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[ad_1] WASHINGTON — President Trump’s new legal team made a chaotic debut as Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was tapped recently to be one of the president’s lawyers, potentially exposed his client to legal and political danger by publicly revealing the existence of secret payments to Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer. After he moved into the White House, the president began paying Mr. Cohen $35,000 a month, Mr. Giuliani said, in part as reimbursement for a $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen made to a pornographic film actress to keep her from going public about an affair she said she had with Mr. Trump. The president confirmed he made payments to Mr. Cohen in a series of Twitter posts on Thursday morning. The explosive revelation, which Mr. Giuliani said was intended to prove that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen violated no campaign finance laws, prompted frustration and disbelief among the president’s other legal and political advisers, some of whom said they feared the gambit could b...

[ad_1] In the end, a jury acquitted Mr. Edwards of one charge while deadlocking on the other five, and prosecutors opted not to seek a new trial. Richard L. Hasen , a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, said that after the Edwards mistrial, federal prosecutors will be reluctant to go forward with similar cases unless they have “documentary proof, a smoking gun, that a payment was in fact election-related.” What is the argument that the payment was not campaign-related? In an interview on Thursday on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Giuliani insisted that the payment was not a campaign contribution. He said Mr. Cohen was trying to help Mr. Trump’s family “to save their marriage — not their marriage so much as their reputation.” But then, muddying that message, Mr. Giuliani said, “Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.” Separately, in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Giuliani ac...

[ad_1] On Wednesday night, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani sat for an interview with Sean Hannity in his first major TV appearance as President Trump’s lawyer. It did not go well. Giuliani offered a new — and contradictory — explanation for why Trump fired Comey. This is problematic when the goal of Trump’s lawyers is to provide Mueller with a consistent, and legal, explanation for the firing. Early in the interview, Giuliani said that Trump fired James Comey as FBI director because “ Comey would  not — among other things — say  that he wasn’t a target of the  investigation.” Giuliani said Trump was “entitled to that.”  Giuliani’s statement not only confirms that Comey was fired because he refused to publicly clear Trump in the Russia investigation, but also directly contradicts two other explanations for Comey’s firing offered by Trump. According to Giuliani, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt in an interview shortly after Comey’s firing that “ I did it because I felt  I had to exp...

[ad_1] California officials have repeatedly vowed  not to back down to attempts by the Trump administration to weaken the state’s environmental regulations, especially the progress it has made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The state kept its word on Tuesday when California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said he is joining more than a dozen other states in filing a lawsuit challenging an EPA  determination , published on April 13, that the fuel efficiency requirements for cars and light trucks are too stringent and must be revised. At the direction of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the agency is now in the process of  rewriting  those standards that aimed to slash carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. In the lawsuit, California and the others assert that the EPA has violated the Administrative Procedure Act, failed to follow its own clean car regulations, and violated the Clean Air Act, Becerra said Tuesday at a press briefing in Sacramento, California. He was joined b...