When Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and new member of President Trump’s legal team, sat down for an interview on Wednesday night with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, arguably Trump’s most devoted defender in the media, the stage appeared set for a rah-rah session of bashing the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and the former F.B.I. director James Comey, as well as, perhaps, some further indication from Giuliani about whether Trump will eventually agree to a sit-down interview with Mueller.

On this score, the interview delivered. At one point, Giuliani borrowed a phrase from his new boss and declared that Mueller’s investigation had turned into a “witch hunt.” At another point, after Hannity noted that Comey had once described Hillary Clinton as someone who “deeply respects the rule of law,” Giuliani sputtered and replied, “This is a very perverted man.” Giuliani also offered yet another explanation for Trump’s decision to get rid of Comey in May of last year—“He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation”—and claimed that the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, had ruled out the possibility of a President being summoned to testify in any criminal investigation that involved him.

But these comments, incendiary as some of them were, weren’t the ones that the interview will be remembered for. The real shocker came when Hannity brought up Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer, who, just before Election Day in 2016, paid a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in hush money to Stormy Daniels, a.k.a. Stephanie Clifford, an adult-film actress who claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. After referring to the recipient of the payoff as “some Stormy Daniels woman,” Giuliani gesticulated with his hands and said that the payment “is going to turn out to be perfectly legal.” Then he went on, “The—that money was not campaign money, sorry. I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know: It’s not campaign money. No campaign-finance violation.” At this point, Hannity interjected. “So they funnelled it through the law firm?” he asked. Giuliani nodded and replied, “Funnelled it through the law firm, and the President repaid it.”

This was news to everyone, Hannity included. “Oh,” he uttered, seemingly involuntarily. “I didn’t know he did.” Just a few weeks ago, on Air Force One, Trump said that he didn’t know anything about the payment to Daniels and referred questions about it to Cohen. The lawyer, for his part, has publicly denied being repaid by anybody in the Trump Organization. No wonder that Hannity seemed momentarily flummoxed. After quickly recovering himself, he said, “There’s no campaign-finance law?” And Giuliani said, “Zero.”

Far from appearing concerned that he might have let the cat out of the bag, or, at the very least, gone horribly off message, Giuliani seemed pleased at Hannity’s surprised reaction. “Everybody was nervous about this from the very beginning—I wasn’t,” he said. “When I heard Cohen’s retainer of thirty-five thousand, when he was doing no work for the President, I said, ‘That’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes, for Michael.’ ” Giuliani also said that, “as far as I know,” Trump didn’t know about the specifics of the payment. “But he did know the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this, like I take care of things like this with my clients,” Giuliani said.

By the time the interview was over, the entire news media had begun a mad scramble to digest and make sense of this information. On MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, appeared, declaring his outrage that the President had lied to the American people.

More to the point, Avenatti speculated that Giuliani’s intention, in revealing that Trump repaid Cohen the hundred and thirty thousand dollars, was to make the case that, because an individual can make unlimited contributions to his own political campaign, the payment didn’t violate any laws. But Avenatti disputed this, saying that if Trump spread out the repayment to Cohen over a number of months, as Giuliani had appeared to suggest, he could have been guilty of deliberately trying to avoid detection. “That’s called structuring,” Avenatti said. “It’s a violation of federal law. It’s a criminal act.”

Other commentators pointed out that Giuliani had created serious political problems for Trump, beginning with the fact that he appeared to have contradicted the President’s version of the Daniels story. Because Trump hired Giuliani at least in part to represent him on television and get his story out, there was, perfectly reasonably, a good deal of speculation that he had royally screwed things up. (In fact, Fox News itself, in its online article describing Hannity’s interview with Giuliani, noted that Giuliani had “clarified” to the network that Trump had paid Cohen for “expenses,” and was unaware the money would be going to Daniels.) Eugene Robinson, the newspaper columnist who moonlights as an MSNBC commentator, wryly suggested that Trump may have acquired a new defense that he could use on appeal if he loses in court: inadequate representation.

But even as the inquests began, Giuliani seemed unapologetic. (His boss did, too. On Thursday morning, he tweeted, “Mr. Cohen, an attorney, 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 non-disclosure agreement, or NDA.”) Late on Wednesday night, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, Giuliani said that he had spoken to Trump, and the President was “very pleased” with his performance. According to Costa’s recounting of the interview on Twitter, Giuliani said that he had discussed with Trump in advance his revelation of the repayment to Daniels. “He was well aware that at some point when I saw the opportunity, I was going to get this over with,” Giuliani said.

"So you won’t be fired for saying this?” Costa asked.

“No! No! No! I’m not going to get fired,” Giuliani replied. “But if I do, I do. It wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened. But I don’t think so, no.”