Donald Trump gave Rudy Giuliani a public show of confidence … sort of. After his new attorney made the media rounds and made news by contradicting Trump’s public statements on payments to Stormy Daniels, the media asked the president to explain the contradiction. “Rudy is a great guy,” Trump told them before getting on Marine One, “but he just started a day ago. … He’ll get his facts straight.”

President Trump says Rudy Giuliani “just started a day ago” and “he’ll get his facts straight” https://t.co/MBqxzYgV9K pic.twitter.com/jhSzFs62LT

— CNN (@CNN) May 4, 2018

Uh oh. Trump also told the press that Giuliani would have a statement out later today. Wonder what that will say?

https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/992426602142289922

Expect a pullback rather than a full mea culpa, because Trump clearly still remains enamored of Giuliani’s pugilistic instincts. The most important quality to Trump right now is that Giuliani considers the Robert Mueller probe a “witch hunt.” To emphasize that point, Trump contrasted it with the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal:

TRUMP: He knows it’s a witch hunt, that’s what he knows. He’s seen a lot of them, and he said he’s never seen anything so horrible. As an example, 33,000 e-mails requested by Congress with a subpoena and they get burned, they get deleted, and nobody says anything. Give me a break.

Trump insisted that his story hasn’t changed at all on the Stormy Daniels payments, although he refrained from attempting to clarify Giuliani’s comments about the issue. He told reporters to “go back to what I said” earlier, insisting that his earlier statement about knowing nothing of the settlement with the porn star was still operative. It will be interesting to see how Giuliani manages to square that circle and still remain within the boss’ good graces.

However, while Trump insists that he likes Rudy because he agrees that Mueller’s probe is a “witch hunt,” he keeps telling the media that he might still cooperate with it. “Nobody wants to speak [with investigators] more than me,” Trump declared:

“I would love to speak. Nobody wants to speak more than me,” President Trump says on meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller. “We've done nothing wrong. There was no collusion with the Russians.” https://t.co/JseDI9SPqQ pic.twitter.com/kDgZd6VZ35

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 4, 2018

Riddle me this. If the investigators are “all Democrats” who went to the Hillary Clinton “celebration that turned into a funeral,” and the most important aspect of Robert Mueller is that he “worked for Obama for eight years” [four and a half, actually, after seven-plus with George Bush], then why would Trump “love to speak” to them? If it’s a witch hunt, then there’s no need to cooperate with it, and no need to pretend that conditions might exist where cooperation would be granted. How exactly does one get “treated fairly” in a “pure witch hunt”?

It’s sheer bluster. Trump is not going to sit down with Mueller, he’s not going to override his attorneys, and he’s going to keep sending Giuliani out to attack the special counsel process. One does not put out this much effort in discrediting an opponent just to do his job for him later. Giuliani makes a great attack dog, but Emmet Flood will be directing the legal strategy much more quietly, and he’s not about to sign onto a presidential interrogatory under any circumstances.