• The attorney Robert Costello said he made his client, Rudy Giuliani, call President Donald Trump to clarify that he did not have “insurance” for if the president were to make him a fall guy.
  • Giuliani had raised the prospect of “insurance” in comments that he’s said were jokes but that also seemed like veiled warnings.
  • Numerous reports have suggested that Republicans – and even the president – could turn on Giuliani in a bid to protect Trump by framing him as a rogue actor in his Ukraine dealings.
  • “He shouldn’t joke – he is not a funny guy,” Costello told Reuters of his client.
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The attorney Robert Costello ordered his client, Rudy Giuliani, to call President Donald Trump to say he was kidding when he claimed to have “insurance” for if Trump were to throw him under the bus in the impeachment inquiry.

Costello told Reuters that Giuliani, “at my insistence,” called Trump to emphasize that he had not been serious when he said he had an “insurance policy, if thrown under the bus.”

“He shouldn’t joke,” Costello said. “He is not a funny guy. I told him: ‘Ten thousand comedians are out of work, and you make a joke. It doesn’t work that way.'”

Costello was referring to comments made by Giuliani, who is Trump’s personal attorney, in a Fox News interview on Saturday.

In that exchange, Giuliani said: "I mean, I've seen things written like he's going to throw me under the bus ... When they say that, I say, 'He isn't, but I have insurance.'"

Giuliani in a tweet subsequently said the insurance claim - which he had also made in an interview with The Guardian earlier this month - was "sarcastic" and "relates to the files in my safe about the Biden Family's 4 decade monetizing of his office."

Trump shrugged off the remarks when asked about them by a reporter Monday, calling Giuliani a "great guy."

But in an interview with the former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday, Trump distanced himself from his attorney, saying that Giuliani had been acting alone in Ukraine in searching for compromising information useful to Trump in his bid for reelection.

Giuliani was one of the pivotal figures in the push for Ukraine to open a criminal investigation into Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, on the basis of unfounded corruption allegations.

The campaign is now the subject of the first congressional impeachment inquiry in two decades, with Trump accused of abusing his office in pressuring Ukraine to launch such investigations and possibly using nearly $400 million in US military aid as leverage.

Multiple impeachment witnesses have testified that Giuliani was Trump's key emissary in the push for a Biden investigation.

In the July 25 phone call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out the Biden investigation as well as another involving a conspiracy theory about the 2016 US election, Trump directed Zelensky to talk to Giuliani.