Rudy Giuliani is all over the place today. The president’s lawyer appeared on three Sunday morning news shows to bash the recently released report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and to defend his boss, Donald Trump.
Giuliani always says crazy things on TV—like when he declared that “truth isn’t truth”—and one of his more egregious comments on Sunday was made to CNN’s Jack Tapper. Tapper asked New York’s former mayor to respond to a statement by Sen. Mitt Romney following the Mueller report’s release. Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate, said he was “sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.”
He added that he is “appalled” that members of Trump’s presidential campaign, including Trump’s son Don Jr. and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, “welcomed help from Russia—including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine.”
Giuliani responded to that statement by telling Tapper that Romney should, “Stop the bull. Stop this pious act…” He added that, “Any candidate in the whole world, in America, would take information.” Giuliani then tried to argue that news outlets like The Washington Post were “just as wrong” as the Trump campaign because the newspaper prints information from foreign sources.
Then he dropped this observation (my emphasis): “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians. It depends on where it came from.”
He added later that, “There’s no crime. We’re going to get into morality? That isn’t what prosecutors look at—morality.”
Perhaps not, but hopefully voters will in 2020.
On Fox News Sunday, Giuliani told host Chris Wallace that the Mueller report was filled with “calumny, lies, and distortion.” He argued that had Trump fired Mueller, as the report notes Trump had asked former White House counsel Don McGahn to do, it wouldn’t have been obstruction of justice. That’s because Mueller, who had only been on the job a month at that point, had hired a staff of “questionable” people linked to Hillary Clinton, Giuliani claimed.
Giuliani also accused McGahn of telling differing versions of the events to Mueller.
On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked Giuliani if it’s acceptable for political campaigns “to work with materials stolen by foreign adversaries.” Giuliani replied, “Well, it depends on the stolen materials.”
He repeated his accusations against the news media, and then called Clinton and her associates “sneaky,” “dishonest,” and “dishonorable.”
As Politico pointed out, in addition to Trump’s order for McGahn to fire Mueller, the special counsel’s report notes nine other cases in which Trump may have obstructed justice, a matter that is now up to Congress to investigate.