Special counsel Robert Mueller has no-commented his way through more than a year of the Russia probe. But he’s recently picked up an unwelcome spokesman of sorts: Rudy Giuliani.

For better or worse, Donald Trump’s newest personal lawyer has in his first month on the job claimed to relay several key details about Mueller’s top-secret investigation.


Giuliani has told the media in recent days that the special counsel has agreed to limit his interview with Trump to a narrower set of topics. He insists that Mueller has concluded that he legally cannot indict a sitting president. And in a weekend interview with The New York Times, he said Mueller told him of plans to wrap up at least part of his Russia probe by Sept. 1 if Trump grants him an interview.

Skeptics are dubious of Giuliani’s claims, noting his self-interest in spinning comments relayed by Mueller or his deputies to Trump’s legal team. Some note that Giuliani has occasionally mangled his facts about the Russia investigation and Trump’s legal woes.

But in an interview Monday, Giuliani said Mueller hasn’t objected to any of his statements. “I am relaying things accurately,” he said. As is its custom, Mueller’s office declined to comment on Giuliani’s statements.

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Giuliani has said that part of his strategy in granting media interviews is “to set the agenda.” In practice, that often means spelling out details of the Mueller probe that wouldn’t otherwise be made public. Legal experts say that, by doling out scoopy nuggets to reporters, Giuliani and other Trump lawyers have the power to create distorted narratives and unrealistic expectations about Mueller’s work.

And given Mueller’s assiduous refusal to discuss his own work, Giuliani’s comments are virtually impossible to fact-check.

“There is some peril in an unrebutted narrative taking root in the public mind,” said Randall Samborn, a former senior Justice Department aide on the George W. Bush-era special counsel investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Samborn cited Giuliani’s claim to the Times that Mueller had recently told Trump’s legal team he might finish the obstruction of justice portion of his probe by Sept. 1 if Trump agrees to an interview with the special counsel.

“By pounding it into the public conversation, Giuliani is able to sort of draw a line in the sand that makes people think it should be done by then, whether it’s done by then or not,” Samborn said.

Giuliani is striking at an opportune time. It’s been three months since Mueller’s last major legal move — a Feb. 23 guilty plea from former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates — and the intervening time has created a vacuum that the Trump team has happily exploited.

While Mueller’s office issues multiple “no comment” statements per week, Giuliani has been on a whirlwind media tour. Last week alone, the former New York mayor made a 45-minute Friday morning CNN appearance and another lengthy hit on Fox News. He also did multiple interviews with print reporters, including the Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times — and two 30-minute interviews with POLITICO.

Giuliani’s appearances generate news in a way that outside pundits can’t. A mishmash of former federal prosecutors, veterans of past independent counsel investigations and a smattering of congressional Democrats have dominated the cable airwaves and Twitter over the past year in defending Mueller. But none generates sure-fire headlines like Giuliani, a household name since, as New York’s mayor, he oversaw the city’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“There’s nothing that beats first-hand knowledge, and Rudy claims to have first-hand knowledge,” said Matthew Miller, a former Barack Obama Justice Department spokesman and frequent MSNBC contributor. “He’s an actor in this drama, and the rest of us are commentators.”

Giuliani’s statements coincide with intensifying conservative attacks on Mueller, a strategy shift from cooperation to direct hits on the special counsel amid calls to shutter the entire probe. They also come as Trump allies have made clear that the GOP’s 2018 midterm strategy depends in part on exciting their base with warnings of a Mueller-fueled, Democrat-led push for Trump’s impeachment next year.

“There's the court of law and the court of public opinion,” said Kevin Madden, a longtime GOP operative and former George W. Bush Justice Department spokesman. “Giuliani and the legal team are doing what they can to gain an advantage in that court of public opinion by shifting expectations and playing to the instincts of the president's political base.”

The attacks seem to be having an effect, according to a POLITICO-Morning Consult poll that has tracked the special counsel’s favorability rating among registered voters over the past six months.

Mueller’s unfavorable rankings among Republicans hit a 51 percent peak at the end of April, a significant jump from the 28 percent who offered that opinion when contacted in mid-November. Meanwhile, his favorable rating among self-described Democrats hit its high mark at 51 percent last week — a surge from the 37 percent who reported seeing Mueller in a good light in mid-November. Independents remain on the fence, with 39 percent last week still offering no opinion on the special counsel, compared with 29 percent who see him favorably and 23 percent who see him in a negative light.

Giuliani’s media appearances have hardly been seen as universal successes. Earlier this month, for example, the White House was forced to do damage control after Giuliani appeared to contradict Trump during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity by revealing the president had reimbursed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels for her silence about an alleged affair. Last week on CNN, Giuliani slammed anchor Chris Cuomo when he aired a 1998 interview clip in which Giuliani said President Bill Clinton needed to respond to a subpoena — just moments after he argued Trump couldn’t be compelled to sit for an interview, even if it was under subpoena.

“Giuliani certainly seems to be trying to box Mueller in, but he has caused too many friendly-fire incidents along the way to be effective,” said Ben LaBolt, a former Obama White House spokesman. He added that Giuliani had also “contradicted the other main message from the White House by talking so much about the state of the investigation, while other officials have argued that it is not substantive and should be wrapping.”

Giuliani’s critics also blame the press for giving him an unadulterated megaphone to get his message out.

“It’s clear as day that this is a deliberate strategy by the Trump team, and unfortunately reporters are complicit,” said a former Obama administration communications official. “Trump’s team knows they can use the press to launder their own talking points and mask it as news.

“It would be like a reporter letting Coke speak for Pepsi,” the former Obama aide added. “Even as Rudy has been humiliated in interview after interview, reporters keep taking his comments at face value. He hasn’t been able to get his own client’s story straight, let alone speaking for the prosecution.”

While Trump’s legal team and the president’s allies relish the political traction that comes with sharing details from their talks with Mueller, several sources said the revelations — true or not — have little relevance to the special counsel.

“At the end of the day, what matters is what the investigation produces,” said Miller. He conceded that Trump’s lawyers have found a way to control the Russia narrative during interludes when the special counsel probe takes a quiet turn. “But whenever Mueller moves publicly,” he said, “it always blows all of that out of the water.”