Rudy Giuliani is back doing damage control after once again veering off script in his defense of Donald Trump. The latest stir began Sunday, when Giuliani seemed to admit on Meet the Press that discussions around a Trump Tower in Moscow—the secret project that has raised significant questions about the president’s ties to the Kremlin—continued up until the 2016 election, despite Trump’s insistence he’d had “nothing to do with Russia.”

“But this—as far as the president was concerned, an active project to at least October or November of 2016?” host Chuck Todd asked Giuliani on Sunday. “An active potential . . . deal?”

“Yeah, I would say an active proposal,” Giuliani replied.

He put it even more bluntly in a New York Times interview published the same day, saying that Trump had told him the Moscow negotiations had been “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.”

They were a striking pair of statements, and seemed to confirm Michael Cohen’s claims in court that, contrary to his previous testimony, the Trump Tower Moscow talks continued well into the campaign. But by Monday, the former mayor had begun to walk back his statements. In a statement to CNN, he claimed that his comments the day earlier had merely been “hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president.”

“My comments did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions,” he said.

He continued the bumbling backtrack in a New Yorker interview Monday, telling Isaac Chotiner that negotiations had ended “somewhere in early 2016” and that the whole matter was “much ado about nothing,” and implying that the Times mangled his quote: “What they are doing is misinterpreting what I said yesterday,” Giuliani said. “I have said the same thing for two months. And that is that the president had very little involvement in this so-called project in Moscow.”

In fairness to Giuliani, it would not be abnormal for an attorney to speak in hypotheticals. In other words, taken alone, his response to The New Yorker makes some sense. In the context of his previous comments, however, this seems unlikely—on Meet the Press, he directly said that the president may have participated in negotiations for the secret Moscow project as late as election day, an acknowledgement that raises more questions than it answers about Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin.

This has become a familiar position for Giuliani, who has proven to be nearly as undisciplined as the man he represents. Each interview is promptly walked back in a subsequent interview as he counters one wild statement with another. Even as he attempted to put out the fire over his Trump Tower Moscow timeline to the The New Yorker, he seemed to light another by implying he’s listened to tapes related to the Russia imbroglio. “I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails, and I knew none existed,” Giuliani said, referring to proof that Trump instructed Cohen to lie about the timing of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations.

“Wait, what tapes have you gone through?” Chotiner asked.

“I shouldn’t have said tapes,” Giuliani said. “They alleged there were texts and e-mails that corroborated that Cohen was saying the president told him to lie. There were no texts, there were no e-mails, and the president never told him to lie.”

“So, there were no tapes you listened to, though?”

“No tapes,” Giuliani said. “Well, I have listened to tapes, but none of them concern this.”

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— Lessons from the “Trump and the Media” class at University of Toronto

— An unsparing look at The New York Times

— A wild mystery surrounding the world’s most expensive painting sold at auction

— “I come from generations of unfulfilled women” —Glenn Close

— Jared and Ivanka’s curious movie date

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.