he said to the former F.B.I. director regarding his national-security adviser, Mike Flynn, ought to be off the table. This, the president’s lawyer implied, would prevent Mueller from luring Trump into a so-called perjury trap. “We’ll leave a little wiggle room,” he told Politico, magnanimously. “It’s not so much obstruction questions. It’s really sucker punches.”

Both topics, of course, are central to the obstruction of justice aspect of Mueller’s probe and, as I wrote last week, certain to be nonstarters. But in an interview on Sunday, Giuliani laid down another plank in his argument that the president should be spared both lines of inquiry, telling CNN that the latter topic—the conversation between Trump and Comey about Flynn—did not occur at all. “There was no conversation about Michael Flynn,” he declared, adding that Trump was blindsided by Comey’s recollection of the Oval Office meeting in February 2017. “All of the sudden in May he says he felt obstructed,” Giuliani said of Comey. “He felt pressured by that comment, ‘you should go easy on Flynn.’ So we maintain the president didn’t say that.”

This account goes against Comey’s testimony to senators in June, when he recalled that Trump had asked him to “see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” The former F.B.I. chief documented the same scene in his contemporaneous memos, and in his book, A Higher Loyalty. Giuliani’s claim also controverts his own past statements; just last month, the president’s lawyer seemed to confirm that Trump did indeed broach the topic of Flynn’s woes with Comey. During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Giuliani said his client did not “direct” Comey to drop the probe, but instead asked if it would be possible—a request he said he received frequently when he was a prosecutor. “The reality is, as a prosecutor, I was told that many times, ‘can you give the man a break,’ either by his lawyers, by his relatives, by his friends,” the former New York City mayor said. “You take that into consideration. But you know that doesn’t determine not going forward with it.” When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Comey “took [Trump’s request] as direction,” Giuliani replied, “Well, that’s O.K. He could have taken it that way, but by that time he had been fired.”

But if the exchange between Trump and Comey never took place, as Giuliani claims (and as Trump has long contended), there would be no need for the special counsel to look into it. “They already know that [the conversation never happened]. Why are they asking us to repeat what they already know under oath?” Giuliani asked rhetorically.

As with most of his inscrutable televised defenses of the president, Giuliani’s shifting stance on the Trump-Comey conversation is reflective of a broader legal and P.R. strategy. While Trump is reportedly convinced that he can talk his way out of peril, his lawyers are less than enthused about the possibility. To help mitigate the risk, Giuliani and Co. have leaned into the “perjury trap” argument, positing that because it is Trump’s word against that of Comey and his memos, an interview covering these topics would be rigged against the president. “The reality is, you can be accused of perjury when you’re telling the absolute truth,” Giuliani said during an interview with Fox News on Sunday. For example: “I didn’t come to your house last night,” Giuliani said to host Howard Kurtz. “You’re lying, and you say I did come to your house. They put me under oath and I say, ‘I didn’t come to Howie’s house last night.’ But they elect to believe Howie, even though Howie lied about it twice. I have no control over that.”