Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, said Monday that collusion is not a crime—which is convenient for his client! Not only that, he said it many times on multiple television networks.
“I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani first said on Fox & Friends. “Collusion is not a crime.”
“The president’s innocence has been proven over and over again…” Giuliani continued. “[Russians] may have colluded with somebody else… but [the president] wasn’t involved in it.”
President Trump and his defendants have repeatedly claimed that there was no collusion whatsoever. Just last Sunday, Trump denied collusion, calling the Mueller investigation a “Rigged Witch Hunt” and an “illegal Scam.”
At the same time, Trump and his aides are also pushing the argument that even if there was collusion, it’s really no big deal since it’s not a crime anyway.
Giuliani repeated the same rhetoric on CNN while being interviewed by Alisyn Camerota.
“Four months, they’re not going to be colluding about Russians, which I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani said. “You start analyzing the crime — the hacking is the crime. ... The president didn’t hack!”
Then, he said it again on Fox News later in the day.
Sure, “collusion” is not a term defined under the federal laws. However, as former FBI Director James Comey pointed out in April, conspiring with a foreign government against the United States is a crime, reported CNN.