Donald Trump would have had attorney Michael Cohen make payments to women other than Stormy Daniels if “necessary”, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Sunday as the White House sought without success to impose order on an increasingly chaotic and damaging scandal.

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In response, Daniels’ lawyer said Giuliani and Trump had “lost track of the truth” and were undermining their own attempted “coverup”.

Daniels, an actor in adult films, claims to have had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006, a claim Trump has denied. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in October 2016, shortly before the presidential election, as part of a non-disclosure agreement. Daniels is suing Trump and Cohen to be released from the agreement and for defamation.



In April, Trump told a reporter on Air Force One he had no knowledge of the payment to Daniels. But this week, on Fox News, Giuliani said the president in fact did know of the deal and had reimbursed Cohen. Trump did not contradict Giuliani in three Thursday morning tweets, but then said on Friday Giuliani had not had time to “get his facts straight”.

On Sunday Giuliani told ABC’s This Week he was “not really involved in the Daniels thing” and added, when confronted with inconsistencies between his statements and Trump’s: “Right now I’m at the point where I’m learning.”

As part of that learning process, Giuliani may have read reports by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported on Friday that Trump knew about the payment “several months” before he spoke on Air Force One. The Journal, meanwhile, said public records showed Cohen “gained access to as much as $774,000 … during the 2016 presidential campaign as he sought to fix problems for his boss”.



Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told the Guardian in an interview he thought there could well be “multiple” other women with similar issues to his client.

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On ABC, Giuliani said he had “no knowledge” of any other payments to women, “but I would think if it was necessary, yes. [Cohen] made payments for the president, or he conducted business for the president, which means he had legal fees, monies laid out and expenditures which I have on my bills to my clients”.

On CNN’s State of the Union, the White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway attempted to explain Trump’s Air Force One remarks by saying she was “relaying what the president has told me” .



“When the president said no on Air Force One,” she said, “he was talking about he didn’t know when the payment occurred. It was a very fast-moving exchange … and so he’s saying he didn’t know about it when the payment occurred, he found out about it after the fact.”



Any payments to women, Conway added in a characteristically combative and confusing interview, “did not cross my desk as campaign manager”.



Cohen’s New York home, office and hotel room were raided by FBI agents last month, on a tip-off from the special counsel Robert Mueller and with documentation about the Daniels payment reportedly among material seized. Giuliani said on Sunday Cohen would cooperate with investigators because he “doesn’t have any incriminating evidence about the president”.

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A presidential pardon for Cohen was “not on the table”, Giuliani added. “That isn’t a decision to be made now. There’s no reason to pardon anybody now … It has not been discussed.”

Avenatti also spoke to ABC, calling Giuliani’s interview “an absolute, unmitigated disaster for Rudy Giuliani and the president, a train wreck”.

“I can’t believe that actually just happened,” he said. “I mean, what we witnessed by Rudy Giuliani may be one of the worst TV appearances by an attorney on behalf of a client in modern times.”

He 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 have lost track of the truth.”

In his interview with the Guardian, Avenatti paraphrased a famous question from the Watergate hearings when he said he was searching “for the truth about what the president knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it”.