RUDY GIULIANI/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Rudy Giuliani has a growing list of enemies in the White House — which now includes his boss, President Donald Trump. Trump was apoplectic after a pair of weekend media interviews by his personal lawyer, in which Giuliani said that the president had been involved in discussions to build a Trump Tower in Moscow through the end of the 2016 campaign — a statement that enraged Trump because it contradicted his own public position, according to two sources close to the president. Giuliani’s statement was the latest in a series of remarks over several months that has required walk-backs or reversals, and Trump spent much of Sunday [1-20-19] and Monday [1-21-19] fuming to aides and friends about his lawyer’s missteps. Most of those people share Trump’s frustration, noting that the former New York mayor often appears to lack a mastery of the facts of Trump’s legal headaches. Giuliani’s public remarks — typically made in sporadic clusters of freewheeling media interviews — have long exasperated White House aides, including the president’s in-house lawyer handling the Russia investigation, Emmet Flood. The latest fracas comes at a time of maximum vulnerability for the president and his legal team.”
–Eliana Johnson and Darren Samuelsohn, “Trump exasperated by gaffe-prone Giuliani,” Politico, January 22, 2019 9:06 pm