"We don't have to" comply, Giuliani said on ABC's "This Week." "He's the president of the United States. We can assert the same privileges other presidents have."

Giuliani added that the president could invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

WASHINGTON — Rudy Giuliani, who recently joined President Trump's legal team, said on Sunday that Trump would not have to cooperate with a subpoena if one were issued by the special counsel investigating Russian interference into the presidential election.

Giuliani, who was hired by Trump to help manage communication between the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the White House, met with the special counsel's office late last month, shortly after being hired.


Giuliani said he and Jay Sekulow, another lawyer for Trump, were in agreement that the president should avoid speaking with Mueller.

"Not after the way they've acted," he said, referring to a list of questions that the special counsel would like to ask Trump. Those questions were reported by The New York Times.

But he said he did not know whether Trump would invoke the Fifth Amendment.

"How can I ever be confident of that?" Giuliani said. "When I'm facing a situation with the president and all the other lawyers are, in which every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify, I've got a client who wants to testify."

Giuliani's television interview on Sunday was his first extended appearance since being criticized by Trump for not having his "facts straight" about payments made to a pornographic actress, Stephanie Clifford.

Giuliani said on Sunday it was possible Trump's personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, made additional payments to other women on the president's behalf.

"I have no knowledge of that, but I would think if it was necessary, yes," Giuliani said.

Cohen "made payments for the president, or he conducted business for the president, which means he had legal fees, moneys laid out and expenditures," Giuliani said, giving his explanation for why Cohen would have made payments to Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.


On Wednesday, Giuliani contradicted the president when he said on Fox News that Trump reimbursed Cohen for a $130,000 payment that Cohen has said he made to keep Clifford from making public a story about an affair she claims she had with Trump.

When asked in April by reporters traveling on Air Force One whether he knew about the payment, Trump said he did not.

The Wednesday admission, which caught Trump's White House staff off guard, caused an uproar and prompted Trump to attempt to clarify the nature of payments he made to Cohen.

The morning after Giuliani's comments, Trump said on Twitter that Cohen "received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA."

Just 24 hours later, he told reporters gathered outside the White House that Giuliani did not in fact know the particulars of the case, even after Giuliani told The New York Times on Wednesday night that he had spoken with the president before and after his interview on Fox News and that Trump and other lawyers on the team were aware of what he would say.


"Virtually everything said has been said incorrectly, and it's been said wrong, or it's been covered wrong by the press," Trump said Friday. "He'll get his facts straight."

Seeming to chastise Giuliani, Trump added: "You know what? Learn before you speak. It's a lot easier."

Some of Trump's legal and political advisers believe Giuliani's comments could put the president in legal jeopardy, since federal officials are required to report liabilities of more than $10,000 during the preceding year.

Trump's last disclosure, which he signed last June, does not mention any debt to Cohen.

On Sunday, Giuliani tried to clarify what Trump called a retainer. "The retainer agreement was to repay expenses, which turns out to have included this one," Giuliani said on ABC.

Giuliani also referred to the sum Clifford received as a "nuisance" payment.

"I never thought $130,000 was a real payment," Giuliani said. "People don't go away for $130,000."

On the same show Sunday morning, Clifford's lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called Giuliani's interview an "absolute, unmitigated disaster" and "one of the worst TV appearances by any attorney on behalf of a client in modern times."

"He now expects the American people to believe that he doesn't really know the facts," Avenatti added. "I think it is obvious to the American people that this is a coverup, that they are making it up as they go along."

In a separate development, four senior US officials said Gina Haspel, Trump's nominee to become CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, The Washington Post reported.


Haspel told the White House that she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing and potential damage to the CIA's reputation and her own, the officials said. The hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled for Wednesday.

She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA's controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination.

Senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, later went to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office.

The White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Trump learned of the drama Friday, calling officials from his trip to Dallas. He decided to push for Haspel to remain as the nominee.