For a man who's meant to be Donald Trump's human firewall, an impervious legal shield of a personal attorney whose top priority is making everyone doubt that his client is a Russian plant caught in a rapidly tightening web of lies and accidental revelations, Rudy Giuliani isn't proving to be exactly watertight.

He's got a track record of barrelling into media appearances and making things far worse, as he did again this weekend over accusations that Trump tried to massage former lawyer Michael Cohen's evidence to Congress. "As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with him, certainly had no discussions with him in which he told him or counselled him to lie," Giuliani told CNN's Jake Tapper yesterday.

But then when he was pressed, Giuliani suggested that actually, coaching a witness and possibly obstructing justice would be a completely normal thing to do: "So what if he talked to him about it?"

Then Giuliani went on NBC and admitted that talks about building a Trump Tower in Moscow didn't end in January 2016 as the Trump team has contended - and which Cohen told Congress - but was "an active proposal" which continued "up to as far as October, November". That'll pique the Mueller investigation's interest.

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WATCH: @rudygiuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, says that negotiations over Trump Tower Moscow likely went up to the 2016 election. #MeetThePress pic.twitter.com/olymBP76Up — Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 20, 2019

Giuliani's got a lot of form for blithering his way into trouble while apparently attempting to defend Trump. These are five of his least welcome interjections.

Collusion is fine and good, actually

Just a few days ago Giuliani popped up on CNN to insist that he "never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or between people in the campaign" between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that he specifically meant the President hadn't got his hands dirty with any of it. Anyway, Giuliani went on, "if the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago", suggesting that colluding with Russia had the same statue of limitations as borrowing a fiver off someone.

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Pouring oil on Stormy waters

While trying to calm down the firestorm around the $130,000 hush money paid to Stormy Daniels as part of a non-disclosure agreement about the alleged affair, Giuliani told Fox News in May 2018 that despite his protestations, Trump knew about the payments and would have directed Cohen to pay off more women Trump had affairs with if it was "necessary". Rule one of legal defence: don't contradict your client, and definitely don't put mental pictures of your client remorselessly banging his way through half of the San Fernando valley into investigators' heads.

Accidentally launching a protest

Chiselling away at your tweet to make it fit into 280 characters is a fine art. For those still learning that art, the revelation that you should avoid accidentally creating hyperlinks by deleting spaces after full stops is roughly the bit in art class where they tell you not to eat the PVA or shove crayons up your nose.

Twitter

That domain name was quickly bought and turned into a page reading "Donald J Trump is a traitor to our country". Giuliani was extremely annoyed, accusing Twitter of "[allowing] someone to invade my tweet with a disgusting anti-President message".

Just take the oil

One of the many monstrous things Trump parped out while on the campaign trail has been completely forgotten now, but it was a handy pointer toward his foreign policy priorities. "It used to be 'to the victor belong the spoils'," Trump said on NBC in October 2016. "Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: take the oil."

These days international law doesn't really recognise the principle of 'finders keepers' as a defence, and experts pointed out that going into Iraq and stealing its oil would violate the Geneva Convention. Giuliani merrily went out to bat for Trump, though.

"Of course it’s legal – it’s war," he laughed on ABC This Week at the time. "Until the war is over, anything is legal." At this point it felt like an It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia title card should have come up reading something like 'The Gang Gets Sent To The Hague', which is doubly fitting as Giuliani looks and sounds more and more like angry Danny DeVito these days.

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Truth isn't truth

Whenever the HBO miniseries about the decline and fall of the Trump White House comes, it'll probably take Giuliani's most famous quote as the title of the third or fourth episode.

Arguing with Chuck Todd on NBC about why Trump shouldn't have to do a face-to-face interview with Mueller's investigation, Giuliani said: "When you tell me [Trump] should testify because he’s going to tell the truth so he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth." Then he went back in: "Truth isn’t truth."

In the same interview, Giuliani said that the Trump Tower meeting between Russian contacts and the Trump campaign team was "for the purpose of getting information about Clinton". He openly said that out loud, out of his mouth, on TV.

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