Longtime Trump Lawyer Slams Giuliani As 'Polarizing Figure' Who Shouldn't Deal With Mueller

Jay Goldberg, the attorney who represented President Donald Trump for almost two decades, doesn’t think Rudy Giuliani is fit to be handling the legal team tasked with handling special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Not only is Giuliani not sufficiently experienced, Goldberg said, but he also may be in it for his own gain.

“I think he’s a polarizing figure,” Goldberg said of the former New York City mayor on MSNBC’s “The Beat With Ari Melber” on Tuesday. “There are those people who think he was a wonderful prosecutor but he has no record managing a defense of someone who’s accused of wrongdoing. I told him that I didn’t think that Giuliani was the right person for him to select. I thought there were much better people that he could use in terms of negotiating with Mueller.”

Giuliani is misguided if he thinks he can scare Mueller into winding down the investigation, Goldberg added.

And to go on cable television and make revelations ― he was referring to Giuliani telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the $130,000 that Trump’s current lawyer Michael Cohen paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels came from Trump himself ― without fully debriefing the client points to “the height of unpreparedness,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg also noted his concern that Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team in order to “aggrandize himself whether at the expense of Trump or not.”

Giuliani, who joined Trump’s legal team in April, said he planned to use this week’s one-year anniversary of the probe to continue calling for its completion.

“There has been no evidence presented of collusion or obstruction, and it is about time for them to end the investigation,” Giuliani told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. “We don’t want to signal our action if this doesn’t work ― we are going to hope they listen to us ― but obviously we have a Plan B and C.”