Opinion: ‘He didn’t lie, but if he did ....”

If we can believe Giuliani, Trump would offer that defense -- total denial of any discussion of Flynn -- under oath in any potential grand jury testimony, which in turn raises all sorts of questions.

For example, why did Trump go through all the trouble of arranging that unusual, one-on-one discussion with Comey with no else to witness it, if not to discuss Flynn’s case? What alternative explanation is there for such a meeting, and why has it taken more than a year for this alleged secret topic to emerge?

That narrative line also requires us to believe that Comey completely invented the conversation about Flynn, on the spot, even to the point of it writing it down immediately thereafter and sharing it with others. That’s a mighty big ask, to say the least.

The president’s second line of defense, according to Giuliani, will be that if “even if Comey is right and the president doesn’t remember correctly,” then it was perfectly OK for Trump to have asked Comey to let Flynn skate.

In that case, “what (Trump) is saying is perfectly justifiable,” Giuliani argues. “He isn’t saying ‘you must, you have to, I’ll fire you if you don’t.’ He said, ‘consider it’.”

Note that in this second line of defense, Giuliani in effect concedes that Trump committed perjury in offering that initial denial, a concession that he attempts to soften by explaining it as memory failure on Trump’s part. That would be quite a thing to forget, particularly for a man who claims a world-class memory. It’s also worth noting that shortly thereafter, Trump DID fire Comey, explaining to NBC News at the time that he had done so in order to make the whole Russia thing go away. That’s pretty powerful evidence that Comey was right to consider it an order, even if unlawlful.

The third line of defense -- again, this is all as described by Giuliani himself -- will be that even if Trump did tell Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, even if Trump fired Comey for refusing that order, “under Article 2 of the Constitution you can’t really question why the president would say that, he has the power to say that.” This is the trump card, so to speak -- the notion that if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.

To say the least, this does not strike me as the strategy of a legal team confident in the truthfulness of its client’s story. It is instead the strategy of a team committed to fighting a long war of attrition, politically and legally, regardless of the costs to the country.  And it makes me more certain than ever that they will do everything in their power to ensure that Trump never has to try telling that first version of the story under oath, when it would matter and when its exposure would have major consequences.