Rudy Giuliani said of Michael Cohen: “There’s no evidence that the president told him to lie.” | Drew Angerer/Getty Images White House Giuliani: ‘100 percent certain’ on Trump-Cohen

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s attorney, said Sunday he is “100 percent certain” that Trump never asked Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.

Speaking about the president to Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Giuliani said “to answer your question, categorically, I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was: ‘Tell the truth.’ We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress.“


The Giuliani-Todd discussion was came after BuzzFeed reported that Cohen had told investigators that Trump had ordered him to lie to Congress — and special counsel Robert Mueller's rejection of that report as inaccurate.

“There’s no evidence that the president told him to lie,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani made similar remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and he also dinged Cohen as unreliable. “Do not think that just because he’s pleaded guilty to something that Michael Cohen’s telling the truth,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

On “Meet the Press,” Giuliani amplified his statement last week from an interview with Chris Cuomo in which he said it was possible there was some collusion with Russia by someone in the Trump 2016 campaign — though it wasn't Trump himself.

“If I'm saying there's no collusion on the campaign, of course I don't know everyone on the campaign. To my knowledge, there's no collusion on the campaign,” he said.

Cuomo “asked me a question before that about, well, 'How would you know,' and I made it clear that I wouldn't know everything that happened,” Giuliani said.

“I represent the president. I know his knowledge [from] directly talking to him. And I'm in a strange position of having been intimately involved in a large part of the campaign. I know what I know from that: no Russian collusion. But how do I know if somebody — I mean, like when [George] Papadopoulos came along, there was a big furor about how he might have been colluding with the Russians, turned out that he wasn't. At the time that that came up I wouldn't have known if he was or he wasn't.“

