• President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani returned from a brief absence from the spotlight Sunday, appearing on three different shows to comment on the Russia investigation.
  • Giuliani encouraged Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen to cooperate with federal prosecutors.
  • He also continued his claims that Trump didn’t collude with Russians to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani returned Sunday from a brief absence from the spotlight to push his client’s case in three separate TV appearances.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Giuliani said Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen should feel free to cooperate with the special counsel and federal prosecutors investigating him.

“If he wants to cooperate, I think it’s great,” Giuliani said. “We’ve been through all his records. I know Michael. He has no evidence of, nor was he involved in anything untoward, with the president.”

Host Chuck Todd asked if Giuliani wanted Cohen to cooperate with investigators, and Giuliani responded: “Yes. Because it’s going to lead to nothing.”

Cohen, who worked for Trump over the past decade, is the focus of an investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws or committed bank fraud, wire fraud, illegal lobbying, or other crimes. The FBI raided his home, his office, and his hotel room in April, seizing roughly 4 million documents.

Last week, Cohen, who once said he would "take a bullet" for Trump, broke his silence and told ABC's George Stephanopoulos he is putting "family and country first."

"My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will," Cohen said. "I put family and country first."

On ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Giuliani told Stephanopoulos he and Trump were fine with Cohen's interview, and that he has "zero" concerns about what Cohen could tell authorities "as long as he tells the truth."

"Michael Cohen should cooperate with the government," Giuliani said. "We have no reason to believe he did anything wrong. The president did nothing wrong with him."

On CNN's "State of the Union", host Dana Bash asked if Giuliani was going back on his past comments that he didn't think Cohen would "flip" on Trump.

"I don't know what he has to flip over," Giuliani said. "What I do know is, there's no evidence of wrongdoing with President Trump."

Whether Trump will sit down for an interview with Mueller

giuliani trump mueller

Foto: sourceShayanne Gal/Business Insider; Alex Wong/Getty; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Following reports last week that Giuliani said he wants the special counsel Robert Mueller to show a "factual basis" before Trump agrees to testify under oath, Giuliani upheld his suspicion of the investigation's roots.

"We're not asking to show us that he committed a crime," Giuliani said on "Meet the Press". "Of course he didn't commit a crime. They can investigate forever. They're not going to find any of that. What we're asking them for is: Is this the witch hunt that a lot of people think it is? Or is there a factual basis for this?"

Giuliani called the investigation into Russian interference and the Trump campaign's possible collusion "kind of really shaky". He said an interview with Mueller could be an "attempt to trap him in perjury."

"It's our firm belief, and we think nothing contradicts this, the president did nothing wrong," he said. "In all the leaking that's gone on, there's been no leak of any fact that's said the president conspired with anybody in Russia."

In his interview last week, Cohen said Trump "simply accepting the denial of" Russian President Vladimir Putin that he didn't meddle in the 2016 US presidential election was "unsustainable."

Cohen also defended the Mueller investigation as a whole, saying, "I respect our nation's intelligence agencies' ... unanimous conclusions."