Rudy Giuliani defended President Donald Trump’s apparent attacks on Michael Cohen’s father in law during a wide-ranging interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper.

Since agreeing to a guilty plea, Cohen has represented a potential legal and political liability to President Trump amid the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 general election to benefit the Commander in Chief.

Trump has recently taken to asking for an investigation into Cohen’s father in law, suggesting that there is heretofore unknown criminal activity at play. Many critics see this as “witness tampering” as Cohen is still very much a person of interest in the Mueller probe, viewing a threat towards a family member as a means to “shut him up.”

Tapper asked the Trump’s personal attorney “The president is repeatedly calling publicly on Judge Jeanine show, on Twitter, an investigation into the father-in-law. Isn’t that obstruction or –”

Giuliani quickly interrupted saying “No, it’s defending yourself.”

After a quick back and forth, Tapper asked plainly “So it’s okay to go after the father-in-law?”

“Of course it is if the father-in-law is a criminal in the Southern District of New York,” Giuliani replied, before suggesting mob ties., saying “His father-in-law was — he may have ties to something called organized crime.”

A stunned Tapper replied, “Because he’s Ukrainian?”

Giuliani then made the very strange decision of raising Michael Cohen’s alleged connection to “organized crime” and “band fraud,” before resolving with “when somebody testifies against your client, you go out and you look at what’s wrong with them. Why are they doing it if they’re not telling the truth? He’s doing it because he’s afraid to testify against his father-in-law because the repercussions for that will be far worse than the repercussions for lying here because now he gets reported in New York where the crazy anti-Trumpers applaud for him.”

And so it continued for another minute or so, but to recap…Trump’s personal attorney defended critiques of witness tampering through a) the admission that he was attacking him, and b) suggesting ties to Ukrainian organized crime and bank fraud. All while President Trump is under investigation for alleged sordid ties with Russian oligarchs and suspected financial gain from Russian oligarchs.

Tapper’s shocked look at the end of the interview says it all.

Watch above, via CNN.

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