Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics

and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray, I'm deputy editor of the spectator. I'm joined today by Jacob Harbrun,

who is editor of the national interest.

So Jacob, last night, Rudy Giuliani, who a couple of weeks ago was hired to Trump's legal team,

dropped a news bomb on Fox when he stated that Donald Trump, through a legal company,

had funneled a payment back to Michael Cohen,

who was Trump's personal lawyer, a $130,000 payment, a hush money payment, effectively,

to Stormy Daniels. Why did he do that? What's going on and what's going to happen next?

It's completely bizarre that he made that admission last night.

And it's another sign of just how inept the Trump legal defense has been.

I don't understand why Giuliani made that admission because it simply draws the president further into the tentacles of both the Mueller investigation and the Stormy Daniels affair, since it all

revolves around his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Now, you may recall that just a week ago, Trump

threw Cohen under the bus and said that he'd only performed a tiny, tiny fraction of his work.

Now Trump is saying that there was a permanent retainer that Cohen could draw on and that the

Daniels payment was only part of a larger

sum of $460,000 that Cohen used on Trump's behalf. Trump didn't specify what the other payments

were for. But again, the whole thing just gets murkier and murkier.

And the real victor in this, to me, is Stormy Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avanotti,

who today said that the admission by Giuliani ensures that Trump, in his words,

will not serve out his first term as president.

I saw that Avanati, Stormy Daniels' lawyer, has been on CNN something like 65 times in the last month,

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