WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s personal attorney says he wasn’t trying to make an existential point about the meaning of veracity when he declared “truth isn’t truth.”
Rudy Giuliani’s puzzling statement on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, following one by another Trump aide last year about “alternative facts,” suggested that people in Trump’s orbit might be denying the existence of reality.
Giuliani says his intent was more mundane: to make the case that having Trump sit down for an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wouldn’t accomplish much because of the conflicting nature of witnesses’ recollections.
“My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology,” he tweeted, “but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic ‘he said, she said’ puzzle. Sometimes further inquiry can reveal the truth other times it doesn’t.”
Giuliani had told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that Trump might “get trapped into perjury” if he were interviewed by the special counsel’s Russia investigation. “You tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well, that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”
When Todd replied: “Truth is truth,” Giuliani responded: “No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth.”